Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite Cracks CPU Records

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite CPU, which will compete with Apple, Intel, and AMD in future Windows PCs, has now been fully detailed and benchmarked.

Qualcomm’s most recent Snapdragon X Elite CPUs for Windows are a direct shot at the PC Trio (Intel, Apple, and AMD).

The Snapdragon X Elite CPU from Qualcomm is exclusively intended for the Windows PC market, where it will face off against Intel and AMD as well as Apple’s line of laptops built on their Arm chip architectures. Let’s get to the facts as Qualcomm is claiming impressive performance and efficiency metrics for Oryon and the resulting Snapdragon X Elite CPUs.

Specifications for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite “Oryon” CPU

Oryon, a new Qualcomm core for X Elite, is built on the TSMC 4nm node and has a total of 12 cores with a maximum boost frequency of 3.8 GHz for all cores or 4.3 GHz for 1- and 2-core operations. For the X Elite chips, which have three clusters and a total of 42 MB cache, these cores are organized in groups of four.

The Qualcomm Adreno GPU processor has a performance rating of up to 4.6 TFLOPs, while the Qualcomm Hexagon AI accelerator provides 75 TOPs of performance as a Micro nPU. Other specifications include the usage of the most recent Snapdragon X65 5G modem with WIFI7 and BT 5.4 provided by the FastConnect 7800 controller, support for up to 64 GB of LPDDR5x-8533 memory, and PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD.

Performance of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite “Oryon” CPU

Qualcomm provided a wealth of performance data, starting with the single-threaded results from Geekbench 6. While using 30% less power, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite achieves a single core score of 3227 points, which is 14% quicker than the Apple M2 Max’s (2841) result. Additionally, the Snapdragon X Elite CPU outperforms the Intel Core i9-13980HX, outperforming it with a lesser 1% increase (3192 points) while using 70% less power.

Moving on to the multi-threaded results, Qualcomm contrasts Intel’s 13th Gen 12 & 10 core CPU offers with the Snapdragon X Elite CPUs with 12 Oryon cores. The CPU is claimed to equal the peak performance of the competition while consuming 68% less power and provide up to double the multi-threaded performance in Geekbench 6 at the same power.

Comparing the CPU to the 14-core Intel Core i7-13800H CPU reveals the same results. The X Elite 12-core matches the peak performance of the competition while using 65% less power and performs 60% quicker at the same power. Even though this is the Non-Max chip being discussed in the specific test, Snapdragon X Elite is also touted to perform 50% better than the M2 in multi-threaded.

Finally, Qualcomm is competing with AMD’s Ryzen 9 7940HS and Intel’s Core i7-13800H for integrated GPU performance. Because the integrated graphics on 13th generation CPUs are less powerful, there is a 2x increase in performance at the same power consumption, whereas the Intel chip offers peak performance while using 74% less power. The CPU is still 80% quicker at the same performance level and uses 80% less power while matching the top performance of the more potent AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS with RDNA 3 architecture.

The performance was measured using 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme graphics test, but we should still treat these results with caution because Intel and AMD iGPUs have very different performance and efficiency characteristics that aren’t represented in these results. For instance, the difference between the Intel Iris Xe (13th Gen) and Radeon 780M (RDNA 3) iGPUs in the Wild Life testing is merely 36%, but it increases to 79% in the more graphics-intensive 3DMark Time Spy assessments. While Time Spy is built on the DX12 API, Wild Life is based on the Vulkan API. Additionally, Wild Life is designed particularly for low-cost laptops, tablets, and smartphones, in contrast to the entry-level notebook CPUs Intel Core i9-13900H and Ryzen 9 7940HS.

By the middle of 2024, Qualcomm expects to release the Snapdragon X Elite CPUs with Oryon cores, and the firm will provide additional information when it becomes available. By the time these chips do ship, AMD’s Strix Point (Ryzen 8000) and Intel’s Meteor Lake (1st Gen Core Ultra) CPUs will already be on the market, making for some fierce rivalry in the consumer market.

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