Snapdragon X Elite hype grows as Qualcomm shows off Apple M3-beating CPU that can handle laptop gaming
Qualcomm continues to be busy building anticipation for the upcoming Snapdragon
Our sister site Tom’s hardware got the chance to try out some laptops that have the new ARM-based chip, while listening to claims from Qualcomm about how the Snapdragon (which is a rival ARM part).
According to Qualcomm’s tests – as always, add a little flavor to internal benchmarks, not that they would be counterfeit of course, but they are inevitably chosen to present hardware in the best light – the Snapdragon X Elite easily beats Apple’s M3 SoC in Geekbench 6. In multi-threaded testing, the Snapdragon was almost 30% faster than the M3, although Qualcomm didn’t provide a single-threaded comparison.
Even more startling was the race against Intel, in which Team Blue virtually ate Qualcomm’s dust. The Snapdragon That’s when both chips have the same power consumption – alternatively, the Elite could match the 155H in performance while consuming 60% or 65% less power (for multi- and single-threaded respectively).
Very impressive? Sure, though we should keep in mind that Intel is getting Lunar Lake CPUs this year, which may not be far behind Qualcomm’s chip – and those next-generation laptop processors promise to make serious advances in power efficiency.
In terms of integrated graphics, the Snapdragon That’s what we mean by cherry-picking, and in the case of integrated graphics, Qualcomm hasn’t made any comparisons to the Apple M3 (or faster Intel silicon like the Core Ultra 9).
Gaming goodness
In the field of gaming, we also have the practical experience of Digital trends to record. The site found that on one of Qualcomm’s reference laptops, the Snapdragon With the same settings, Baldur’s Gate 3 ran at an average of 30 fps.
Those are pretty impressive results for today’s games running under emulation (since it’s an ARM chip, remember, not x86).
One of the big hopes for Windows on ARM devices is that emulating software and games (which can’t run natively because they are x86) will reach a level where it’s more than palatable, and the Snapdragon to be an alternative. step forward in that direction.
Through VideoCardz