Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon presented a keynote title “The PC Reborn” with a focus on the company’s Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus platforms. Amon revealed the company’s vision to expand in the PC processor industry. Besides, fans also got the release date for the first batch of Snapdragon X-powered PCs.
While Qualcomm is mostly known as a maker of smartphone SoCs, the company has a plethora of communication products. However, it’s yet to become a “connected computing” firm. Qualcomm has jumped the bandwagon with the Snapdragon X Elite in 2023 and expanded its portfolio with the Snapdragon X Plus this year.
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Qualcomm Wants To Redefine PC With AI At its Core
Qualcomm plans on redefining PCs, opening doors for new possibilities in terms of productivity, creativity, and entertainment. Obviously, AI is the core of this move, with Amon mentioning Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI companion for PCs. The Snapdragon X platform offers a powerful NPU dedicated to AI workloads, freeing up the CPU and GPU for other tasks. This boosts the performance and lowers power consumption for better battery life.
“The Snapdragon X series and Copilot+—it’s one of the most significant transitions in Windows…as significant as Windows 95,” the Qualcomm CEO said. The Elite models come with the world’s fastest and most efficient NPU for laptops. Its NPU performance per watt is up to 2.6X more than Apple’s M3 and up to 5.4x higher than Intel’s Core Ultra 7. It also claims to offer 51% faster CPU performance while power consumption is reduced by 65%.
The CEO also talked about the company’s development tools that developers can use to build next-gen AI apps. The Qualcomm AI Hub, for instance, enables developers to deploy an AI model on Snapdragon-powered devices in just 5 minutes. It supports stock AI models offered by Qualcomm as well as custom models made by the developer. The new Snapdragon Dev Kit offers developers the ideal Windows hardware platform.
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Intel Launches Xeon 6700E ‘Sierra Forest’ CPUs
Intel has made some big announcements along with the launch of Xeon 6700E “Sierra Forest” CPUs with up to 144 cores. The new CPUs are the first of the new server chips featured in the Xeon 6 family.
This family will come with both P-Core and E-Core variants launching at their respective timelines and for respective platforms. Intel noted that the Xeon 6700E CPUs are optimized for performance per watt in high-density workloads. These CPUs are said to be based around an open ecosystem with an open software and open platforms approach.