When Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon However, that point may be a bit far in the future, as one of his first X Elite-equipped laptops, made by Samsung, is priced well into his Apple territory for a mid-spec machine. not.
This is according to ComputerBase, which reports that the entry price for the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge at retailers will be €1,800 ($1,966/£1,534/AU$2,976) for the 14-inch, 16GB RAM, 512GB spec. If you pop into the Apple Store and buy the new M3-powered 13-inch Macbook Air with 16GB RAM, you’ll be faced with a bill of €1,759 or $1,499/£1,499/AU$2,399.
Apple’s latest M3 processor is quite similar to the Snapdragon X Elite, so the comparison to the Macbook Air is apt. Both utilize the Arm license for their core architecture, and early benchmarks of Qualcomm chips showed much better performance than Apple’s M2 chip.
Since the X Elite is a completely new major development for Qualcomm, I don’t think anyone expected it to be as cheap as lower-end x86 processors from AMD or Intel. We are also directly targeting the Windows laptop sector, and in order to stand out among the huge number of models and variations on offer, you must not only perform on par with your competitors; appear is also good.
As Apple has shown over the years, if you can market your product as a high-end luxury item and charge a price commensurate with that status, consumers will buy it in large quantities, no matter how good your competitors are. You will.
So what are Samsung and Qualcomm up against in the x86 laptop market? For gaming, you can get a great value laptop for $1,499 with a Ryzen 9 7940HS, RTX 4070, 16 GB of RAM, 1 You can get a 17-inch machine with TB of storage. Of course, it won’t be as portable as a Macbook Air or perhaps a Galaxy Book4 Edge, and I don’t think the battery will last that long.
But that’s because it’s designed for gaming and almost certainly to be connected and used. A more comparable x86 lightweight laptop would be the Microsoft Surface 5. For the same price, you get a 13.5-inch screen. 12th Gen Intel Core i5, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage, and a pretty awful gaming experience.
Some preliminary gaming benchmarks for the Snapdragon X Elite put it in roughly the same performance category as handheld gaming PCs. This is very encouraging, but normally he costs less than $1,499.
So it’s good news that AMD and Intel will be facing new competitors in the Windows laptop chip market, but not before we see vendors offering $1,000 models with X Elite processors. , you will have to wait for a while.
