Qualcomm brings receipts: Snapdragon X Elite gets benchmarked, completely dunks on Apple’s M2 processor
During Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, the company held a benchmarking session for reporters to prove it does what it says.
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So a 80W 12 Performance core CPU could only manage +10% single core and 2x multi-core over a 20W 4+4, year old CPU? That doesn’t sound like a dunk. Performance per Watt looks to be worse than the M2 as well.
„Best Snapdragon CPU beats Apples basic entry level Mac processor“ doesn‘t generate enough clicks and outrage to divide Apple haters and Apple fanboys further.
This is mentioned in the article:
The critical thing to remember during all these benchmarks is that Qualcomm matches or beats the competition (as of today) at all these CPU and GPU tests, but at less power than the others, sometimes up to 70% less power than Apple or Intel.
Even against the M2 Max from Apple, which will beat the Snapdragon X Elite on most benchmarks (except single-thread), the Snapdragon X Elite still consumes 30% less power when matching Apple's single-threaded peak performance.
Looks like a 30% efficiency improvement, although the article doesn't detail the performance against M2 besides in writing. We'll have to wait for more benchmarks.
On the more familiar and widely used Geekbench 6, both configurations easily beat Razer’s Blade 14 (2023) powered by the AMD R9 7940HS. The MacBook Pro 13” with M2 processor came last (compared to our best gaming laptops) with 2,658 single-thread and 10,088 multi-thread. By comparison, Qualcomm pulled off 2,940 ST, 15,130 MT, 2,780 ST, and 14,000 MT at its lower TDP configuration.
Cinebench 2024, which replaces Cinebench R23, hasn’t been used a lot by us yet as it’s brand new, but the new version, which is compiled to run ARM natively, still shows the Snapdragon X Elite way ahead of the competition with 132 ST and 1,220 MT for Config A. The MacBook Pro with M2 could only muster 121 ST and 572 MT and was still easily beaten by the Config B model with 122 ST and 950 MT.
The article didn’t even make it a day before Apple announced the M3 CPUs which will probably dunk on this in both performance and efficiency.
The M2 CPU was kind of a disappointment since it was mostly just an overclocked M1 with a few more GPU cores, but the same bad architecture. The M3 should actually be a newer architecture and fix the M2s PPW regression.
Apple says the M3 is 50% more efficient than the M1, and since it's on a 3nm process it's likely at least competitive, and probably more efficient than the Snapdragon at 4nm.
Apple just announced m3, we'll see how it compares
