Qualcomm’s System Level Architecture in the Snapdragon X2 Elite

Laptop chips have gotten very powerful in recent years, with increasing CPU core counts, more powerful iGPUs, and higher DRAM bandwidth to feed that compute. All of that creates pressure on the chip’s system level architecture, which must deliver high bandwidth, service an increasing number of blocks, and keep latency under control. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is a good example of how powerful recent laptop chips have become, with 18 CPU cores and an iGPU packing nearly as much compute as a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. It’s an aggressive entry into the laptop market, and needs a strong interconnect design to support everything packed into it.Snapdragon X2 Elite Laptop kindly sampled by ASUSQualcomm simplifies the chip-level interconnect by splitting CPU cores into clusters, much like AMD. All cores within a cluster can be treated as a single client of the system level interconnect, reducing the number of clients that interconnect has to deal with. A shared cache within a…