Benchmarked Brawl: Snapdragon X Elite Tops M3, But at What Cost?

During this year’s Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm announced the launch of its most powerful processor to date, designed specifically for PCs: the Snapdragon X Elite. Qualcomm holds high hopes for the Snapdragon X Elite, believing that this pioneering platform will usher in a new era of computing and significantly enhance the PC experience. Many are curious to know if the Snapdragon X Elite, tailored for Windows on Arm, can match up to Apple’s latest self-developed M3 series chips.

As reported by Digital Trends, in a conversation with Qualcomm’s Senior Public Relations Manager Sascha Segan, it was noted that the Snapdragon X Elite and the M series self-developed chips offer different experiences due to the former running on Windows and the latter on macOS. However, in terms of hardware, which is the only aspect Qualcomm can control, the Snapdragon X Elite is considered to be exceptional.

Qualcomm claims that in the Geekbench 6 benchmark test, the 80W version of the Snapdragon X Elite surpasses Apple’s M3 by 21% in multi-core performance, scoring 15,300 against the latter’s 12,154. Interestingly, Qualcomm tactfully omits one factor: the power limitation of the Snapdragon X Elite. It offers a 23W version emphasizing battery life and an 80W version unleashing full performance, with the differences significantly impacting the processor’s capabilities.

The Snapdragon X Elite is manufactured using TSMC’s 4nm process and features 12 custom Oryon cores in its CPU, with all cores capable of reaching up to 3.8 GHz and two cores accelerating up to 4.3 GHz. It also boasts a 45TOPS NPU and integrates Qualcomm’s proprietary Adreno GPU, delivering 4.6TOPS of computational performance. The new platform supports LPDDR5X memory with a rate of 8533 MT/s, a maximum capacity of 64GB, and a maximum bandwidth of 136 GB/s. In addition to supporting PCIe 4.0, the Snapdragon X Elite will also support UFS 4.0 storage, along with 5G, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4.