We tested it: Here's how the Snapdragon X Elite compares to Apple Silicon and Intel

Summary

• Snapdragon X Elite aims to reinvigorate Windows on Arm with its performance and battery life, besting the competition in benchmarks.
• The Snapdragon X Elite's single-core score positions it well against upcoming Apple and Intel launches, showcasing its power.
• While there are roadblocks ahead, Qualcomm is making strides to stay ahead of the curve and 2024 will be an interesting year for computing.

For the first time this year, the hero product at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit wasn't a smartphone chipset. It was a new SoC for laptops called the Snapdragon X Elite, and it's aiming to reinvigorate Windows on Arm with a combination of performance and battery life.

If we're ever going to see Snapdragon chips in flagship laptops instead of Intel, it's going to be an uphill battle. The history of Windows on Arm has been a long road of overpromising and underdelivering.

Things do seem to be a bit different this time. For one thing, Qualcomm actually had a laptop benchmarking session at its event, and since the company was kind enough to sponsor our travel to Maui, we were able to test out the Snapdragon X Elite.

The test units

Qualcomm had two different reference designs on-hand, which were meant to demonstrate the scalability of the Snapdragon X Elite. One of the machines was running at just 23W device TDP, while the other could get up to 80W.

One thing that I thought was kind of neat was that when Qualcomm showed its comparisons, it didn't include the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (the X Elite's predecessor) at all. It included the competition, rather than the past. Still, for that very reason, I wanted to include one in my testing. Here are the other four PCs that I used:

• MacBook Air - M2 / 16GB / 512GB
• Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3 - Intel Core i7-1360P / 16GB / 512GB
• Lenovo ThinkPad X13s - Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 / 16GB / 512GB
• Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 - Intel Core i7-13700H / RTX 4060 / 64GB / 1TB

Benchmarking the Snapdragon X Elite

Geekbench 6.2

We can start off with Geekbench because it's one of the standard tests you'd run on any CPU. The results don't disappoint, with both of Qualcomm's reference designs besting the competition.

Both Snapdragon X Elite units beat all the others in both single- and multi-core. Notably, that single-core score is far enough ahead that with the Apple M3 and Intel Meteor Lake launches being imminent, Qualcomm is still pretty well-positioned.

In the session, Qualcomm was also letting us run Geekbench 6.2 on Linux, which got the single-core score up to 3,227. The company also provided us with a score for an Intel Core i9-13980HX (a 55W CPU), which was 3,192.

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench is another CPU test, but this one works by rendering an image in separate single- and multi-threaded work loads.

This is where the 12 powerful Oryon cores start to shine, as the multi-core performance of the Snapdragon X Elite comes out well ahead of the competition with its scores of 1,110 and 1,228. The single-core score is higher as well, but not as much, especially on the 23W unit. The closest to come to it is the Apple M2, which scores 120, so if the Cupertino firm does announce the M3 soon, it might come out ahead here.

Aztec Ruins

Aztec Ruins is part of the GFXBench suite of benchmarks, and as you can guess, it's graphics rendering. It's measured in fps, so higher is better. We used the 1080p test using Vulkan, except for on the Apple M2, which uses Metal.

For tests like this one, I ran the Surface Laptop Studio 2 separately using Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, and using the dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics. Given the score of 641, the RTX 4060 stands out far ahead of the pack, although that's not surprising since that's not what Qualcomm is trying to compete with. The Snapdragon X Elite A configuration scored 357, while the B config scored 295, both of which beat out the Apple M2's 285.

Wild Life Extreme

Wild Life Extreme is part of the 3DMark suite of benchmarks, and it's one of few that run natively on Arm. As far as functionality goes, it's somewhat similar to Aztec Ruins. The score is once again in fps.

Again, the RTX 4060 gets pretty far out ahead of everything else with its score of 102.15. The Snapdragon X Elite A config was the best of all integrated graphics with 44.81, but the second-best was not the B config. It was the Apple M2 with 39.8, while the B configuration scored 39.19.

PCMark 10 Applications

PCMark 10 is probably the oldest test that Qualcomm gave us to run, but that's also why most of it doesn't run natively on Arm. What does work is the separate PCMark 10 Applications test, and the reason that works is because it relies on the use of external apps that do run natively, specifically the Office suite and Microsoft Edge. Unlike the main PCMark 10 test which is more of a general benchmark, this is aimed more at productivity.

For this one, Qualcomm's platforms didn't come out on top. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 did with 13,655, followed by the ThinkPad X1 Nano with 13,736. That was followed by the two Snapdragon X Elite machines at 13,178 and 13,017.

Conclusions

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite still has a very long road ahead of it, and there are definitely roadblocks along the way. Apple, Intel, and AMD are all going to announce new generations of their products between now and when the Snapdragon X Elite actually ships.

On top of that, Qualcomm still has an app problem on Windows. These numbers are all well and good, but they don't matter as much when you're forced to run Google Chrome in emulation.

Still, things look good right now. I think it's fair to say that Qualcomm is doing everything that it can to stay ahead of the curve. One thing that's for sure is that 2024 is going to be a really interesting year for computing.