Only the 23W version’s performance is good, the 80W version doesn’t scale well at all.
CPU is impressive.
Their GPU is fighting toe-to-toe with the Apple M2.
Considering:
- They use very fast 8533 MT/s memory, giving them 33% memory bandwidth than Apple’s 6,400 MT/s on the M2;
- Apple’s TDP (20 watt) is likely lower than both configurations 23W and 80W “Device TDP”
- They choose the benchmarks;
- The Snapdragon X Elite will launch mid 2024;
- The Apple M2 will 2 years old then;
I’m not that impressed by the Snapdragon X Elite’s GPU.
The M2 Pro already beats it hard (it has both twice GPU cores and twice the memory bandwidth of the M2), and the M3 will most likely beat is as well.
Let alone the M3 Pro.
Then AMD will release their Strix Point APU also likely in the first half of 2024 - increasing the GPU core count by 33% (from 12 to 16).
Intel’s Meteor Lake’s iGPU, called Xe-LPG, also looks promising.
So as Ryan said:
Ultimately, the 6+ month gap until retail devices launch means that the competition for Qualcomm’s upcoming SoC isn’t going to be today’s chips such as the Apple M2 series or Intel’s various flavors of Alder/Raptor Lake. Almost everyone is going to have time to roll out a new generation of chips between now and then. So while Qualcomm’s SoC may be ready right now, we’ve yet to see what they’ll be competing against in premium devices. That doesn’t make today’s benchmark disclosure any less enlightening, but it means that Qualcomm is aiming at a moving target – beating Apple, AMD, or Intel today is not a guarantee that it’ll still be the case in 6 months.
Let’s do some new benchmarks in 6 months!
That being said, it’s great to see more competition in the laptop SoC market. I hope Qualcomm also pushes competitors on their wireless capabilities: 5G should be an option on almost every laptop.