Snapdragon X Series

Tests and reviews of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite have officially started rolling out. Although much of the reception has been lukewarm, a test by TechTablets revealed that the Snapdragon X Elite performs virtually identically when on battery and plugged into the charger. This is compared to x86 CPUs that often lose up to half their performance when on battery power.

The first Snapdragon X series laptop reviews are out, and with that, we got a closer look at the performance of Qualcomm's new ARM chipsets. As we noted in our review of the Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED with Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, the gaming performance is the biggest weak point at the moment. The other reviewers shared the same story.

The Snapdragon X Elite's independent reviews have started showing up, including ours. While the results might not blow anyone's socks off, they sure are promising. However, in a recent GravityMark GPU benchmark score posted by a Twitter user, the X Elite has faced a shocking performance downgrade - barely keeping up with the A17 Pro from last year's iPhone, but this is more likely to be an optimisation issue than anything else.

Qualcomm and its partners are still a few days away from delivering any Snapdragon X series devices yet. In the meantime, Qualcomm has published early results for its X1-85 GPU, albeit without comparing the GPU against any recent AMD Radeon iGPUs.

Snapdragon X Elite laptops are expected to be available starting from June 18. Days before being officially available, we are now seeing early user reviews. While Qualcomm made a lot of promises, these early reviews are not very promising, with Samsung Book4 Edge featuring the newest ARM processor performing worse than the Apple iPhone 12 mini from 2020 in the single-core test.

At Computex, Tuxedo showcased a 14-inch laptop prototype powered by a Snapdragon X Elite processor, 32 GB LPDDR5X, PCIe 4.0 SSD storage, USB4 connector and vapor chamber cooling. Linux was not actually running on it, as full ARM compatibility is coming with Kernel 6.10 or 6.11 later this year, so Toxedo is not mentioning a specific launch date.

Cristiano Amon has formally introduced the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chipsets during the company's "PC Reborn" Computex 2024 keynote speech. The series features a custom NPU touted to deliver the potential of their signature Microsoft Copilot+ "experiences". Qualcomm's CEO also officially unveiled some Oryon CPU performance gains compared to rival platforms such as Apple M and Intel Core Ultra.

Demonstration of a Snapdragon X Elite system at a Microsoft Build 2024 session has provided insight into the actual performance of the Snapdragon Oryon CPU powering CoPilot+ laptops launched this year. During the session, a Blender Classroom benchmark was run, allowing for rough performance comparisons to current Intel and AMD systems.