Qualcomm’s new eight-core Snapdragon X Plus makes these Windows laptops cheaper
The Asus Vivobook S 15 and Dell Inspiron 14 now start at just $899 each.
Qualcomm launched its first big wave of Windows laptops this summer for $999 and up, but a new, somewhat weaker chip could soon shave off at least $100. Today, the company is announcing its first eight-core Snapdragon X Plus chips, which will feature in a new Asus Vivobook S 15 and Dell Inspiron 14 that’ll retail for $899 each. The Asus is already available at Best Buy.
Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung should also have new Snapdragon X Plus laptops coming soon, like the $999 Acer Swift Go 14 AI. A new 15-inch model of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is coming in October.
While the new Qualcomm chips have all the same features as the 10-core and 12-core models, they’re decidedly weaker in some ways, especially graphics. On average, they’ve got less than half the GPU power for games and other graphical apps. And while they all feature the same 45 TOPS of AI performance from their NPU, they’ve also got 12MB less CPU cache.
According to Qualcomm’s own internal benchmarks for the new eight-core chips (take that with a grain of salt), all that means they’re roughly 80 percent as capable as the company’s 12-core chips in the CPU realm and on par with the 10-core chips for productivity. But with the eight-core, those graphic scores are predictably cut in half.