Dell is doing something it’s never done before to the XPS 13

Dell is flipping the XPS 13 on its head. In fact, it’s changing up its entire lineup of laptops with the addition of the new Snapdragon X Elite chip, which coincides with Microsoft’s push into the era of AI PCs.

Although we have five new laptops here, the XPS 13 definitely takes center stage. The XPS 13 is still one of the best laptops you can buy, depite the Plus redesign stirring up some controversy in the community (read our XPS 13 Plus review for more on that). This new model sports 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, however. This is the first XPS design powered by the Snapdragon X Elite processor, and one of the first laptops ever with the chip, for that matter. In the U.S., it comes with the X1 Elite, which is a 12-core chip that is capable of up to 4GHz on two cores, or 3.4GHz across all cores. It also packs Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, but the more exciting addition is the Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU).

This NPU is the heart of a new era of AI 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 leverage the NPU for AI-powered tasks, that much processing power will surely come in handy.

Although the NPU is the star of the show, you shouldn’t discount the GPU. We’ve already seen the gaming prowess of the Snapdragon X Elite in action. It can play games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Control at around 30 frames per second (fps), which is certainly acceptable performance for integrated graphics.

Outside of the chip, the new XPS 13 is mostly unchanged. You can still pack in up to 4TB of storage (2TB at release), along with up to a 3K OLED display. You’ll also be able to pick it up in Dell’s Platinum or Graphite color options. Perhaps the most significant change is the new Copilot key on the keyboard, which is something all five laptops carry.

The laptop is available for preorder now with a starting price of $1,300, and Dell says other configurations will launch later this year.

Although the XPS 13 is the most interesting of the lot, Dell has four other laptops launching with Snapdragon X chips. The Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus are unchanged compared to the models already available, but they’re now using a Snapdragon X Plus chip. This chip comes with the same NPU and GPU, but it slims down to only 10 cores that can reach 3.4GHz.

The Inspiron 14 Plus is available for preorder now with a starting price of $1,100, and more configurations will arrive 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 in the year.

Rounding out the slate are two new Latitude models: the 5455 and 7455. Both are business-focused laptops packing a Snapdragon X Plus chip, though the 7455 can scale up to a Snapdragon X Elite. Similar to the Inspiron 14, we don’t have pricing or availability details on the Latitude 5455 and 7455 quite yet.