Not to be outshone by Intel's Lunar Lake launch, Qualcomm on Wednesday rolled out a pair of slimmed-down X chips aimed at lower-cost Copilot+ PCs.

Launched ahead of the IFA conference in Berlin, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus 8 core has two fewer Oryon cores than the original X Plus that launched alongside the flagship X Elite parts back in May.

Despite the lower core count, Qualcomm claims the chips are still very potent, boasting up to 61 percent higher single-core performance in Geekbench 6.2 compared to Intel's older 12-core Core Ultra 7 155U.

More importantly, the chips boast the same 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU as their siblings, which Qualcomm says will allow them to meet Microsoft's 40 TOPS performance targets while undercutting competing AI PCs ranging from $700-$900.