A few weeks ago, journalists were invited to Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego to demonstrate the platform Snapdragon X Elite. The company paid for the participants’ travel and accommodation, but did not make any editorial changes. Since the announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite platform at the end of last year, there have been many rumors, leaks, and information from the manufacturer about its performance. Now a select few have been able to get hands-on experience with the system. Devin Arthur from Windows Latest told us about the test results.
During the demonstrations, we had access to several reference hardware systems that ran predefined tests such as 3D Mark, Jetstream, etc. The table below shows some of the results of these tests, which were run on the Snapdragon X Elite 23W (whole system consumption) compared to the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor.
As you can see from the numbers above, the X Elite beats the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in every single test with much lower power consumption: 23 watts compared to the 100+ watts of the Intel processor. Unlike traditional PC processor manufacturers, Qualcomm doesn’t measure the TDP of a chip — instead, it speaks of the total system power. This means that the processor itself consumes even less than 23 watts, but this information needs to be verified in independent tests. Participants did not have the opportunity to measure the temperature or other indicators of the test or comparison systems.
The system under test runs games well, although it is not positioned as a gaming system. However, the performance is not comparable to modern video cards. Participants had the opportunity to see several game demonstrations: Baulders Gate 3, Control, and Redout 2, and the videos demonstrate how well they work. The journalist emphasizes that the system was not so much about gaming performance as it was about the work that Qualcomm has done with Microsoft to make Windows 11 and the X Elite processor work well enough to run modern games.
It is not known what graphical settings were chosen in Baulders Gate 3, but the resolution was 1080p and the frame rate hovered around 30 frames per second without any dips.
Redout 2 ran at 1080p, but with a frame rate well above 30 FPS.
One of the most interesting aspects of the X Elite platform is the AI processing on the device. While Intel and AMD have released their own chips with dedicated NPUs, the Snapdragon X Elite seems to be the most powerful, at least by the numbers. The AI performance is measured in TOPS (trillions of operations per second), and the results for different chip architectures are shown below.
Higher Qualcomm values mean that AI models are processed very quickly. The video shows Stable Diffusion running on a device that receives a text prompt and generates an image. A similar result can be achieved on AMD or Intel, but with higher power consumption.