The leaked roadmap of Dell's laptop plans is that system builders have been given a serious overhaul of the current Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake models, and a detailed plan of just three years was discovered by Videocardz and, in the form of a 300-page document, a laptop version of the Xps series with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processor. Among the jumble of pages that delve deeper into Dell's plans at the top is a graph showing the expected timescale for implementing Intel's next-generation CPU architecture. At the moment, Dell uses a combination of Raptor Lake (RPL-H, RPL-P) and Meteor Lake (MTL-H) chips on all XPS laptops, but this year we will introduce an updated XPS2 model with 1 of the 13 Arm-based Snapdragon X Cpus. In the second half of 2024, the same model will be updated again, but this time it will be equipped with an Intel Lunar Lake chip. The larger XPS16 range will feature an Arrow Lake (ARL-H) processor in 2025 and will be replaced with a Panther Lake (PTL-H) chip in 2026. The XPS14 laptop will also get Arrow Lake next year, but according to the chart, its model will be Panther Lake like the xps16, while the other will play the second generation of Snapdragon X processors

still 'good' with me. The other snippet hidden in that 1 chart is that Nvidia's next generation mobile Gpus (i.e., the next generation of mobile GPUs) are expected. Blackwell RTX50 series) will appear in 2025, and the final successor to Panther Lake, called Nova Lake, will appear in 2027.

So to sum things up a bit, there are 3 different architectures in total in just 5 years of space. This is a fundamentally progressive strategy by Dell, even though AMD or Intel regularly update their portfolio every time they release a new CPU. Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake and Panther Lake probably share a common platform, or at least some common elements.

However, it is still so many changes in a relatively short period of time and I must imagine that it will not cause an end of confusion to casual buyers trying to understand the differences between the various models. And while Qualcomm's plans to revise the Snapdragon X Elite chip have hardly hit the shelves, and on how well it will be accepted in the laptop market, Qualcomm and Dell are clearly confident they will do enough to guarantee a model update, they probably have almost 2 years to do so. Be cautious in waiting. 

However, the caveat to all of this is that the leaked document was from May 8 last year and is now almost 12 months old, and the roadmap may have changed during that time. Not everything is considered a gospel, because the document lists updates to Nvidia laptop GPUs that obviously do not happen. Still, it's an interesting insight into how difficult it is for a laptop manufacturer with just 3rd additional player in the windows device market, with Qualcomm joining AMD and Intel. Imagine what it would look like when other Arm-based chips arrived.

The Meteor Lake laptops we've reviewed so far are pretty good in 1080p gaming, but not particularly good in terms of power consumption. Hopefully, each new Intel architecture will continue to improve the performance of the game and make the chip a bit kinder to the battery. But how good the first-generation Snapdragon X Elite Cpu is for the final calculations is still in the air. Qualcomm is confident, and so may Dell, but it's not long before we know if Silicon can really compete.