Qualcomm Unveils Even More Snapdragon X Elite PC CPU Benchmarks: 23W & 80W Reference Laptops Tested

Qualcomm has provided even more benchmarks of its upcoming Snapdragon X Elite PC CPU featuring the Oryon core architecture.

Following the initial unveil and benchmarks, Qualcomm gave a further deep-dive of its next-gen Snapdragon X Elite CPU platforms which will be powering its fleet of Windows PCs in the coming next year. You can find more details on the architecture side of things here.

During the hand-off presentation, Qualcomm had two reference laptops set up for the audiences which included a 28W efficiency-focused model and an 80W high-performance variant. The thin & light configuration was running a Snapdragon X Elite CPU with a 4.0 GHz (2-core) and 3.4 GHz (all-core) boost frequency while the performance-focused system was running the chip with a clock of 4.3 GHz (2-Core) and 3.8 GHz (All-Core) boost.

There are additional differences for both reference laptops with the 80W configuration using a 16.5" screen with a maximum resolution of 3840x2160 and a bigger 87Wh battery while the 28W configuration uses a 14.5" OLED screen with a maximum resolution of 2880x1800 and a 58Wh battery. Both models featured active cooling and were equipped with the latest LPDDR5x-8533 system memory. The thinner laptop, as the name suggests, was just 15mm thick while the 80W variant had a thickness of 16.8mm.

The performance of both chips was evaluated in various benchmarks such as Cinebench 2024, Geekbench 6, 3DMark Wildlife Extreme, Aztec Ruins, and UL Procyon AI. Both 28W and 80W CPU variants of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite series were tested against a range of chips from Apple, Intel, and AMD. The competitor results are at their maximum achievable performance using unconstrained power limits. The platforms included:

The benchmarks can be seen below:

In Cinebench 2024, the Snapdragon X Elite CPU with its Oryon core architecture is said to offer up to 20% higher single-core and twice the multi-threaded performance of the competition. Doing a breakdown, the 80W chip is 9% faster than the Apple M2, 15% faster than the i7-13800H, and 21% faster than the Ryzen 9 7940HS chip while the 28W X Elite CPU is 1%, 6%, and 12% faster than the same chips, respectively.

Looking at multi-threaded scores, the X Elite 80W laptop is 22% faster than Intel, 25% faster than AMD, 28% faster than the 28W chip, and over 2x faster than the Apple M2 CPU. Similarly, the 28W configuration is neck to neck with the much higher wattage Apple and Intel counterparts and 66% faster than the Apple M2.

In Geekbench, the lead is up to 10% in single-core and up to 50% in multi-core performance tests. Breaking down the numbers, both X Elite CPUs retain the highest single-core performance out of the chips tested but the main differences lie in the multi-core tests. The 80W configuration is up to 5% faster than Intel, 8% faster than the 28W X Elite chip, 24% faster than AMD, and 50% faster than Apple's solution.

For the GPU benchmarks, Qualcomm is touting up to 2.5x and 67% gains in Aztec Ruins & 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmarks, respectively. The Aztec Ruins benchmarks support multiple APIs including Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL ES 3.2, Desktop OpenGL, DirectX11, and DirectX12. But the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS is shown to be slower than the 13800H here which isn't the case in real-life workloads and games.

Also, the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme benchmark is used once again to evaluate the GPU performance and we have the same reservations as the previous article as the performance showcased for the Ryzen 9 7940HS here is not up to mark and the chip should easily be much faster than the 13800H when actual games are tested.

That seems to be the case as the laptop was tested by Geekerwan in Control at 1440P and the CPU resulted in 32 FPS versus 30-33 FPS on the Ryzen 7 7840HS. This is a very good showcase for the X Elite if it is managing to offer performance on par with AMD's RDNA 3 graphics architecture and we can't wait to see further optimizations as the chipmaker still has several months to go till launch.

Lastly, we have the UL Procyon AI benchmark which evaluates the inference performance of CPU, GPU, and dedicated neural engines. Apple is left out of this benchmark while the X Elite CPUs are shown to be over 10x faster than the competition. AMD Ryzen CPUs feature a dedicated AI engine known as Ryzen AI and should prove to be a challenger to the neural AI capabilities on X Elite chips though the proper real-world application needs to be used.

The Qualcomm X Elite CPUs with Oryon cores are planned for launch by the middle of 2024 and the company will also be sharing more details in the future. By the time these chips do launch, Intel will have its Meteor Lake (1st Gen Core Ultra) and AMD will have its Strix Point (Ryzen 8000) CPUs out in the market so the competition is going to be really heated in the consumer space.

News Sources: Anandtech, PC.Watch