Qualcomm

Qualcomm has announced a new PC laptop chip that will be faster and more energy efficient than its rivals

Qualcomm, the world's leading wireless technology company, has unveiled its new Snapdragon Elite X chip for Microsoft Windows-based laptops, which it claims will be faster at some tasks than Apple's chips for Mac computers, and more energy efficient than both Apple and Intel PC chips. The chip, which will be available in laptops starting next year, has been redesigned to better handle artificial intelligence tasks like summarizing emails, writing text, and generating images. Qualcomm said the chip can run artificial intelligence models with 13 billion parameters, a measure of sophistication for AI systems that generate text or images. The chip will also support a range of new AI features in Windows, the world's most popular PC operating system.

The Snapdragon Elite X chip is based on a new architecture called ARMv9, which Qualcomm said will offer a 30% improvement in performance and power efficiency over its previous generation of chips. The chip will also feature a new AI engine called Hexagon 8, which will enable faster and more accurate processing of natural language, computer vision and speech recognition tasks. Qualcomm said the Hexagon 8 can deliver up to 26 tera operations per second (TOPS), a measure of AI computing power, which is more than twice as much as the previous Hexagon 7.

One of the main advantages of the Snapdragon Elite X chip is that it will allow PC users to run AI applications locally on their devices, without relying on cloud servers or internet connections. This will improve the speed, privacy and security of AI tasks, as well as reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. Qualcomm said the chip will support various AI frameworks and tools, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, ONNX and WinML, making it easier for developers to create and deploy AI applications for Windows PCs.