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Samsung is gearing up to launch its first laptop powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC. Qualcomm’s new platform promises high performance and power efficiency. The upcoming laptop from Samsung, dubbed the Galaxy Book 4 Edge, could compete with Apple silicon-powered MacBooks.
Samsung is going to be one of the early adopters of the Snapdragon X Elite SoC
This upcoming device will be equipped with Qualcomm’s 12-core ARM CPU, featuring clock speeds of up to 4.3 gigahertz. This processor, incorporating the latest “Oryon” CPU architecture is reportedly developed by a team of former Apple chip designers. It aims to rival Apple’s M series processors, narrowing the disparity between Windows and MacOS-based devices.
Initial details about the Galaxy Book 4 Edge reveal a 14-inch display along with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. It’s unclear about the storage and memory configurations at this point.
This upcoming potentially power-efficient Samsung laptop also comes at a premium price, with the high-end variant estimated to retail around 1800 euros (~$1,967). As WinFuture notes, this upcoming Galaxy Book is priced at a similar range as compared to the latest MacBook Air, which currently costs 1759 euros in Germany.
Despite its hefty price tag, the Galaxy Book 4 Edge is likely to justify its value proposition based on its power-efficient operation. Based on what Qualcomm showed off last year about the Snapdragon X Elite chip, Samsung’s new Galaxy Book should offer significantly longer battery life given that Samsung does not reduce the battery capacity.
Besides longer battery life, the Galaxy Book 4 Edge may also offer significantly better performance
For someone who is thinking about the potential performance gains, luckily we have some insights here. Qualcomm showed off two different machines running on the Snapdragon X Elite chip with 27W and 80W TDPs at the Snapdragon Technology Summit last year. Surprisingly, both of them outperformed the MacBook Air with an M2 chip in XDA Developers’ tests of Geekbench 6.2. The one with just 23W TDP scored 2,762 and 13,845 on single and multi-core tests respectively.
In comparison, the MacBook Air M2 only managed to harness 2,591 and 9,837 points on the tests respectively. Not to mention, the future of Windows on Arm devices looks promising.
We don’t know the exact launch date of the Galaxy Book 4 Edge at this point. However, Qualcomm’s new SoC won’t be here until “mid-2024,” confirmed president and CEO Cristiano Amon at Qualcomm’s Q1 2024 earnings call. So, you shouldn’t expect this Snapdragon X Elite-powered Galaxy Book to appear before the second half of this year.