when I arrived for my Snapdragon X briefing with Qualcomm I did what I
always do and I plugged in my
laptop I was mortified eventually they coaxed me back
in with unfettered access to their army of partnered devices and with my
favorite kind of sponsorship the kind where I make a video that I would have
made anyway and my sales team gets to hit their quarterly Target seriously all
I have to do is go over their claims about battery life AI capabilities and
performance and show you guys some of the sick Hands-On demos Who's laughing
now Colton
wo without getting too far into the speeds and feeds that you can read off
of the spec sheet Snapdragon X is manufactured on tsmc's 4 nanometer
process and comes in two flavors Plus or
Elite with 10 or 12 of qualcomm's Orion
CPU cores respectively it can be equipped with up to 64 gigabyt of
high-speed lpddr 5x system memory and it goes Toe to Toe with the best laptop
silicon on the market all of which would be absolutely
worthless if all it could do was run Bing Maps fortunately that is not the
case right now before the first Snapdragon X even ships to an end user
they're showing off video editing audio production there are over 1,00 games
working and okay guys look I hear you these use cases and even gaming are not
the most important thing to everyone and
none of the designs that qualcom is announcing would really fall under video
production workstation or gaming laptop
but when you compare to many other types of software these ones are really really
hard and they're working but how though
all right let's talk compatibility if you've got a lightning fast piece of
silicon that doesn't run anything you might as well leave it on the beach but
with the improvements that they have made Microsoft now expects the vast
majority of your use time to be on Native applications like Chrome teams
Zoom blender and so much more you can find a curated list at qualcomm.com
Windows apps which is super cool but as
one of you so poetically put it in a recent comment I spend over 90% of my
time not on the toilet but that last couple of percent is very important to
me well that's where prism comes in emulation for x86 applications is built
right into Windows and while some
applications that need special drivers for example might not function at this
time they are claiming that prism is competitive with Rosetta 2 meaning that
most applications should run well enough albeit at the cost of some processing
overhead I'm actually really looking forward to taking a much deeper look at
this maybe something kind of like our Arc gaming live stream where you guys
can suggest stuff for us to try at least once the editorial embargo lifts cuz I
can't help but think processing overhead would be like you know kind of a bad
thing on a mobile first platform right
except if it isn't let's talk about battery life let me put it this way I
chose this HP dragonfly Elite for my work machine because it is among the
best endurance Windows laptops on the market at around 15 hours and HP rates
the Snapdragon X Elite machine at
26 oh and did I mention that the raw battery capacity of the dragonfly is 15%
higher to say that these chips are efficient then would be an understatement of Epic Proportions
Qualcomm claims that they can match the performance of an Intel Core Ultra 7
while using 65% less power in single-threaded workloads or 60% less
power in multi threaded workloads not only do they claim they can outperform
Intel Core Ultra 7 though they even claim to beat Apple's M3 in
multi-threaded workloads although of course we're going to have to verify
those claims when the review embargo lifts next week all of this efficiency
is in no small part thanks to their high level of integration just like
qualcomm's mobile Snapdragon chips the X+ and the X Elite are systems on a chip
or S so's and include a direct X12
capable adreno GPU that can handle up to three concurrent current 4K external
displays unlike some other s so's
there's a USB controller that can hit data rates of up to 20 gbit per second
and so much more some of which I think they should be talking about a lot more
one of my biggest pain points on laptops is their webcams even premium devices
get absolutely embarrassed by basic smartphones fortunately Qualcomm has
been making the chips for those smartphones for many years and they know
a thing or two about making their cameras look really good on almost every
existing Windows laptop the webcam has its own ISP or image signal processor
that's connected to the system over USB 2 giving it a pitiful 480 megabit per
second of bandwidth on a Snapdragon X laptop the ISP is built directly into
the S so die and it connects to the camera via a blistering 3.5 gabit per
second over an 18-bit mppy connection
not only is the data rate higher but it also means near dropin compatibility for
much better phone image sensors and well
let's just put it this way I think the results here kind of speak for
themselves and if that wasn't enough
what about second ISP okay this one runs
constantly and has some really cool party tricks like the ability to
automatically unlock and lock your system to enhance security and an API
that would allow app developers to build functionality like automatically turning
off your camera in a video call if another face was detected say for the
privacy of your children the other big integration is qualcomm's Cutting Edge
npu or neural Processing Unit it's rated at 45 tops of performance making it the
first processor to meet the 40 tops minimum for Microsoft co-pilot plus
which in a nutshell means that you can do AI stuff directly on your device
rather than relying entirely on the cloud where speed privacy and cost
remain outstanding questions a lot of the stuff is just kind of fun um
co-creator and paint allows you to draw an image write a description select a
style dial up or down the creativity and
it'll spit out an AI image this is really cool also have you ever been a DJ
and needed to isolate a particular instrument in a song without access to
the stems wait that's really specific are we trying that
okay drums huh all right we'll add
base keyboards I don't want drums okay how about vocals hit that
button off it also includes the ability to
instantly translate and caption audio from the 40 supported languages or
control your device using gestures to help improve accessibility obvious
winners all around so far one of
Microsoft's biggest and most controversial pushes with the npu is
recall which records everything that you've done on your computer and makes
it searchable so let's say you looked at a picture of a cute dog a couple days
ago but you don't remember if it was in an email or if it was on Reddit well
recall can bring up every time you looked at dogs recently this does come
with some concerns about privacy but Microsoft says it'll be okay because
everything is stored and processed on device with no need to send any of the
data to the cloud if that doesn't completely satisfy you I 100% get you
and they do allow it to be disabled both in specific apps or systemwide coming
back to other non Windows applications they are using their npu to power this
pretty cool demo in dentu resolve where they can use their npu to do things like
color correct for a single person in a group or in other applications like for
example luminar they can CSI enhance and
magnify at both high speeds and without
thermal throttling now In fairness a lot
of the other operations in these programs are still going to want a
dedicated GPU for the smoothest experience so we had to ask it is is
that a possibility let me put it this way
Qualcomm got a little KY when we asked about it so instead we asked a different
question how many PCIe lanes are on the
Snapdragon X Elite and the answer answer is 16 four of them are PCIe gen 3 and
are dedicated to Wi-Fi 7 at speeds of up to 5.8 GB per second because of course
Qualcomm would have their bases covered for wireless connectivity four of them
are Gen 4 for high-speed envme storage
leaving eight Gen 4 lanes that are just
chilling for something like a GPU
maybe who knows I also asked them about potential
competition for the steam deck or the Rog Ally and
again no they did actually say something it wasn't just crickets they said we've
done Android gaming handhelds before with our partners and then they just
stopped talking so it wouldn't surprise
me to see an extremely efficient Windows gaming handheld down the line but that's
pure speculation what isn't speculation is the pricing and availability of the
devices they've announced here at computex 2024 not only are they boasting
incredible performance and battery life they're actually undercutting the
pricing of equivalent x86 models at launch we are still looking at pretty
premium devices here with starting prices of $9.99 but guys these are
available for pre-order now they're going to be shipping in mid June and hey
these are the top-end chips and I wouldn't be surprised if you know with
Brands like plus and Elite if maybe down
the line something less Plus and less elite were to come Guys these are very
very exciting times massive shout out Qualcomm Technologies for sponsoring
this video getting us handson with all these amazing devices and if you guys
are looking for something else to watch what should I throw them to how about
the Surface RT unboxing from 12 years ago to show you just how far we've come