Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite has been available for nearly a year, and users have recently shared images of its core and module layout diagrams, drawing intriguing comparisons to Apple's M4.

The Snapdragon X Elite is manufactured using TSMC's 4nm process and has a core area of 169.6 square millimeters, nearly identical to Apple's M4, which is based on TSMC's 3nm process and measures 165.9 square millimeters.

Boasting up to 12 Oryon architecture CPU cores, codenamed Phoenix, each core occupies an area of 2.55 square millimeters. This is slightly smaller than the 3.0 square millimeters of the Apple M4's performance cores but matches the A16's large cores on the same process. These cores are 5 percent larger than those in the A15 and 20 percent larger than the A17 Pro.

Each core is equipped with a 192KB Level 1 instruction cache and a 96KB Level 1 data cache, while every four cores share 12MB of 12-way L2 cache, totaling 36MB. The area of a single group is 6.1 square millimeters.

Overall, the entire CPU cluster spans 48.2 square millimeters, making it 78 percent larger than Apple's M4.

In contrast, the Adreno X1 GPU cluster occupies 24.3 square millimeters, up to 25 percent smaller than the Apple M4's GPU.

The GPU can be segmented into six SP groups of 2.38 square millimeters each. Additionally, it includes 1MB of L2 cache, with three groups totaling 3MB of GMEM and three groups totaling 384KB of cluster cache.

The system cache aggregates up to 14MB, with 8MB situated adjacent to the GPU clusters (occupying 3.32 square millimeters) and 6MB near the CPU clusters (occupying 5.09 square millimeters), although the latter cache is divided into eight smaller, irregularly shaped chunks.

Furthermore, the Snapdragon X Elite incorporates eight 16-bit LPDDR5X memory controllers, each covering an area of 0.72 square millimeters.