Snapdragon, Apple, Intel, MediaTek, and AMD are all big-time silicon makers and have been in the race for a very long time. Snapdragon was not in the PC processor race until now, but this has just changed. The company has entered the market with the promising Snapdragon X series chipsets. The Snapdragon X series chips are specifically being built for Microsoft’s AI PCs, known as Copilot+ PCs.
Why we are talking about these Snapdragon processors today is because their benchmark scores have turned out to be pretty surprising. According to a report, recent benchmark tests have revealed that the Snapdragon X series competes really well with chipsets from Apple, Intel, and AMD.
Also read: Computex 2024: Hands-on with Snapdragon X Elite AI PC laptops from Acer, Lenovo, Samsung, Microsoft
The Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 tests were run on these chips. A recent report by The Verge revealed that the new Snapdragon X Elite chipsets have shown a 2-3% increase in single-core performance over Apple’s M2 Max chips, which powers the 2023 MacBook Pro. The same test also showed that Snapdragon surpassed Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H and AMD’s Ryzen 7 8845HS processors by 24% and 17%, respectively. But still, Apple’s M3 chipsets led in single-core performance.
Coming to the multi-core performance now, the Snapdragon X series could not beat
Apple’s M2 Max and M3 Max, despite its great performance. It got up to 16 cores compared to the Snapdragon’s 12 cores. The M2 Max chipset outperformed Snapdragon’s X Elite chips in Cinebench 2024 tests, by a small margin.
Also read: Qualcomm’s Alex and Kedar Discuss AI Innovations and Snapdragon X Elite in Microsoft Partnership
All is well and good until you come to GPU performance. This is where the Snapdragon X series falls short. Apple’s M3 Max has a high GPU score of 91,480. On the other hand, AMD’s Radeon 780M GPU is at 29,199 and Intel’s Arc GPU is at 34,528. All three have outperformed Snapdragon.
Well, it seems that there’s some space where Snapdragon can learn from its competitors but they offer substantial improvements in CPU, GPU performance, and battery life over previous Arm-based Windows laptops.
