(Reuters) – Qualcomm on Tuesday unveiled details about its new Snapdragon Elite X chip for Microsoft Windows-based laptops, claiming it will outperform Apple’s chips for Mac computers in certain tasks. The company stated that the chip, which will be available in laptops starting next year, has been redesigned to better handle artificial intelligence (AI) tasks such as summarizing emails, writing text, and generating images.
The announcement follows a recent report by Reuters that Microsoft has urged Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Advanced Micro Devices to develop new chips to accommodate a range of AI features in Windows, the most widely used PC operating system globally.
Qualcomm will be the first to launch a chip aiming to challenge Apple’s dominance. Since the introduction of custom-designed chips by Apple in 2020, the company has more than doubled its market share in laptop and desktop computers. The X Elite chip will be Qualcomm’s initial offering to feature fully customized computing cores, designed by a team of former Apple engineers acquired by the San Diego-based firm for $1.4 billion in 2021.
At the announcement, Qualcomm claimed that the X Elite chip is faster than Apple’s M2 Max chip in certain tasks and more energy-efficient than both Apple and Intel PC chips. However, the most significant feature of the X Elite chip is its ability to handle artificial intelligence models with 13 billion parameters. These parameters are used as a proxy measure of complexity for AI systems that generate text or images.
“These models can respond faster than what you and I can read,” stated Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm Senior Vice President. “No one else in the world can do that” on a laptop, Katouzian added.
Analyst Francis Sideco from TIRIAS Research believes that the demand for laptops with AI capabilities will increase, particularly with the introduction of AI-powered image generation features by companies such as Adobe. Sideco stated, “You’ve got a lot of smaller businesses and individual designers and creators using these devices. They need that kind of capability.”
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Lisa Shumaker.
