Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Analysis - More efficient than AMD & Intel, but Apple stays ahead

[Redaktion]

Qualcomm launches the new Snapdragon X Elite about nine months after the official announcement - with support from Microsoft and all the major laptop manufacturers. We were able to test the small X1E-78-100 as well as the X1E-80-100 and compare them with current chips from AMD, Apple and Intel.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite-Analysis-More-efficient-than-AMD-Intel-but-Apple-stays-ahead.850221.0.html

[DS27]

Wow... What crazy manipulation, everything hand-picked to fit the narrative... you've thrown any relevance you had in the garbage can. Do you think the public is retarded?

I have a 7840u and it runs videos in 4k using hardware acceleration drawing only 4-5w, all you have to do is use any browser without acceleration to manipulate it.
The reality is that the CPU loses in 98% of cases to x86 competitors, the GPU loses in 100% of cases. Nobody in their right mind should pay that price for a problematic and inefficient product.

[Neenyah]

"More efficient than AMD & Intel"

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Runs hotter and louder, has less battery life, less performance per Watt, Ryzen 8840U STOMPS it at any power limit you set be in iGPU or CPU performance, Meteor Lake is beating it at anything pretty much. It consumes more power even in idle than AMDs and Intels.

But yeah, the Flopdragon is more efficient, sure. Qualcomm propaganda goes hard. Dave2D level or "journalism" is coming here to this site too, sadly...

Meanwhile in reality: Impressive! But Also Not?! Snapdragon X Elite - Asus Vivobook S 15 Review (The Phawx on YT)

[ikjadoon]

Could we get any clarity on the YouTube test? NBC hasn't used this test before.

Is that a peak power draw or an average? Which video was used? Same browsers in all? Were all laptops confirmed HW decode? How was system power draw measured (e.g., USB-PD power analyser)?

Would love to see additional laptops added from both Qualcomm & Intel/AMD.

[Gallo123]

I'll stick with Intel laptops. Don't need more than 15 hours of battery and thunderbolt really changes the office workstation experience. Don't care about anymore performance.

[voidanix]

At the beginning of the article you mention that '...there is currently no app that can show the current consumption of the new Qualcomm chips and we can only make educated guesses...'. The "external screen power measurement" method is, from what I can tell, completely undocumented: it does not clarify anything, and assuming that a silly plug power meter is being used, it feels completely pointless on battery powered devices.

This article and the German one on the X Elite/Vivobook really scarred this site's reputation for me. Get your stuff together.

[Ivy]

Would love to see power consumption and efficency in light tasks, such as your web browser test. I think this metric was on the nose since M chips appeared, as this is what defines battery life.

[NikoB]

Hahaha, what a monstrous fraud.

In the multi-threaded test, the CBR24 supposedly won the M3 Max, but in the energy efficiency picture at the top of the list is no longer the M3 Max, but the simple M3 (the author probably hoped that no one would notice the substitution), which loses to any AMD in the multi-threaded test exactly 1.5 times, and the M3 Max there is no even multi-threaded energy efficiency in the results, which means that it is below par and loses even to hot Intel chips.

Stop making such shameful reviews - draw a performance graph on one axis of which is consumption, and on the other is productivity, and the points are the object of study. And it will immediately become clear who is really king of the hill in terms of balanced performance and consumption. And this is definitely not Apple, not to mention the junk from Qualcomm...;)

The only thing that is an absolute shame about x86 is playing 4K videos on YouTube - it is quite obvious that the SoC+MB+SSD combination should not consume more than 5-7W in this mode, but they consume 2-3 more and this is not normal.

In general, playing 8k@60fps/AV1 should already fit within 5-7W, and 4k@60 should consume less than 5W.

By the way, Lunar Lake is the first SoC with hardware support for H266 decoding.

[XDS.2]

It should have at least written "paid by Qualcomm"

[chris@amd]

There was a time i came to notebookcheck for deep analytical articles. they was transparency in the past not cherry picked charts to make broken SOC look good. guys don't count on these charts, just go to phawx youtube channel to see real picture of efficiency. i wonder if you NB-check is part of qualcomm/microsoft PR department !

[indy]

However, there can also be crashes (often happened during gaming tests) or the apps simply won't launch at all. It is unfortunately not always easy to find our whether there is a native ARM app or not.

This is intolerable. No vendor should be selling a device that crashes/doesn't start on emulation, or not.

The market is NOT going to rush to build native ARM on Windows apps, especially games, ESPECIALLY LEGACY GAMES! It happened for OSX because Apple's legacy software is very, very, very small compared to x86. And Apple supports graphics design, not games.

People stick with Microsoft due to legacy support, games, and Microsoft's 10 plus years of support per operating system. But crashes on emulation?! Not acceptable. The market won't tolerate it, and developers won't develop native apps for it if people don't rush to it.

This is DOA, calling it as I see it.

[Disappointed]

I agree that this article does not read like the usual, high quality reviews I came to respect Notebookcheck.net for. Moreover, the lack of emulated benchmarks is telling. Yes, x86-64 emulation performance is ABSOLUTELY important here. We all have software and games that we like/need that will never see a Windows-on-ARM version, so how does the emulation affect its performance and efficiency?

This is Qualcomm's 4th attempt to crack the laptop market (after Win-RT, SD850 and SD8cx line), so it's not like a fair bit of skepticism isn't out of the question and would paint you as trolls or something.

[Deceptive]

This is truly a great example of a deceptive review. Hawk Point is just simply better in almost every aspect, not to mention it just destroys utterly Snapdragon X in 3D/gaming. Not by a small margin. While consuming less power. It is the 4th try by qualcomm. Next iteration they better pull a rabbit out of a hat, in 3D they will need over double perf/watt improvement if they want to have any chance agains Strix (Ryzen 300 AI).

[q]

After reading this I must wonder: Is nbcheck biased peace of sh*t now?
Like this is just sad and not objective.

[bootless]

Did I read a different article? As a first look it seeks to answer questions people had about the big performance and efficiency claims Qualcomm made. Turns out these X Elite chips don't deliver game changing improvements to either, but at least offer a competitive alternative to AMD and Intel. And that's the focus of the article.

There are plenty of other considerations and details to get into. They've got compatibility to deal with, at least much improved since the days on Windows RT. They've got a short window to sell before new gen chips from Apple/AMD/Intel are likely going to beat them at all counts. Their one strong point in the NPU can only be leveraged with Windows Copilot/Recall, with questionable utility and demand. Pricing is also going to be a big factor in purchase decisions.

I don't see the bias, or any difference in conclusion as other publications.