Qualcomm isn't going to let its arm-based war against the best MacBooks end with the elite alone. The company just announced the Snapdragon X Plus, a low-end option that is slightly faster than the Apple M3 with impressive performance and power efficiency.

These Qualcomm-powered machines are expected to be available from top-tier laptop makers in mid-2024, and rumors point to Lenovo and Microsoft as the first companies to jump on this silicon.

So what makes the Snapdragon X Elite different? Let's take a quick look. [Two important changes were made to lower the cost and make it a lower-end chip than the Snapdragon X Elite. The number of cores for multi-threaded performance was reduced from 12 to 10, and Dual-Core Boost frequencies are no longer available to speed up complex tasks.

What is rather more impressive is that many of the chip's specs are very similar to those of the Elite: 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS) AI performance with NPU, 3.8 GHz GPU power, 42 MB total cache.

Incidentally, this is still a more powerful NPU than the one in the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H. In fact, this is the only Windows laptop chip that can run Copilot locally.

Now that we've gotten into the nitty-gritty, let's answer the simple question of what these specs mean for laptop users. Qualcomm promises some vague numbers: "37% faster CPU" and "up to 54% less power consumption."

We tested the performance of this chip ourselves with the Geekbench 6 benchmark and found the following.

The multi-core performance gap is somewhat closer to the competition, and while it doesn't match the more powerful M3 Pro or M3 Max (which are lower-end Snapdragons, as expected), the X Plus is still faster than the M3s in the new MacBook Air and iMac. It continues to be faster.

Also, the Ultra 9 185H in the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is much closer to the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in the Asus Zenbook Duo, which also shows the mid-tier Windows laptop market can also be seen.

Simply put, there is much to be excited about regarding the performance and longevity potential of the Snapdragon X Plus.