Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx amasses respectable score on Geekbench and closes in on Intel's Core i5-8250U

The Snapdragon 8cx is an ARM-based SoC for use in laptops operating on Windows 10. There has long been plenty of desire for WoA (or specifically WoS in this scenario) to be a more viable option due to the inherent benefits of the architecture, such as long battery life. However, performance has often been a thorn in the side of WoA-based devices, although Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx may have fixed that issue.

According to the leaked Geekbench 4.3.3 results, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx managed to score 3,327 and 3,352 points in two separate single-core tests and also amassed 11,154 and 11,048 points in the respective multi-core tests. Various media outlets have compared these results favorably with Intel’s Kaby Lake Refresh i5-8250U. In our tests, the latter processor attained median single-core scores of 4,029 and 4,115 in Geekbench 4 and Geekbench 4.4, respectively. The multi-core scores were 12,131 and 12,751. A particularly interesting sample to point out here is the Geekbench 4.3 multi-core score recorded in our Fujitsu LifeBook U938 review. The i5-8250U in this laptop scored 11,269 points, which is barely ahead of the Snapdragon 8cx's results.

It’s important to note that not only has the Snapdragon 8cx performed at an almost similar level as the quad-core i5-8250U but also that the Qualcomm SoC has a TDP of 7 W whereas the Intel chip has a considerably higher TDP of 15 W. The Snapdragon 8cx has been designed on the 7nm manufacturing process, so it is expected to be extremely power efficient while throwing up system performance on the level of a full-blown mid-range Intel competitor.