In case you’ve been out of the know for a bit in tech, Qualcomm just announced a family of new mobile processors last week at its Snapdragon Summit event, including its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile CPUs as well as its second-generation Snapdragon X2 laptop chips. This new PC platform is simply known as the Snapdragon X2 Elite family, although the top-end model gets an additional “Extreme” appellation. That certainly suits this new SoC, at least if the performance benchmarks that Qualcomm shared with us are anything to go by.
Currently, the company is planning to launch three models in the Snapdragon X2 Elite lineup. The top two have similar specifications, with eighteen CPU cores, the same integrated GPU, and the same Hexagon NPU. The biggest differences in the X2E-88-100 and the top-end X2E-96-100 that gets the “Extreme” moniker are primarily in terms of clock speed and memory bandwidth.
It’s not completely clear how Qualcomm will achieve 228 GB/sec of LPDDR5x memory bandwidth on the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, but it will absolutely require a wider memory bus, similar to AMD’s Strix Halo, and we do know that the platform does have on-package memory now as well.
We didn’t have a chance to run our own on the Snapdragon PC reference platform like we did with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 for phones. However, next to the reference laptop was a “score sheet” with a number of benchmark scores for common laptop benchmarks. Our man in the field Dave Altavilla snapped a photo of the score sheet, and I have dutifully taken to task charting those results along with some in-house data of our own to give us a picture of the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme’s expected performance.
Speedometer 3.1 Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Results
We use BrowserBench.org’s Speedometer test to take a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs a variety of sample web apps using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and even simple JavaScript. This test is an example of how a device copes with real-world, modern web apps.
The given value for Qualcomm’s reference platform unseats Apple’s M4 Pro as the highest Speedometer result we’ve ever seen from any system. Spoilers: this is sort of a trend. It will be fascinating to see if retail machines can hit this same performance level.
Cinebench 24 Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Results
Next up is the latest-generation 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D rendering engine. It’s a purely CPU-based test that doesn’t make use of the graphics processor at all, and it scales very well with additional CPU cores. We ran both single- and multi-threaded tests on all of the machines in the charts.
While Qualcomm’s 18-core chip falls behind 24-core Intel and 16-core AMD CPUs in multi-core performance, it does produce an exceptionally high single-threaded result. This is a massive leap over the performance of the first-generation Snapdragon X Elite.
Geekbench 6 Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Results
Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real-world workloads in image processing and particle physics calculation scenarios. We tested all of the smartphones featured here with Geekbench’s single and multi-core workloads.
Another world-beating result. Geekbench strongly prefers Arm platforms, but even taking that into account, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is coming dangerously close to some of our desktop results in multi-core, while the single-core result is again the highest we’ve ever seen from anything, laptop or desktop.
Geekbench AI Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Results
Geekbench AI provides a straightforward look at how well a device handles a variety of AI-assisted tasks. This quick and easy test gives you a numerical snapshot of the CPU, GPU, and NPU’s ability to power through real-world machine learning workloads, factoring in both speed and accuracy. The higher the score, the better the device’s AI chops, whether it’s image recognition, object detection, or natural language processing.
Results are NORMALLY presented in three levels of numerical precision: single precision or FP32, half precision or FP16, and quantized or INT8. However, Qualcomm only gave us a single value, which we’re taking to be a Quantized result, as that’s usually what you run on NPUs.
Yet another dominating result for Qualcomm. This is about 3.3x the performance of the previous-gen Snapdragon X Elite despite that chip being rated for 50 TOPS while the X2 Elite claims 80 TOPS, so either a massive memory bandwidth bottleneck was alleviated, or Qualcomm has made some serious software improvements since our last test as well.
Procyon AI Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Results
You might have noticed an absence of AMD machines in the last chart. That’s because Geekbench AI doesn’t support AMD’s XDNA NPUs yet. UL’s Procyon multi-benchmark *does* AMD’s NPUs, so let’s have a look at that. The following is a look at how some of our machines do in this benchmark suite’s AI Computer Vision benchmark. This test exercises the subject’s ability to handle machine vision workloads, which you’ll find in everyday tasks like webcam background blur, subject tracking, and eye gaze correction, for a just few examples.
Once again, Qualcomm’s NPU pretty much destroys the competition. Notably, it purportedly outpaces even a discrete GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU by some 67%. The NPU in the first-gen Snapdragon X Elite was already quite competitive, so this is arguably expected for a second-generation effort.
3DMark Steel Nomad Light Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Results
Finally, Qualcomm provided some 3DMark benchmark results for the new Adreno graphics hardware in the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, but we don’t normally use these tests, so we didn’t have much comparison data. That’s why some of the data in the last two charts is sourced from the 3DMark Browser. Simply speaking, pulled the average results for a few discrete and integrated GPUs. These are not the highest nor lowest possible results in the database.
Steel Nomad Light is a relatively recent benchmark from UL that uses all of the latest-generation rendering techniques, like mesh shaders and volumetric particles, but notably does not make use of ray-tracing. It’s a pure raster test, but that doesn’t make it any less brutal. The “Light” version of the benchmark has lower-resolution textures, fewer objects, and runs in 2560×1440 resolution, but it’s still quite demanding for current-generation integrated devices. How does Qualcomm’s new chip do?
Predictably, Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite comes in well ahead of every single Intel and AMD integrated GPU, except for the Radeon 8060S on board Strix Halo, and it also manages to squeak past a GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop. However, it does get crushed by the RTX 4060 as well as the even-more-powerful Radeon 8060S. Remember, that’s also an integrated GPU, not a discrete graphics card, so this comparison is fair, even though AMD’s high-end platform is likely a fair bit pricier than retail Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops when they hit.
3DMark Solar Bay Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Results
Contrary to Steel Nomad, Solar Bay is explicitly and specifically a cross-platform ray-tracing benchmark. It has two versions on Windows: one for DirectX 12 and one for Vulkan. Conveniently, Qualcomm specified that it used the Vulkan version of the test, so we used Vulkan results for the competitor hardware as well.
In Solar Bay, Qualcomm actually falls a position, putting it behind the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop and well behind the two larger GPUs. It’s still faster than all of the other integrated solutions on the chart, though, including Intel’s Xe2 graphics in Intel’s Lunar Lake, although they put up a pretty decent fight. This result from Snapdragon X2 Elite is nearly double the ray-tracing performance of the previous generation, which is very good, although it’s actually a smaller uplift than we saw in the Steel Nomad Light test.
Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Preliminary Thoughts On Performance
These numbers are provided by Qualcomm and were captured using a prototype reference platform, which isn’t the same as a laptop you can actually buy. We had world-beating reference numbers from Qualcomm for the first-generation Snapdragon X Elite, and the reality turned out to be still impressive, though more mixed versus Qualcomm’s own data would have suggested at the time.
In other words, while these results are very impressive, you’ll really want to wait for our full retail review before you let your jaw fully hit the floor. When is that coming? Qualcomm says devices based on Snapdragon X2 Elite will be on the market in the first half of next year. Whether means Q1 or final week of June isn’t clear, but Qualcomm may be facing stiffer competition from AMD’s Gorgon Point as well as Intel’s Panther Lake by then.
Whoever wins, this kind of competition is great for consumers and the market at large, so we’re excited to see how things pan out for Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite in the months ahead.
