One of the most confusing moments of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit was when I accidentally flipped over the example of the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme in the testing room. Was that actually embedded memory?
Yes, it is. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Arm processor does support on-package memory as an option, though the standard X2 Elite chips do not. Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of compute and gaming, told PCWorld that the 48GB of embedded memory that the X2 Elite Extreme was simply a choice Qualcomm made for performance testing, not a number PC makers are locked into.
That’s probably why Qualcomm barely mentioned the technology at all — it’s confusing, and probably not a feature consumers will ever see, let alone be aware of. Still, it’s worth knowing about.
“There’s a 12-core version, actually, that does have the off-chip memory,” Kondap said, referring to the Snapdragon X2 Elite. “There’s an 18-core version that has an off-chip memory. There’s an 18-core version that can have the integrated memory [the Elite Extreme]. You have the option.”
But why 48 gigabytes of memory, exactly?
Regarding the memory size of the Elite Extreme, Kondap said that the 48GB inside the Elite Extreme was an arbitrary amount. “It’s not limited,” he said. “48 gigabytes is what was available in this particular device, but it’s not restricted to be 40. Somebody could say I just want to put 24 inside, and I’m good with it and that’s 100-percent perfectly okay.”
That memory will be configurable, as it normally is, between ordinary system RAM and VRAM, Kondap added.
Aside from the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, it looks like PC makers will have a more ordinary array of memory options than I first thought. And they’ll be able to run them on battery without losing performance, too.