Much has been written about Arm-based processors outperforming x86-64 CPUs, but depending on your point of view, that’s not quite there yet. Apple’s M-series processors are certainly competitive in many tasks, along with a range of data center products that emphasize power efficiency, but ultimately the overall performance crown goes to either Intel or AMD, depending on the specific task. question. Will Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite and its Oryon cores change that? Probably.
We first wrote about the Snapdragon X Elite back in October last year, and not long after that, we attended Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit to see first-hand the performance of the new processor. In short, the Snapdragon X Elite appears to offer impressive speeds that can truly compete with some of the best offerings from Apple, AMD, and Intel.
That said, the machines we’ve been testing are indeed reference platforms, not final products that consumers will be able to purchase. In these reference platforms, TDP and heat are not necessarily as constrained as they will be in the final shipped product. That’s why we were excited to see this benchmark leak today, which gives us an idea of how the Snapdragon X Elite performs in Lenovo’s real-world laptops. Have a look…
This vulnerability is @techinamul On Xwitter, he helped screenshot the result to prevent it from being deleted. However, Geekbench’s policy is generally to avoid deleting results that have already been reported, so the list was still a work in progress at press time. The benchmark results appear to be for a Lenovo machine powered by the Snapdragon X Elite, which is likely to be a test platform itself given the vague model number, but we expect it may be closer to a retail product than Qualcomm’s reference platform.
Many sites reported that this result destroyed high-end mobile parts from Intel and AMD, but that’s not entirely true. Even according to Geekbench’s own official data, the single-core scores leaked here lose to the Ryzen 5 8640U, while the multi-core scores are just ahead of various 35W-45W Intel and AMD CPUs. We must emphasize in both cases that the Snapdragon X Elite can run in the same group as these higher-power chips even with a lower TDP.
In fact, the gap between the two is surprisingly close, which is a remarkable result for Qualcomm, considering that its previous Snapdragon 8cx SoC has struggled to close the gap with Apple, not to mention the more power-hungry x86-64 CPU . Even better, the Snapdragon X Elite is said to be able to do this while using much less power – although we have to point out again that we haven’t verified this ourselves.
While some of the breathless enthusiasm surrounding the Snapdragon X Elite is certainly justified, it’s important to remember that these benchmarks are synthetic, and many have been ported to support the Arm architecture natively. Windows does provide solid emulation and most applications will work out of the box, but some will not be fully optimized for Arm. Regardless, the Snapdragon X Elite’s performance is likely to be so powerful that it’s likely to outperform Intel or AMD in many applications even under emulation, but it’s still an important distinction.
Editorial update, April 5, 2024, 7:44 am – In fact, if you remember, critics panned Apple’s M1 architecture and Rosetta emulation when it debuted, and now the industry barely talks about it anymore. With a powerful enough silicon engine, it seems that if you build it, they will indeed come.
Fortunately, most of what most people do on their PCs these days is done in a browser, and Chrome is one application that’s already optimized for these new chips. In fact, the speedometer results you see above are the best we’ve seen on a mobile platform to date; we only saw slightly higher scores (491 per minute) on Intel’s flagship desktop CPU, the Core i9-14900K runs), and the chip consumes almost 10 times the power.
So if you’re looking for a highly portable and powerful device later this year, the Snapdragon X Elite device could be a good choice. We’ll be reviewing the products as soon as they become available, so keep an eye out.