Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon X Elite CPU PC Benchmarks: Oryon Core Faster & Efficient Than Intel 13th Gen & Apple M2 Max, GPU Faster Than AMD RDNA 3

Qualcomm has finally unveiled the full details & benchmarks of its upcoming Snapdragon X Elite CPU for upcoming Windows PCs which will tackle Apple, Intel, and AMD.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite CPU is designed purely for the Windows PC market where it will be competing against Intel & AMD while also tackling Apple's laptop portfolio based on their Arm chip architectures. Qualcomm is claiming some big performance and efficiency numbers for Oryon and the resultant Snapdragon X Elite chips so let's get on with the details.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite "Oryon" CPU Specifications

For X Elite, Qualcomm has a brand new core known as Oryon which is based on the TSMC 4nm node and features a total of 12 cores that can operate at up to 4.3 GHz (1-core and 2-core) or 3.8 GHz (All-Core) boost frequencies. These cores are arranged in clusters of four and three clusters are used for the X Elite chips with a total of 42 MB cache.

The GPU is a Qualcomm Adreno chip rated at up to 4.6 TFLOPs and there's also a Qualcomm Hexagon AI accelerator which offers 75 TOPs of performance as a Micro nPU. Other specs include support for up to 64 GB of LPDDR5x-8533 memory, PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD, the use of the latest Snapdragon X65 5G modem with WIFI7 and BT 5.4 offered by the FastConnect 7800 controller.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite "Oryon" CPU Performance

In terms of performance, Qualcomm shared a lot of figures starting off with the single-threaded numbers within Geekbench 6. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite delivers a single core score of 3227 points which is 14% faster than the Apple M2 Max (2841 points), while consuming 30% less power. The Snapdragon X Elite CPU also ends up faster than the Intel Core i9-13980HX, leading it with a smaller 1% gain (3192 points) but doing so by consuming 70% less power.

Moving on to the multi-threaded benchmarks, Qualcomm compares the Snapdragon X Elite CPUs with 12 Oryon cores against Intel's 13th Gen 12 & 10 core CPU offerings. The CPU is said to deliver up to twice the multi-threaded performance in Geekbench 6 at the same power & match the peak performance of the competition while sipping in 68% less power.

The same is the case when comparing the CPU to the 14-core Intel Core i7-13800H CPU. The X Elite 12-core offers 60% faster performance at the same power and matches the peak performance of the competition while sipping 65% less power. Snapdragon X Elite is also said to deliver 50% better performance than the M2 in multi-threaded though this is the Non-Max chip being talked about in the specific test.

Lastly, Qualcomm is sharing the integrated GPU performance against Intel's Core i7-13800H and AMD's Ryzen 9 7940HS. The 13th Gen CPUs have weaker integrated graphics so the performance gain at the same power is quite significant with a 2x gain while peak performance of the Intel chip is offered while consuming 74% less power. Against the more powerful AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS with RDNA 3 architecture, the CPU still ends up 80% faster at the same performance and consumes 80% less power while matching its peak performance.

The performance was evaluated within 3DMark's Wildlife Extreme graphics benchmark but we will take these numbers with a slight grain of salt as Intel and AMD iGPUs have a vast performance and efficiency difference in performance which isn't reflected here. For example, the Intel Iris Xe (13th Gen) and Radeon 780M (RDNA 3) iGPUs have a difference of just 36% in the Wild Life benchmarks whereas in the more graphics-intensive 3DMark Time Spy, this difference grows by 79%. Wild Life is based on the Vulkan API whereas Time Spy is based on the DX12 API. Also, Wild Life is primarily for entry-level notebooks, tablets, and smartphones whereas the Intel Core i9-13900H nor the Ryzen 9 7940HS are entry-level notebook chips.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 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.