In what some of our readers call chip porn, the image reveals massive CPU cores, a moderate-size GPU, and huge caches. Unfortunately, the die shot does not reveal the 45 TOPS neural processing unit (NPU).

For those not in the know, Qualcomm says that this is the main selling point of this system-on-chip.

The 12-core Snapdragon X Elite has a die size of 169.6 mm2, a little bigger than Apple's 10-core M4, which is 165.9 mm2. Yet, it should be noted that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is made on TSMC's N4P process technology (a 4nm-class node), while Apple's M4 is produced using TSMC's N3E (a 3nm-class process) manufacturing technology.  

The Snapdragon X has large general-purpose Oryon CPU cores (codenamed Phoenix and initially developed by Nuvia for its datacentre-grade processors) that operate at up to 3.80 GHz. Each Oryon core is around 2.55 mm^2, which makes them significantly bigger than typical Arm CPU cores.

The CPU domain takes 48.2 mm2 of space, which is two times larger than the Adreno X1 GPU domain, which is 24.3 mm2. Given that the GPU is relatively small, it is not surprising that it does not offer high performance. Qualcomm says that the GPU features around 4.6 FP32 TFLOPS of raw performance, just a bit below the 4.8 FP32 TFLOPS of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3050.

The Snapdragon X Elite processor has three quad-core CPU clusters featuring 12MB 12-way L2 cache each, a 6MB system-level cache, and the GPU has its own circa 12MB cache (spread over multiple levels). The CPU has 54MB of various caches that take about 15 mm^2 of die size.

The processor also has a 128-bit LPDDR5X-8448 memory interface, an NPU, a display controller, an ISP, and various special-purpose components not annotated on the image.