In October 2023, at the Snapdragon Summit held in Hawaii, Qualcomm not only released the third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform for mobile phones and tablets, but also announced the first batch of products using the self-developed Oryon CPU architecture, Snapdragon X Elite.
As an important step in the transformation of Qualcomm's Snapdragon system to its self-developed CPU architecture, and at the same time, it is also the most important product of Qualcomm's PC business so far, Snapdragon X Elite has attracted a lot of attention since its birth. We also conducted an early test of the reference design equipped with this new platform at the Snapdragon Summit early last fall, revealing its huge performance progress compared to previous generations to a certain extent.
From October last year to the present (the end of April 2024), more than half a year has passed. For the PC industry as a whole, we've also seen a number of other new processor solutions for thin and light laptops in the past six months. So for the Snapdragon X-series that hasn't hit the market yet, can they still maintain their lead?
The latest running score results were announced, and they continued to lead in the face of new opponents
In response to this problem, Qualcomm recently released some of the latest test data.
Half a year later, when they compared the M3 with the Snapdragon X Elite, they found that the Snapdragon X Elite's CPU still maintained a leading performance in the GeekBench multi-threaded test, and the amplitude was as high as 28%.
At the same time, compared to the latest x86 competitors, the Snapdragon X Elite still maintains a huge lead.
In GeekBench 6, the Snapdragon X Elite can achieve the same performance as the Core Ultra7-155H at only 1/3 of the power consumption. Or achieve the single-core performance of the Core Ultra7-155H at 154% at the same power consumption level.
In the multi-threaded test scenario of the same software, the Snapdragon X Elite only needs 60% of the power consumption to achieve the same performance compared to the Core Ultra 7-155H. Or 52% more multi-threaded performance at the same power level.
Even, Qualcomm also used the Snapdragon X Elite to compare the Core Ultra9-185H, which has higher power consumption and is more expensive. The test results show that it leads the performance of single-core and multi-core CPUs by 51% and 41%, respectively, at the same power, and consumes 65% (single-core) and 58% (multi-core) less energy than the Core Ultra9 at the same score.
In addition to CPU performance, Qualcomm's latest benchmark also includes the GPU part. The test results show that the integrated GPU of the Snapdragon X Elite can achieve the same performance as Intel's latest ARC core graphics at half the power, or as much as 36% at the same power consumption.
More native software adaptation, the measured response speed is significantly improved
Obviously, judging from the latest theoretical performance test results released by Qualcomm this time, even compared with the latest competing ARM or x86 architecture mobile PC platforms, the Snapdragon X Elite still retains a significant performance advantage. And this obviously also makes the outside world have more confidence in Qualcomm's self-developed architecture and its market competitiveness after listing.
However, in addition to these hardware-level performance comparison results, Qualcomm also announced further information about the new platform in terms of system and software adaptation.
According to Qualcomm, on the one hand, through cooperation with a number of software and system manufacturers, Snapdragon X Elite now has Microsoft Office suite, Google Chrome browser, and some entertainment, and even multimedia productivity software are natively compatible.
On the other hand, through the in-depth cooperation with Microsoft, the efficiency of the Snapdragon X Elite platform running x86 code on Windows has also been greatly improved. Not only does this make it now compatible with 64-bit x86 programs, but the Snapdragon X Elite can be faster than the latest Core Ultra platform in terms of startup speed for many commonly used professional software, such as Cisco WebEx, Firefox, Teams, and Adobe Photoshop, and can even achieve up to 70% faster response times.
In addition, because all models are equipped with NPU hardware with a computing power of up to 45TOPS, this allows the Snapdragon X-series platform to better support the true device-side AI experience in a non-networked state. For example, it can allow a large language model with a scale of 7 billion parameters to run on the device side at a speed of 30 tokens/second, which is enough to support the offline operation of functions such as automatic code generation, image quality enhancement, AI filtering, and AI noise reduction.
This is something that is generally unattainable on other so-called "AI PC" mobile platforms. After all, they basically only have one-third or even less than a quarter of the NPU computing power of the Snapdragon X series, and Snapdragon's AI platform itself started earlier, so it naturally has more potential in terms of software optimization.
The Snapdragon X Plus will be launched at the same time, and the "Snapdragon Laptop" will be aggressive
Although Qualcomm has announced that the terminal products equipped with Snapdragon X Elite will be officially launched at Computex in June this year, and will be available later. But they still chose to "preemptively announce" more derivative models of the Snapdragon X series, that is, the Snapdragon X Plus, which is positioned a little lower.
According to the official relevant data, the Snapdragon X Plus is still based on the 4nm process, with a 10-core Oryon CPU, a maximum frequency of 3.4GHz, and a total cache capacity of 42MB. At the same time, it also has an Adreno GPU with 3.8TFLOPS of computing power, a 45TOPS NPU, and also supports WiFi7 and 10 Gigabit 5G network connectivity.
In comparison to potential competitors, the Snapdragon X Plus's CPU performance is about 10% ahead of the Apple M3. Compared to the Core Ultra7-155H, it has a slight advantage in multi-threaded performance, while consuming only 46% of the x86 competitor's power at the same peak performance.
In the 3DMARK Wildlife Extreme test, the Snapdragon X Plus outperformed Intel's ARC GPU by 36% at the same power consumption, while consuming only half the power at peak performance.
It should be noted that according to the information disclosed by Qualcomm, whether it is Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X Plus, they will not have a fixed "TDP level", but will achieve the corresponding performance level according to the thermal design of the actual product. At the same time, whether it is Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X Plus, they both have the same ultra-high memory bandwidth of 136GB/s, and both support external "chips", or to put it more clearly, that is, external PCIE independent graphics.
In other words, when the new batch of "Snapdragon books" actually hit the market, we are likely to usher in a product lineup that is far richer and more open in price segments than in the past. On the other hand, as long as the terminal manufacturer is willing, Qualcomm's new PC platform can theoretically be used to achieve "5G AI workstations" and even "5G full-time online gaming laptops".
In fact, these are not too difficult to implement technically, it only depends on whether the relevant PC manufacturers dare to think and do. and whether the new Snapdragon X-series platform can succeed in the market with higher performance and a broader product portfolio.