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These new chips could be good news for Copilot+ PCs

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The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus
Arif Bacchus / Digital Trends

The first Copilot+ laptops are already out, powered by Qualcomm’s impressive new Snapdragon X chip. The first batch of reviews were delayed, and early impressions have observed the hits and misses of the current chips. But a new leak tells us that Qualcomm might have another ace up its sleeve, and there may be hope for these Arm-based Copilot+ PCs yet. What’s new? There might be more models of the chip than what we’ve been privy to so far.

So far, we’ve seen reviews of the Asus Vivobook S 15, but that’s just one of several chips that fall under the Snapdragon X Elite umbrella. According to files for the Adreno GPU driver, there may be not just six, but 10 different models of the Snapdragon X — and three of those are Plus chips, which we’ve previously only seen one of.

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As per VideoCardz, the unreleased chips include the X Elite X1E-76-100 — that one would, presumably, be a 12-core variant like the rest of the Elite chips. There are also three new additions to the X Plus lineup, including the X1P-62-100, X1P-42-100, and the X1P-40-100. The specs remain unknown right now, although the Plus chips are likely to sport 10 cores instead of 12.

A racing game running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite reference laptop.
Arif Bacchus / Digital Trends

Based on the naming alone, we can imagine that the X1P-62-100 will be the second-best 10-core chip, while the X Elite X1E-76-100 might end up being the most entry-level of the 12-core options. Clock speeds make for an interesting thing to speculate about here, but the reality is that we don’t know when — or if — these rumored chips may pop up in actual laptops.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite stand against chips like the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series or the Intel Lunar Lake when it comes to meeting the requirements for Microsoft’s Copilot+ program. However, the challenge for laptop makers and Microsoft alike lies in the fact that Qualcomm’s chips are Arm-based, which means they rely on an entirely different instruction set. Emulation showed a lot of promise, but so far, the reviews show that some applications like games struggle to run well on these PCs, which is something Microsoft is making some progress in already.

On the positive side, they seem to offer solid battery life and efficiency. We’ll have to wait and see to find out if these so-called new Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips are real.

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Monica J. White
Monica J. White
Computing Writer
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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