News Early Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks seemingly confirm the chip's incredible performance and battery life potential

[Admin]

A third party has finally gotten its hands on a production laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite. Early test results suggest its performance is virtually as good as advertised.

Early Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks seemingly confirm the chip's incredible performance and battery life potential : Read more

 

[ThomasKinsley]

This looks good, but I'm still nervous that the benchmark is commissioned by Microsoft and therefore is not truly independent. We need tech review sites to get their hands on these machines to get real results.

 

[Pierce2623]

Wait…so 12 full fat p cores beats big.LITTLE chips in a multithreaded test? Who would’ve ever guessed that?

 

[kealii123]

So as far as I can tell, this is roughly on par with AMD's 780m? Kinda disappointing on the graphics side.

 

[Pierce2623]

So as far as I can tell, this is roughly on par with AMD's 780m? Kinda disappointing on the graphics side.

I mean that was expected. The 780m is 4.2tflops and this is 4.5tflops. Both are limited by a 128 bit bus shared with the CPU anyways.

 

[Giroro]

Every couple years Microsoft pretends to care about ARM, pushes out a product that nobody buys, and quietly sweeps it under the rug so they can pretend like the next one is a big deal.

At the end of the day, I think people just don't want a nerfed computer that forces you to use a phone-style app store that charges inflated prices. Because Microsoft is going to make their ARM products locked into the Microsoft store again, just like every other time, right?
I don't think that Microsoft understands that if they limit features of their desk-sized computers to make it work like a phone... then people are just going to use their phones.

Like I'll keep a laptop around because mobile websites are awful, feature limited, and often broken. I usually can't pay my bills with a phone, because a lot of the places I need to pay bills tend to not have an adequate mobile page. Since "desktop mode" doesn't do anything useful anymore, well that's one reason to keep a PC handy. But when Microsoft inevitably decides they can compete with android by forcing their desktop browser to only display broken mobile pages, I wouldn't say "Well it's broken in both places so I might as well leave the phone at home and take the laptop". I would just ditch the useless laptop.

Microsoft could delete their app store and lean into the high performance, customizability, flexibility, open marketplace, wide compatibility, or any of the other things a PC can do a lot better than mobile... but they refuse. Their current leadership apparently has no idea what product they are supposed to be selling.

 

[Notton]

Wait…so 12 full fat p cores beats big.LITTLE chips in a multithreaded test? Who would’ve ever guessed that?

What's crazy is that X Elite's die size is only around 171mm². (estimated to be a range between 165mm² and 182mm²)
For comparison, Zen4 Phoenix (7840, etc.) is 178mm²
It's hard to judge the GPU portion die size, but they perform similarly.

I think the key takeaway here is Snapdragon fit 12 full cores in where as AMD could only fit 8.

 

[tigerseal12]

Was this a sponsored article? Seriously, your headline says "incredible performance and battery life" but 10% battery life on Procyon over a 8-month old Core Ultra and "equivalent" to M3 does not scream game-changer. This from an opaque sponsored reviewer which at best set up ideal conditions for the Snapdragon X. Behind the M3 and only 5% difference vs the 7H on single-threaded performance. It still could not outperform with emulated apps, merely "matching", likely on a cherry-picked app. It's an improvement over the 8cx sure but the headline is hyperbolic.

 

[Quirkz]

A warning sign to me was the comparison to a macbook air. A passively cooled lower power version of the device compared under a sustained workload to an actively cooled device. Yeap. I'd expect the any actively cooled device to beat the macbook air during sustained workloads.
The better comparison for pure performance would have been the macbook pro.

(Value for money is a different question of course. If this device retails at better performance than the air at the same pricepoint, then that's quite a win.)

 

[NeoMorpheus]

Crtl+F “AMD= zero.

Amazing writing skills that somehow manages to ignore one important CPU player in such manner.

Anyways, hopefully that wont happen when real reviews are done.

 

[abufrejoval]

Microsoft could delete their app store and lean into the high performance, customizability, flexibility, open marketplace, wide compatibility, or any of the other things a PC can do a lot better than mobile... but they refuse. Their current leadership apparently has no idea what product they are supposed to be selling.

Microsoft isn't interested in your optimal personal computer experience or empowering you.

Microsoft wants to become another fruity cult that sells dependency and addiction and rest assured that the bucks will keep on coming.

And unfortunately nobody else wants you satisfied either, because that's when you stop spending.

 

[jheithaus]

With the better gpu and no need for emulation, I'm going to buy the Meteor lake XPS for my son's back to school laptop. The NPU performance is nifty, but I don't know what the actual value add is.

 

[abufrejoval]

I think the key takeaway here is Snapdragon fit 12 full cores in where as AMD could only fit 8.

That is likely to level out a bit when AMD combines four Zen 5 with 8 Zen 5c cores in their next gen APUs.

Apart from the cache size (so far) those are full cores with less dark silicon to enable the high clocks, and this no disadvantage where energy budgets restrict all-core workloads clocks more than thermal headroom.

I guess we'll have a much broader picture in a few months, this is just marketing with very selective comparisons, very much like the other fruity cult.

 

[sstanic]

Ryan Shrout 🤣

Thanks to the writer for transparency 😉

 

[nitrobear]

Every couple years Microsoft pretends to care about ARM, pushes out a product that nobody buys, and quietly sweeps it under the rug so they can pretend like the next one is a big deal.

At the end of the day, I think people just don't want a nerfed computer that forces you to use a phone-style app store that charges inflated prices. Because Microsoft is going to make their ARM products locked into the Microsoft store again, just like every other time, right?
I don't think that Microsoft understands that if they limit features of their desk-sized computers to make it work like a phone... then people are just going to use their phones.

Like I'll keep a laptop around because mobile websites are awful, feature limited, and often broken. I usually can't pay my bills with a phone, because a lot of the places I need to pay bills tend to not have an adequate mobile page. Since "desktop mode" doesn't do anything useful anymore, well that's one reason to keep a PC handy. But when Microsoft inevitably decides they can compete with android by forcing their desktop browser to only display broken mobile pages, I wouldn't say "Well it's broken in both places so I might as well leave the phone at home and take the laptop". I would just ditch the useless laptop.

Microsoft could delete their app store and lean into the high performance, customizability, flexibility, open marketplace, wide compatibility, or any of the other things a PC can do a lot better than mobile... but they refuse. Their current leadership apparently has no idea what product they are supposed to be selling.

You didn’t read the article. Come back, read it, and then feel free to comment.

 

[kealii123]

This time it looks like Microsoft and Qualcomm are serious about ARM Windows. Qualcomm has invested billions into this chip, and Microsoft is seriously harming their decades long relationship with Intel over this. As scatter-brained and ununified as Microsoft can be, they are still the largest corporation in Human History, surpassing Apple a year ago. They aren't "chasing fruit" or whatever.

Granted, their recent growth that put them at #1 has all been from Azure and other cloud infrastructure (and Office). Large corporations like Microsoft, when they grow this big, become more like a loose confederate of competing sub-companies, where one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing, and they compete for resources, and individual incentives do not align with the company as a whole (just like a government). Whats really impressive to me is that Apple has somehow managed to avoid this.

 

[Nyara]

Was this a sponsored article? Seriously, your headline says "incredible performance and battery life" but 10% battery life on Procyon over a 8-month old Core Ultra and "equivalent" to M3 does not scream game-changer. This from an opaque sponsored reviewer which at best set up ideal conditions for the Snapdragon X. Behind the M3 and only 5% difference vs the 7H on single-threaded performance. It still could not outperform with emulated apps, merely "matching", likely on a cherry-picked app. It's an improvement over the 8cx sure but the headline is hyperbolic.

Game-changer is the leaked $150 lower price over Intel's Raptor Lake and $300 over Meteor Lake and $500 over Apple, while also beating all of them by a non-insignificant margin. Qualcomm is not competing in the same price segments, and even then is beating all competition. Qualcomm isn't even using a cutting-end node for this, so they can mass-produce freely too.

Crtl+F “AMD= zero.

Amazing writing skills that somehow manages to ignore one important CPU player in such manner.

Anyways, hopefully that wont happen when real reviews are done.

AMD is not offering any product for this power consumption segment. If you up just a bit the TDP to regular laptops, AMD is the clear winner, but Qualcomm is specifically targeting for ultrabook. The Snap X has very poor scalling as you up the TDP, likely.

 

[Quirkz]

And unfortunately nobody else wants you satisfied either, because that's when you stop spending.

ouch!
That's a damning one line indictment of the modern age.
And depressingly true.

 

[Quirkz]

Game-changer is the leaked $150 lower price over Intel's Raptor Lake and $300 over Meteor Lake and $500 over Apple, while also beating all of them by a non-insignificant margin. Qualcomm is not competing in the same price segments, and even then is beating all competition. Qualcomm isn't even using a cutting-end node for this, so they can mass-produce freely too.

Killer move to try get in on a crowded segment as a newcomer. But just watch them raise the prices as soon as they gain some traction.
A better result would be if the others dropped their prices - As it's likely there are very fat margins involved: especially from Apple.

 

[abufrejoval]

ouch!
That's a damning one line indictment of the modern age.
And depressingly true.

It's not that modern. Those without enough of a reproductive drive have left us early, too.

Satisfaction either lasts an eternity or not very long.

 

[Pierce2623]

What's crazy is that X Elite's die size is only around 171mm². (estimated to be a range between 165mm² and 182mm²)
For comparison, Zen4 Phoenix (7840, etc.) is 178mm²
It's hard to judge the GPU portion die size, but they perform similarly.

I think the key takeaway here is Snapdragon fit 12 full cores in where as AMD could only fit 8.

It’s been well known for quite a while that ARM based IPs almost always excel in performance per mm^2 without super wide registers, but they also generally give up a lot in vector workloads.

 

[Silas Sanchez]

One thing to think about is after all these years of advancements with chips- becoming ludicrously powerful and efficient. The humble battery hasn't changed much, its not subject to moores law, its sadly subject to the laws of chemistry. You can't shrink down the size of the constituents.
Li-ion topped out at >300wh/kg specific capacity in late 2000s (too lazy to figure out the energy density).
Modern safer chemistries (particularly nmc/LiNiMnCoO2 Pouch cells can match this due to having less body than cylindricals and having silicon alloyed into the anode which increases the charge density.
There is buzz of getting to 400-500wh/kg. It sounds plausible given possible pseudo solid electrolytes and advanced packing. But of course we must wait until an actual product exists on the shelf. Until then It means very little to me.
No matter how "efficient" modern tech gets, it doesn't do much when the battery is a slave to chemistry. When you try and do a task that is demanding, the runtime nosedives. My 17" workstation laptop only gets 25-30mins off a full charge from the 100wh battery in gaming. Play "720p" videos and the battery life is a few hours, play real 4K even with a less aggressive codec and its under 40mins. As far as I can tell its a similar story with these handheld devices, when the graphics are cranked right up the runtime is so bad its not worth even owning.
The battery is the big limiting factor.