The biggest weakness of SoCs developed by Qualcomm It’s the graphics they incorporate, which are quite limited. For the new Snapdragon X Elite and More, intended for laptops and mini PCs, a powerful solution is needed. Now, Qualcomm has revealed details about Adreno X1the new GPU that they have integrated into their latest processors.
We see that more and more users are demanding lightweight, compact, powerful and highly efficient/autonomous laptops. Leading processor and laptop manufacturers are working to offer solutions that combine all of these elements.
Focused on this segment, Qualcomm recently presented its Snapdragon X Elite and Plus processors. These are chips that offer very good performance and low consumption, allowing great autonomy. In addition, they are the first to offer support for Copilot+, the AI that Microsoft integrates into Windows 11.
Qualcomm presents its new Adreno X1 graphics
For new chips with high computing power for everyday tasks and AI, suitable graphics were needed. This is why Qualcomm designed the Adreno X1 GPU. It is a custom-built iGPU to run on the Windows 11 operating system that offers full, native support for the ARM architecture.
The new graphics solution receives the full name Adreno X1-85. You should know that the “8” indicator is used to identify the GPU level and the “5” indicates the SKU.
The Adreno This GPU gives us a power of 4.6 TFLOPs of maximum performance and has the capacity to process 72 million pixels per second. Most interesting of all is that it offers support for major graphics APIs, such as DirectX 12.1 (Shader Model 6.7), DirectX 11, Vulkan 1.3 and OpenCL 3.0.
Qualcomm wanted to compare this Adreno X1-85 with the iGPU of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor equipped with 8 Xe Cores. Qualcomm claims its iGPU can match and exceed the performance of Intel’s integrated graphics in games at 1080p resolution. They did not give any information about the games configuration or the testing platform.
It should be noted that Intel is about to launch the new Core Ultra 200 which uses the integrated Xe2 graphics architecture and offers a substantial performance improvement.
One of the interesting aspects is what they called the “Adreno Control Panel”. This is software focused on game optimization and update notification. Qualcomm also promises monthly updates, we assume, with optimizations.
Although the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus were presented a few weeks ago, they have not yet been launched on the market. The first laptops based on these chips will arrive next week, more precisely on June 18. It will be then that we will be able to see the performance of these systems as well as that of the new iGPUs.
Everything we’ve seen about these processors is very interesting and quite promising. It now remains to be seen how they behave in real environments, since brands generally apply a lot of makeup to their silhouettes.
