A few months ago, Qualcomm unveiled its most ambitious flagship processor for laptops, the Snapdragon X Elite. After the announcement, Samsung confirmed that it would launch a laptop featuring that chipset, but it didn't reveal when we can expect the laptop to be unveiled. Now, we may have more information about it.
Galaxy Book 4 series laptop with Snapdragon X Elite processor could launch in the second half of 2024
Qualcomm confirmed during its earnings call for Q4 2023 that it is planning to launch the Snapdragon X Elite in mid-2024. Laptops with that processor will be launched around the same time. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said that the Snapdragon X Elite will be launched alongside a new version of Windows that can take full advantage of NPU on Qualcomm's new chip for AI features.
“We’re tracking to the launch of products with this chipset tied with the next version of Microsoft Windows that has a lot of the Windows AI capabilities,” Amon said. Since Samsung is usually among the first to use Qualcomm's laptop chips, we can expect the first Galaxy Book with the Snapdragon X Elite chip to launch in mid-2024 or at least before the end of this year. Samsung has launched at least one new Galaxy Book laptop every year, and its most recent laptop with a Snapdragon chip was the Galaxy Book 2 Go 5G, which was launched in early 2023.
Why is there so much hype around the Snapdragon X Elite processor for Windows laptops?
If you don't know why the Snapdragon X Elite is such a big deal, it is an ARM-based processor, similar to Apple's M series processors used in newer generation Macs and MacBooks. It uses Qualcomm's custom CPU core called Oryon, which was developed by Nuvia, a chip startup founded by legendary chip designers who previously worked with AMD, ARM, Apple, Broadcom, and Google. Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm in 2021, and the Oryon CPU was used in processors made for Windows laptops. The Snapdragon X Elite is built using TSMC's 4nm process and is said to be more powerful than Apple's M3 chip. It is also claimed to be as power-efficient as Apple's M series laptop processors.
Author's Note: Since Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon X Elite to be more powerful and as power-efficient as Apple's latest M series processors, we can expect the Galaxy Book 4 series laptop with that Snapdragon chip to be similar to the MacBook Pro in terms of performance and battery life. Microsoft is also said to be bringing several AI features and power-efficiency gains with its next version of Windows, and that could also help in improving the performance of Windows on ARM-based laptops. We can finally see Galaxy Book laptops being similar to MacBooks in terms of battery life and performance.
