Breaking Down The Snapdragon X Series Strategy

Today we're going to talk about  the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite   and X Plus, the two chips that  should have Intel maybe running scared. Gi everyone it's Mark Hachman here from PCWorld and I'm here with Kardar Kondap, the senior vice   president and general manager for the computer and  gaming division at Qualcomm hello thank you for   being here thanks Mark thanks for having me here  absolutely so today we are going to talk about   the Snapdragon X Elite what I wanted to do was  first just start out with talking about at least   just the terminology so we've talked about uh  Snapdragon X Snapdragon X Elite oryan can you just   tell us what those terms mean first of all sure  uh thanks again Mark thanks for having me here I   think uh maybe just to characterize what all of  these different terms mean uh Snapdragon X Elite   is our premium uh platform uh for notebooks uh  the X+ is a new platform that were introduced now   uh with uh the aim of being able to expand this  portfolio and uh make all of the goodness that   we have with snapd dragon available to more users  and more specifically to your question on Orion   uh Qualcomm Orion is the CPU core uh that is uh  used in both the Snapdragon xlite as well as the   Snapdragon X+ platforms so is it fair to say that  Snapdragon X Elite is the premium solution and   the Snapdragon X+ is more value I'd say highend  more highend definitely you know when we talk   about arm historically you know we've had this  sort of big little architecture where we've had   performance cores and we've had efficiency cores  the performance core is being devoted to high-end   uh uh you know intensive uh workloads efficiency  being done for for background work and so forth   you guys haven't taken that approach with the with  the Snapdragon xite why not you know Mark we look   at uh we look at the architecture every time we  come up with the new platform and uh just to put   things in perspective the Qualcomm Orion CPU is a  custom uh CPU that we've designed inh house it's   a ground up design uh for us and um we're very  confident of being able to deliver as you saw some   of the numbers with respect to Performance as well  as uh the power to be able to deliver the right   experience when it comes to battery life and at  the end of the day make sure that uh we maintain   a performance for what leadership in market so U  we have all of the tools necessary we have all the   software algorithms to be able to more effective  manage all of the uh symmetric cores if you will   uh and provide the necessary uh battery life  that we are hoping to provide to our consumers   MH well I mean you certainly can't argue with the  performance numbers uh battery life um give us a   ballpark what we should expect in terms of battery  life I know it's dependent upon number of factors   but you know just depends like if you look at um  some use cases uh for example let's take uh a very   common use case that we're all uh used to which is  video call say a teams call and uh let's say it's   a 3 by three uh teams call you should expect up to  2x right so 2x 2x battery life okay versus versus   competition versus U NX 86 competitor and so it  just depends on if you look at YouTube if you look   at uh browsing or if you look at any of these use  cases the numbers can vary uh but like I said yeah   it's more than uh uh 50% in some cases and it's uh  it just varies depending on the use case but very   impressive uh experiences that consumers will be  able to see with this uh with both the elite and   the plus4 mhm well historically when we've talked  about the earlier Qualcomm Snapdragon chips I'm   thinking about the the eight series The 86 and  so forth we've talked about you know and again   it depends upon uh the OEM it depends upon the  size of the battery and so forth the workloads   but we've talked I mean I think of those machines  those historical machines as 12 16 maybe close to   24 you know hours of battery life is that that  that's the ballpark or at least maybe even the   Baseline for for the for sure it's the Baseline  okay I think uh as uh what's going to change now   and what's going to get even more fun is uh the  next gen AI experiences that going to be driven   off of these platforms so we'll talk about that  in a second yeah so I think it's just going to   get uh I think it's fair to assume that that is a  baseline we come from that Legacy with respect to   uh making sure that power is top of mind for us  when we design the architecture of all of these   platforms so yeah I think it's fair to assume you  should expect some pretty incredible battery life   numbers excellent well I want to just make sure  that we point out the I guess we call it elephant   in the room I don't know this is a a Qualcomm  uh Snapdragon X Elite reference design you guys   have been using those dog fooding those for for  months now is that right yeah we're all using   them internally this is uh one of my machines as  well we use them uh every day as our uh workour   machines internally and one of the things I think  that I was impressed by as well and that this was   we we found this information out even before we  had access to the Benchmark data was the fact that   you guys have I mean a number of PC makers backing  this and it wasn't like like you know historically   it was always Lenovo uh HP would contribute and so  forth I mean just to to reiterate uh the the the   names that you guys were talking about before uh  Acer Asus Dell HP Lenovo uh the Microsoft Surface   brand Samsung xiaomi and then honor who had never  actually delivered a PC before is getting into   the laptop space so those guys are I'm assuming  still on board I mean there's no nothing changes   no we're pretty excited to be partnering with all  the oems I think you uh our all of our uh people   that are watching this beautiful show are going  to be very excited to with the devices that will   come to Market and these are coming to Market  in mid 24 mid 24 okay great excellent you had   talked uh or I should say Qualcomm had talked  about uh 12 watt 23 watt and 45 watt scalable   to 80 watt um let's talk just briefly about what  those numbers mean because I think most people   are used to buying or at least talking about uh  like U series courtships or H series courtships   or P series courtships we're talking about we talk  about these things in the context of TDP can you   give us a sense for okay you know I'm a reader I'm  a viewer I'm I'm looking to buy a Snapdragon and   Elite like xite laptop what do those numbers mean  can you great question I think U the numbers that   you just to put context on the numbers that you  were uh talking about right now uh that's the uh   total thermal dissipated power for a particular  laptop and uh what that means is it just depends   how fast you're able to run a particular platform  um I think the beauty of Snapdragon X Elite as   well as the plus is that it's a very versatile  platform in the sense that we have a single uh   piece of silicon that can scale to all of these  different uh thermal design points what that   means uh for a consumer is you could be someone  that says I'm just an a normal user in the sense   I don't use any high-intensity application that  stress necessarily stress the system out I just   want a thin and light uh say a fanless design and  I just want so that would translate into getting   a lower TDP type device U or somebody could  say no I'm I'm one of those Workhorse uh type   users where I want to be able to run some intense  applications and I want to push the performance   to as high as I can possibly get so then you'd go  with uh a device with higher TDP which means you   have the ability to score a much higher Benchmark  numbers or get a higher performance out of the   CPU so uh that's exactly what it means but then  like I said the versatile Al ity of the Silicon   is that our OEM partners are able to use a uh  single piece of silicon to scale all of these   different uh uh tdps if you will and without  having the need to go multiple uh skews and   variants and stuff and we're seeing a clam shell  here but I mean you could put this in a tablet I   assume yeah you can put in a tablet you can put  in a two in one there's uh nothing limiting uh   different form factors with this platform okay  you know one question I want to make sure I I   asked and uh we' got a little bit past that but  I just want to make sure that we we understand in   terms of okay you you've obviously signed up uh  a number of oems uh a consumer is going to weigh   a Snapdragon Elite X Elite PC versus something  from AMD versus versus an Intel what's the and   you've alluded this before but what's the real  selling point of a Snapdragon xite PC what do   you guys do best uh is there great question I  think uh the first thing is uh we talk about   game-changing performance right and uh that just  means that you uh highlighted some of the numbers   it just means we have incredible performance for  any of the applications that you're talking about   whether and that can get translated to a consumer  in terms of how quickly the application uh opens   like uh latencies for that it could be uh a  measure of uh battery life in terms of I can   watch a YouTube video for uh multiple hours and  so uh first is game-changing performance second   is uh we talk about connectivity you get uh  the best-in-class connectivity whether it's   Wi-Fi 7 5G all of these experiences and then  third angle which uh is uh driving uh is the   new experiences which includes things like Ai  and other experiences uh there's a lot we have   a 45 tops npu uh in this particular platform in  both the X Elite and the plus we have the same   uh AI capabilities and the reason why we chose to  lead the industry with this is because we've been   doing this for the last many years right this  uh even our HC gen 3 the older platforms has   uh 15 tops for example so we put in a lot of the  focus on AI several years ago in trying to drive   uh the industry CU we saw that coming so I think  you should look at as three vectors to summarize   like gamechanging performance great connectivity  as well as nextg eii experiences okay actually   it's a good good jumping on point let's talk a  little bit about the AI where is the npu this   local processing AI where is that going to be most  important what apps yeah great question I think uh   Mark the way to think about U uh AI is going to be  that it's going to have multiple use cases across   multiple Industries sure um right from whether  let's take an example of uh a manufacturing line   and you highlighted a couple of things uh which  is immediacy privacy security um if you're if you   have a Snapdragon based device on a production  line uh the benefit is you're going to be able   to process real-time data and uh find um def defs  be able to debug defects real time and uh time to   fix cuz this is all translated into productivity  the amount of time that your production line is   down is just costing you a lot more money so when  you think of on device AI processing uh that's one   use case where you think then if you just start  to expand whether it is uh if you're an artist   for example and you're creating music um you know  we show some pretty cool uh demos where uh you can   type a prompt in and create some beautiful music  on the Fly and so if you are a Creator you're   able to integrate a lot of these on device type  applications but also to add I think you should   what we expect is that yes the industry will move  towards on device AI there'll be more processing   as more of these models start to become more  and more pertinent and uh they start getting   uh you know quantized to be able to run on device  it'll start to have more and more of effect but   I think till that happens and even out in the  future we do expect like there'll be on device   AI there'll be some hybrid where it's going to  run on device and in the cloud and there'll be   some models that are just too large and they will  continue to run in the cloud so I think we should   expect that to happen but with on device Ai and  US leading the way uh there's more and more isvs   that we've partnered with that are porting their  applications to uh the npu and it what that means   is it translates into a lot of things that you  said immediacy privacy security uh instant uh   analytics uh but at the same time it gives you  lower power the fact that you can run on the npu   so effectively means you you're going to have a  lot better battery life with the device so yeah   and I think that's an important point I mean one  of the things that you guys pointed out offline   was the fact that you can run an llm uh you know  an AI chatbot uh on a plane for example you know   and if you're putting together a presentation for  your your sales conference or something of that   sort you don't have to do it all manually you  can have this local AI running on your PC doing   your PowerPoint for you and I think that's that's  that's I think that's a real world case selling   point that really makes a lot of sense exactly  um and of course you can do uh various things   you guys have worked with da Vinci for example  uh with rol resolve and one of the demonstrations   you're showing off was just basically just uh uh  uh identifying an object uh as it moves through a   video and then modifying that on the Fly using and  the difference is I think is that before GPU was   used but now you're treating it with npu and how  does that can you explain a little bit what the   difference is and how that would work in in the  context yeah so it just depends on any and every   application that we have uh it just depends so we  provide a standard SDK we provide standard apis   uh we provide a neural framework for all of these  uh app developers where it's very easy for them to   be able to go right to for that application to  be able to write to our uh silicon and be able   to take uh standard interfaces and be able to  optimize so uh you brought up Da Vinci resolve   there's so many different applications we've  talked luminar Neo has an application we've   shown in the past with super resolution um you  can do it in a matter of seconds right you take   a low res image and you super scale that to a  much higher uh image and you do it in a matter   of seconds and the processing is really fast so it  just depends on the complexity of the application   uh we can do a lot of creative things whether and  again it depends what models they're using some as   you know use llama and some use other different  kind of models and it's just easy for them to be   able to work with uh Snapdragon cuz we offer that  uh standard layer if you will where it's easy for   them to be able to Port their applications with  standard apis and sdks how important is developer   relations here because Intel for example is is  talking a lot about how it's working with a lot of   top 100 De developers to make sure that uh those  applications run best on its own npu it seems like   you guys would be doing the same thing is that  right yeah we have a very strong list of uh isvs   already that have ported their applications  to our npu we've talked about beatoven we've   talked about audacity like there's the list goes  on and on we uniform was a great partner with us   at Summit so yeah the application list is growing  and uh the beauty of uh Snapdragon X Elite as well   as plus is the is the fact that we have such  a versatile heterogeneous architecture that we   can easily enable uh depending on the application  different use cases to run on different uh course   uh right for example even uh if you are in a  video applications uh you know we have a small   little npu that sits inside the audio block  for example that can take advantage of saying   the audio portion of this runs in a small little  npu and you're not really waking up the system or   we have uh this sensor Island where um you know  things like presence detection you walk by your   PC your PC detects that it's uh mark and it wants  to unlock the PC it doesn't have to wake up the   entire application process so the versatility of  how we're able to achieve what we're doing with   all these isvs and third party developers is cuz  we offer that flexibility with their heterogeneous   architecture so yeah our list with isvs is long  um I think a lot of you'll see a lot of these   applications uh uh on some of the devices that  our oems will launch I think he me uh one of the   more impressive demos that you guys showed off  was like working with OBS where OBS I believe   the video encoding was done on the GPU portion but  the translation this the uh Speech to Text Speech   to Text and even translation was doing on the npu  right that's a nice uh conjunction conjunction of   those two working together um one question just  to get a tad bit nerdy in that it looks like you   know over time historically go back to the days  of say the pennium or some um you've had a general   purpose architecture and then over time people  have identified particular tasks that they want   to accelerate so they build in specific logic to  do that are we at that point at all with AI have   you guys identified specific tasks or specific  workloads that you can optimize for inside the   npu or is that just not the case yet no no we are  we are in general though your point is correct um   that's where we've had general purpose processings  right right from whether it's the CPU the GPU or   now in the case of npu where we are optimizing  workloads to run more effectively on through   the npu pipeline okay um also just to add to one  of the points that you had was uh even a camera   right we have a dedicated camera ISP uh which is  integrated so a lot of image quality and uh camera   performance that you will see will be drastically  better with the Snapdragon xl8 and uh plus PCS   because this is where we have general purpose  blocks another example for uh to add is we have a   video dedicated video block as well as a dedicated  audio block and that's what I mean the versatility   of the heterogeneous architecture where you have  fixed function blocks to be able to run various   parts of a particular uh application so you  could be running the video on the video engine   and the audio on the audio core and then say noise  cancellation within audio could be running on the   little tiny npu so and this is where it starts  to add up to deliver like this really low power   experience to a consumer I don't want to forget  about the Snapdragon X Plus which is the new   bit we haven't talked about that before um do you  want to talk a little bit about how that differs   from the Snapdragon xlite if you would sure so  yeah we're pretty excited about uh enabling the   Snapdragon X+ our goal just to reiterate the int  intent is to make sure that we are able to offer   the same goodness that we had with X Elite to a  more broader set of consumers uh just to highlight   a couple of differences between the X Elite and  the plus the X Elite has uh uh 12 cores whereas   the plus has uh 10 of the same qualcom Orion CPU  course uh the GPU runs at 3.8 uh teraflops and uh   the snapd dragon X Elite has the dual core boost  the X+ uh does not have the dual core boost so a   few different differences I'd say that are there  but I think the key notable point is that the AI   uh which is the npu has 45 tops on both the X  Elite as well as the plus as well as the same   eight uh Channel DDR lpddr 5x so uh the benefit is  as llm start are becoming more and more uh DDR uh   bound we wanted to make sure that as experiences  evolve as there are more AI use cases that uh are   going to play a prominent role with these next  gen PCS uh we want to be able to offer consumers   the same AI experiences across both the elite and  the plus so that's one area where we've tried to   keep uh a constant uh and delivering the same  experience does it consume less power as well   uh absolutely the plus will consume uh less power  and uh the numbers will be staggering compared to   competition again okay so it sort of it basically  allows you to migrate up and down the performance   chain is that fair to say that's fair to say now  the one thing I did also want to talk about too   is you have gaming in your title is the X Elite  is the X+ are these gaming PCs and if not and   if so describe just put it in perspective for me  yeah yeah I think obviously uh you know uh every   consumer loves playing uh games every consumer  now loves being a Creator so uh which is why   I'll address the Creator version first which is  why we said uh we showcase DCI resolve and stuff   very uh very important applications if you are  a Creator and then when it comes to gaming I I   think at U Snapdragon Summit I showed a bunch  of games as a part of the keynote and uh you   know we continue to optimize games uh we have  a legacy we have all of the relationships so I   think uh yeah it will run games casual games very  effectively there will be some AAA games that will   also run effectively but uh it's going to take  time before we optimize every single AAA title   but I think uh consumers that are used to playing  casual games will have a very good experience and   that's let's talk about this a little bit too cuz  I think this is this is where we get into some of   the uh things that have have have have haunted  the the arm platform before when when windows on   arm has historically had some issues with uh uh uh  performance has had some issues with compatibility   you guys believe you've saw those though between  your work and Microsoft's work is that fair yeah   we're pretty excited I think with the work that  we've done with Microsoft it started as you   probably know it started with us uh and Microsoft  where sat had announced the voltera platform with   with the previous uh it was a couple years back at  build where uh we made sure that there was access   to uh uh Dev boxes Microsoft made uh sure that  there was visual studio and other applications   that were available for developers we made sure  there was the uh sdks that we were providing to   developers and yeah we've made a lot of progress  and I think we're we're pretty excited of where   we are in terms of application ecosystem whether  it's uh uh emulated or native we feel very good   about where where we sit with the applications  now one of the things that I did when we when   I reviewed the Surface Pro 9 5G it had an arm  chip in it it was your older I know uh the work   the the older Snapdragon uh which was you know  codesigned with Microsoft and I thought that   particular tablet did a great job of of of of  basically enabling what Microsoft intended for   the tablet Microsoft 365 uh teams U slack ran a  little bit slowly uh I gave it a I gave it a pass   other people felt differently other people felt  like you know what we're at a point where I just   want to run this laptop as a lapop I don't want to  have to have any caveats I don't want to have to   make any sacrifices I just want everything to work  would you say we're at that point now with the   Snapdragon X Elite in this particular architecture  I'll tell you Mark I'm using this PC right now and   I have not run into any of those issues uh we are  so we've uh definitely put in a lot of focus to   make sure that uh for a lot of the consumers  that we're targeting uh the the applications   run we've solved a lot of the issues when it comes  to Enterprise applications and so uh we feel very   good of course to be fair it's a 35 year uh Legacy  of applications that exist so uh I'm sure there   will be some applications that I think will need  uh still need to get ported but I think overall   uh we're pretty excited about consumers as well as  where we are headed with Enterprise or commercial   as they call it terrific that's Snapdragon X Elite  that's the Snapdragon X+ um any closing thoughts   oh it's uh I think we're pretty excited about uh  disrupting this industry I think we're looking   forward to it as we said at Summit uh we really  believe ex Elite is performance reborn so we're   very excited about uh you know the gamechanging  performance we're excited about the AI experiences   that we're going to bring so overall I think  with the addition now with the plus family and   being able to expand our Horizons I think  we're very excited for the upcoming launch   that's awesome great so thank you Kar for being  here today and we look forward to testing the   Dragon X laptops when they ship the summer so  I guess we're going to have to allocate a week   or two just for battery life testing alone aw  awesome thanks for having me of course so we'll   have more on the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X Elite  processor and the Snapdragon X laptops when they   begin shipping sometime in the middle of this  year so keep reading pcworld.com and make sure   you're subscribed right here on the pcworld.com  YouTube channel thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: PCWorld

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Keywords: pcworld, pc, computer, pc world, pc building, pc hardware, computer hardware, mark hachman, kedar kondap, qualcomm, snapdragon x elite, snapdragon x plus, NPU, AI

Id: TXhFbPEmvcw

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024