Qualcomm has turned up to the laptop party and started making waves, particularly when it comes to cleaning Apple’s clock.
The Snapdragon X Elite was only the opening act, with the San Diego outfit now pushing the Snapdragon X2 Elite as its next statement chipset for Windows-powered notebooks.
Qualcomm had previously rolled out the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and Snapdragon X2 Elite last year, and the less powerful SoC has now been put through CPU and GPU benchmarks, with results that in some cases beat the M5 while leaving the Snapdragon X Elite looking a bit tired.
Hardware Canucks was allowed by ASUS to run a stack of benchmarks on a Zenbook, though the unit was pre-production with early drivers and firmware. That means the numbers might shift once retail machines land later this year.
All tests were carried out with Qualcomm’s newest silicon running at 31W, which is just 5W more than Apple’s M5 at 26W. Even with that small bump, the Snapdragon X2 Elite beat the M5 in three out of five benchmarks and hammered its immediate predecessor.
Battery testing was not performed due to pre-production caveats, and Windows 11 updates have been known to change battery behaviour depending on context or the weather.
In Cinebench 2024 single-core, the Snapdragon X2 Elite hit 146, which is 35.2 per cent faster than the Snapdragon X Elite at 108, but the M5 still led with 200, which is 37 per cent faster than Qualcomm’s new chip.
Cinebench 2024 multi-core flips the script, with the Snapdragon X2 Elite scoring 1,432, which is 24.2 per cent faster than the M5 at 1,153 and 48.7 per cent faster than the Snapdragon X Elite at 963.
Blender 5.01, where lower is better, also favoured Qualcomm, with the Snapdragon X2 Elite at 3:31 versus Snapdragon X Elite at 5:24 and M5 at 5:33.
Handbrake, again lower is better, had the Snapdragon X2 Elite at 3:29, beating the Snapdragon X Elite at 5:32 and the M5 at 5:14.
DaVinci Resolve 20.3 was a different story, with the M5 posting 09:43 while the Snapdragon X2 Elite clocked 22:06 and the Snapdragon X Elite trailed at 33:16.
Hardware Canucks shared figures Intel’s Core Ultra X9 388H, with a nod to detailed coverage of ASUS’s Zenbook Duo that suggests Chipzilla has managed a proper comeback in x86 land.
