Dell is turning the XPS 13 on its head. In fact, it’s changing its entire laptop lineup with the addition of the new Snapdragon X Elite chip, coinciding with Microsoft’s push into the age of AI-enabled PCs.
While we have five new laptops here, the XPS 13 takes center stage. The XPS 13 is still one of the best laptops you can buy, despite its Plus redesign causing a bit of controversy in the community (read our XPS 13 Plus review for more on that). This new model takes the Plus design with an edge-to-edge keyboard and capacitive touch buttons, along with an invisible haptic touchpad.
The real goods are under the hood, though. This is the first XPS design to be powered by the Snapdragon X Elite processor, and one of the first laptops ever to feature the chip. In the US, it comes with the X1 Elite, a 12-core chip that can hit 4GHz on two cores, or 3.4GHz across all cores. It also packs Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, but the most exciting addition is its Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU).
This NPU is the heart of a new era of AI-driven PCs. This Hexagon NPU is capable of 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS), which is more than four times higher than what we see with Intel’s Meteor Lake processors. As more apps start to use the NPU for AI-driven tasks, this much processing power will certainly come in handy.
While the NPU is the star of the show, don't underestimate the GPU. We've already seen the Snapdragon X Elite's gaming prowess in action. It can handle games like Baldurs Gate 3 And Check at around 30 frames per second (fps), which is certainly acceptable performance for integrated graphics.
Beyond the chip, the new XPS 13 is largely unchanged. You can still squeeze in up to 4TB of storage (up from 2TB at launch), along with a 3K OLED display. You can also pick it up in Dell’s Platinum or Graphite colors. Perhaps the most significant change is the new Copilot key on the keyboard, something that all five laptops share.
The laptop is available for pre-order now with a starting price of $1,300. Dell says other configurations will be released later this year.
While the XPS 13 is the most interesting of the bunch, Dell has launched four other laptops featuring Snapdragon X chips. The Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus are unchanged from the models already available, but they now use a Snapdragon X Plus chip. This chip comes with the same NPU and GPU, but has been trimmed down to just 10 cores that can reach 3.4GHz.
The Inspiron 14 Plus is available for preorder now with a starting price of $1,100, with more configurations arriving later this year. We don't have details on the base Inspiron 14, however. Dell says it will share pricing and release date details later this year.
Rounding out the list are two new Latitude models: the 5455 and 7455. Both are business-focused laptops that feature a Snapdragon X Plus chip, though the 7455 is upgradable to a Snapdragon X Elite. Like the Inspiron 14, we don't yet have pricing or availability details for the Latitude 5455 and 7455.
