Shulou(Shulou.com)12/24 Report--

Since its birth, PC has been one of the most important productivity tools for human beings. However, with the development of the times, people's demand for the scene and efficiency of production work is constantly changing, which means that PC, as a production tool, also needs to evolve to meet the new needs of the new era.

The real "evolution" must be driven from the bottom chip, so as to drive a fundamental leap in the shape and function of the upper PC products. Therefore, building such a transformative chip can be said to be the most decisive step.

At this year's 2023 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm launched the new Snapdragon X Elite computing platform, which is such a transformative chip. This is a new generation of omnipotent killer specially designed by Qualcomm for PC products. It shines brilliantly at this year's Snapdragon Summit with strong performance, power consumption ratio and excellent AI, connection and other technologies, and has been affirmed by the industry and the majority of technology enthusiasts.

Snapdragon X Elite computing platform is the most powerful computing processor Qualcomm has built for PC so far, and its value lies not only in the name of "the strongest", but also in its impact on PC products and the industry as a whole.

These pain points of traditional PC, it is time to change how the Snapdragon X Elite PC platform changed PC, we need to know why PC needs to change.

We know that the PC industry after decades of development to now, from the product form point of view, basically can be divided into game book and light book two mainstream categories. The game is designed to meet the ultra-high performance needs of large games, e-sports and so on, while the lightweight game is used to meet the needs of mobile office and daily work and entertainment.

So, is this the end of PC's development? Obviously not enough, at least at this stage, whether the game is light or light, there are still a lot of pain points in daily use.

In terms of lightweight books, the biggest problem is weak performance. If you are a civil servant, it is OK to just deal with documents when you travel. If you are a professional and technical staff, you need to run some large software at work, or the creator needs to render ultra-high-definition video and 3D content, which will be very difficult to deal with and affect your work.

And if you carry a more powerful game book with you when you move to work, the weight above 2kg will certainly put a heavy burden on your shoulders, and the key is also very inconvenient.

At the same time, on the way of business trip, often can not connect the network cable or Wi-Fi, at this time need to search the Internet for information, can only use the mobile phone to launch hot spots, very troublesome. The general weakness of traditional PC in connection performance is also a major pain point when we use PC.

In addition, although PC is still our core office productivity tool at this stage, but in addition to the limited annual performance growth, the improvement that this tool can really bring to our production efficiency is actually not very considerable.

A lot of mechanical and complicated work still needs to be done bit by bit on the computer, and the forms have to be filled out piece by piece and the words need to be coded one by one. This has been the case for many years, which is not efficient.

In other words, the lack of intelligence of traditional PC products is also a big pain point, it is difficult to use artificial intelligence to replace the daily onerous and repetitive workflow, and naturally it can not really lighten people's burden.

In addition, the traditional PC chip driver based on x86 architecture uses microcode to achieve complex instructions in the instruction set, which naturally consumes more power, so it is usually difficult for the traditional PC to achieve a real long range, mobile office can not be recharged at any time, and it is difficult to last a day under a slightly higher intensity, which is also a very important pain point.

For this reason, it is clear that the current PC products are far from reaching the "end", and there is a need for further evolution and change. The direction of evolution should be: extreme frivolity, extreme performance and energy efficiency, ultimate connectivity and extreme intelligence.

Just now we have analyzed and predicted the evolution trend of PC in the future, but the reality is that it is not an easy task to achieve these "four extremes" and requires long-term technological accumulation and evolution. Qualcomm is an important explorer who rises abruptly based on accumulated strength for such a goal.

Back in 2016, Qualcomm partnered with Microsoft to make ARM chips run the Windows10 operating system. The following year, including Hewlett-Packard and Asustek launched PC products with Snapdragon 835. Since then, Qualcomm has also launched the Snapdragon 850 platform for Windows 10 ARM notebooks, bringing gigabit LTE connectivity and long battery life to PC users.

In 2018, Qualcomm launched the first generation of Snapdragon 8cx, the first 7nm process computing platform for PC, on the basis of accurate prediction of industry trends. Its thermal design power consumption is only 7W, has PC-level performance, features, and supports 4G always online and always connected, providing several days of battery life.

In addition, Snapdragon 8cx at that time also brought Qualcomm Quick Charge 4 + anytime, anywhere fast charging experience, as well as Aqstic / Aptix HD audio technology to support AI voice assistants such as Cortana and Alexa at that time. It can be seen that Qualcomm's goal of pursuing the above-mentioned "four extremes" was already revealed at that time.

In 2019, Qualcomm brought 5G connectivity to Snapdragon's 8cx computing platform, making it a global leader. Since then, including Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung and other mainstream PC manufacturers have launched Win10 PC products based on Snapdragon 8cx 5G computing platform.

In 2020, Qualcomm updated the Snapdragon 8cx computing platform to the second generation, bringing more performance than 10 generations of i5 at that time, as well as a battery life experience of up to many days. at the same time, the second generation Snapdragon 8cx computing platform is also equipped with Qualcomm artificial intelligence engine AI Engine, which provides AI acceleration experience for PC devices and brings breakthrough AI performance with extremely high energy efficiency. Users can enjoy a better interactive experience of video conferencing through AI accelerated eye contact and virtual avatars, which is also a typical use case of AI on PC at that time.

The third generation Snapdragon 8cx computing platform in 2023 is the first 5nm chip on Windows platform. When TDP comes to 15W, CPU performance increases by 85%, GPU performance increases by 60%, per watt performance is 60% higher, and AI computing speed exceeds 29 TOPs.

Not only that, the third generation Snapdragon 8cx is also equipped with Spectra ISP image processing unit, which can provide better autofocus ability for video conferencing, as well as better automatic white balance and automatic exposure ability.

In addition to the high-end Snapdragon 8cx computing platform, Qualcomm also extended the PC computing chip to the Snapdragon 7c and Snapdragon 8c series in 2019 to provide support for entry-level PC and mainstream PC, respectively, to create always-on, always-linked PC products.

It can be seen that before this Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm has made long-term efforts to create a real next-generation mobile PC through the product and technology exploration of the Snapdragon computing platform, and actively cultivated the market ecology, and these technologies and market accumulation will break out on the brand-new Snapdragon X Elite computing platform.

Thin hair, Snapdragon X Elite computing platform is the beginning of the next generation of mobile PC. Speaking of Snapdragon X Elite computing platform, first of all, in terms of performance, its CPU adopts 4nm process, has a full large core architecture with 3 clusters of 12 cores, and the main frequency is 3.8GHz, of which two cores can be overclocked to 4.3GHz. At the same time, it also supports LPDDR5X memory, memory bandwidth up to 136GB/s, with the total cache of 42MB.

The Snapdragon X Elite computing platform has better single-threaded performance than Apple's 12-core M2 Max and Intel 14-core Core i7-1355U, for example, it can achieve the peak performance of M2 Max with 30% lower power consumption.

In terms of multi-core, the peak performance of Snapdragon X Elite computing platform is 50% faster than Apple M2 processor, and the X Elite is up to twice the performance of Intel Core i7-1355U (10 cores) and much better than Core i7-1360P (12 cores).

In addition, Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon X Elite computing platform is 60% faster than Intel's 13th-generation Core i7-13800H (14-core) standard compression processor (based on GeekBench 6.1), can even beat i9-13980HX in single-threaded performance, and its power consumption is 70% lower than that of i9-13980HX at peak performance.

In terms of GPU, Snapdragon X Elite computing platform can achieve the computing power of 4.6TFLOPS, its performance is 2 times faster than that of Intel Iris Xe in i7-13800H, and it has only the power consumption of 1MB 4, and is even expected to achieve an 80% performance improvement with 1/5 power consumption of AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS kernel display.

In addition to the performance of CPU and GPU, another highlight of the Snapdragon X Elite computing platform is its new Hexagon NPU and the resulting powerful AI capabilities.

In the Snapdragon X Elite computing platform, the design of the connection and power supply of Hexagon NPU has been optimized, and its computing power is as high as 45TOPS. With the computing power of other modules of the chip, the overall computing power of the AI engine can reach 75TOPS. With such powerful AI computing power, Snapdragon X Elite has been released to support the device to run generative AI LLM (large language model) with more than 13B parameters at "amazing speed".

And everyone is most familiar with the open source AI image generation tool Stable Diffusion, Snapdragon X Elite is 2.7 times faster than the competition, and even 20 times faster after optimization.

At the same time, the Snapdragon X Elite computing platform also integrates a separate sensor hub, with two micro-NPU, a small ISP, a DSP and a separate memory unit. In this way, it can always control the camera, microphone, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth lamp unit on the PC, resulting in audio noise reduction, video portrait center and other experiences, not only greatly reduce the frequency of CPU being awakened, save energy, but also make PC's AI perception ability always stand by, always online, and become a real AI PC.

In other aspects, the Snapdragon X Elite computing platform is also versatile, for example, it is equipped with a Snapdragon X655G modem, which can achieve 10 Gbps transmission speed, support Wi-Fi 7, low-power Bluetooth 5.4.In the display, it has Adreno DPU subscription, supports up to UHD 120Hz and HDR10, and allows PC to realize the display output of a single 4K 120Hz HDR10 monitor, or the output of two 5K 60Hz external monitors or three 4K 60Hz HDR10 external monitors.

Finally, Snapdragon X Elite also supports AV1 encoding, 4K HDR video decoding, lossless sound effects with Snapdragon Sound Tech Suite, and security support for AI generation on devices with 30 tokens per second, providing "enterprise" security.

Ecological refresh, PC industry change moment I believe we all know Qualcomm in the past on the Snapdragon mobile platform connection, AI, video, audio, games, security six pillar experience, and after in-depth understanding of Snapdragon X Elite computing platform, Xiaobian would like to say that Qualcomm is to apply their successful experience and ideas on the mobile platform to the PC computing platform.

In fact, this is indeed necessary and correct, because the wave of mobility has long been a trend, and it is only because traditional PC has developed for decades and is deeply ingrained that it leaves imperfect experience in the process of mobile transformation. What Qualcomm is doing is to use the six-pillar experience to create a truly completely mobile PC. In fact, the "four extremes" summarized by CTOnews.com before is essentially a service for mobility.

As a result, we can imagine that the future mobile PC will not only be extremely light and thin, but also have super performance, even if you are engaged in a job that requires ultra-high performance loads such as graphics rendering, and you only need to bring a light and thin Snapdragon book when you travel, you can still complete various tasks smoothly and smoothly, and you can take it anywhere without a sense of burden in your bag.

And, whether you are processing manuscripts on the subway, or doing field research in the wild and other places where there is no network cable or Wi-Fi, this Snapdragon can also stay online at any time with its super 5G 🔗 ability to access materials and upload research data on the Internet in real time.

In your work, you can also help you solve some routine tasks such as writing copywriting, outline, writing code, consulting materials, high EQ communication, etc., by running the AI model locally on Snapdragon, which can be easily realized on Snapdragon, and greatly improve the efficiency of your work.

When you need to use Snapdragon to quickly connect and transmit data with other terminals such as XR, mobile phones, cars and other Internet of things devices, you can also seamlessly connect and cooperate with different terminals through Snapdragon Seamless technology, even if they are running different operating systems, they can easily interconnect and share peripherals and data, as if they are counting a set of integrated systems.

More importantly, under the above high-intensity work, your Snapdragon can be used all day without any problem, and there will be no longer anxiety about battery life.

All these experiences that are difficult to be given by traditional PC will become a reality on the next generation of mobile PC, and Snapdragon X Elite computing platform is the beginning of all this.

At the same time, Qualcomm is also working with many software and hardware partners at the industrial ecological level to promote the rapid arrival of the next generation mobile PC era. For example, at the hardware level, under the groundwork of the past few generations of computing platforms, the mainstream terminals and supply chains in the entire PC industry ecology have adapted to the production of related PCB and components. It is for this reason that we can see that shortly after the release of Snapdragon X Elite computing platform. Acer, Asustek, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Glory, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface, Samsung, Xiaomi and other manufacturers have announced that they will launch products equipped with Snapdragon X Elite platform.

At the software level, Qualcomm is also actively working with Microsoft to transplant many people's applications to the Snapdragon platform, and they have teamed up with more than 150 game studios to create rich game and entertainment applications. In the live Demo presentation of the Snapdragon Summit, we can already see that masterpieces like World of Warcraft can be run on Snapdragon.

In addition, Qualcomm is also promoting the adaptation of the application ecosystem around the dimensions of software developers, tool kits, SDK and so on, so as to provide partners with a development platform that is applicable and meets the needs. It is believed that with Qualcomm's efforts, the whole mobile PC ecology with Snapdragon X Elite platform as the core will be refreshed gradually. At that time, the next generation of mobile PC era, even if the real arrival.

Conclusion Mobile and digital intelligence is the constant development trend in the field of science and technology and even thousands of industries. Under this trend, almost every industry can not do without the basic productivity tool PC, and it is time to start to adapt to the changes of the times.

If the previous generations of Snapdragon computing platform is Qualcomm's energy savings for the future development of mobile PC, then the new Snapdragon X Elite computing platform is undoubtedly their first throttle on the mobile PC new era track.

On both sides of the track is the scenery of the times, and in the middle of the track is the highlight moment of Mobile PC. I believe that Qualcomm's innovation and exploration can lead us to a bright future of personal productivity liberation.

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