Snapdragon X Elite in Dev Kit delivers performance on par with Apple M3 Pro on Geekbench

While none of the Snapdragon X series processors made their way to commercial mini PCs, Qualcomm officially released one. It's called the Snapdragon Dev Kit, and it features the most powerful processor available in the lineup, the X Elite X1E-00-1DE.

To see how this Snapdragon X Elite mini PC performs, Jeff Geerling has benchmarked it on Geekbench. Per the benchmark run, the X1E-00-1DE can deliver scores that are close to the Apple M3 Pro. More specifically, the Qualcomm chipset got 3,020 in single-core and 15,969 in multi-core.

In comparison, in our benchmark run, the 12-core Apple M3 Pro achieved 3,138 in single-core and 15,480 in multi-core. That means the scores of the Snapdragon Dev Kit are comparable to those of the Apple chip, which is pretty impressive.

However, as Jeff Geerling points out, the Snapdragon X Elite processor was able to deliver this level of performance at about 80W, and it's relatively higher than what the Apple M3 Pro consumes during benchmarks. So, Apple's chip is power efficient (512 GB 2023 MacBook Pro curr. $2,499 on Amazon).

Jeff Geerling has also benchmarked the Snapdragon X Elite mini PC on Cinebench 2024. In this test, the Qualcomm chip scored 131 points in single-core and 1,227 in multi-core. To compare, in our benchmarks, the 12-core Apple M3 Pro got 143 points and 1,059, respectively.

But again, the Snapdragon Dev Kit achieved such scores in Cinebench with a max power of 102W. In comparison, in our benchmarks, the Apple M3 Pro had a max TDP of 28W. This suggests that the same Snapdragon X Elite chip inside a laptop might not be able to deliver similar scores.