Qualcomm launched its first big wave of Windows laptops this summer at $999 and up — but a new, somewhat weaker chip could soon shave off at least $100. Today, the company’s announcing its first 8-core Snapdragon X Plus chips, which will feature in a new Asus Zenbook S 15 and Dell Inspiron 14 that’ll retail for $899 each.
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.
