The first PCs to ship with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chips were premium laptops with starting prices of $1,000 or higher. A few months later Qualcomm introduces a cheaper Snapdragon X chip for PCs starting at $700.

Now Qualcomm is expanding its processor lineup with a new chip designed to power Copilot+ PCs with prices starting as low as $600. The new Snapdragon X (X1-26-100) processor features 8 Oryon CPU cores with support for speeds up to 3 GHz, a 1.7 TFLOPS GPU, and a 45 TOPS NPU.

In a lot of ways, the new chip is basically what you’d get if you took a Snapdragon X Plus (X1P-42-100) processor and reduce the maximum CPU speed from 3.2 GHz to 3 GHz and swapped the dual ISP to a single ISP (which means that instead of supporting up to two 36MP cameras, the new chip can only support up to a single 36MP camera).

In terms of performance, this may be Qualcomm’s cheapest current-generation chip for PCs, but the company says it scores about 1.6X higher than an Intel Core 5 120U processor in single-core and multi-core benchmarks. And it does that while consuming less power.

GPU and AI performance are said to be even more favorable, as is battery life. But keep in mind that Qualcomm has most likely cherry-picked some benchmarks that show its chip in the best possible light. And perhaps more importantly, Qualcomm is comparing the Snapdragon X processor to a mid-range chip based on Intel’s older Raptor Lake architecture rather than a newer chip based on Meteor Lake or Lunar Lake architecture.

But it’s not a ridiculous comparison to make when talking about a processor designed for budget and mid-range PCs.

Qualcomm says we can expect to see PCs featuring the new processor early this year, including models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.