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In summary:
- PCWorld reports that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite chip outperforms Apple’s M5 in real-world tests like Handbrake and Blender rendering tasks.
- The new chip shows significant gaming improvements over its predecessor but still lags behind Intel and Apple competitors in graphics performance.
- First laptops featuring the Snapdragon X2 Elite are expected to launch in February/March, though battery optimization remains pending through future firmware updates.
The first laptops with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite chip inside will begin rolling out in February and March, according to a new video featuring more tests of Qualcomm’s upcoming chip — some in which it even beats the Apple M5.
The video, released over the weekend by Hardware Canucks, also includes a handful of gaming benchmarks. Those don’t quite position the X2 Elite as a gaming processor, though the company claims that many games will run on the chip over two times faster than its predecessor, the Snapdragon X Elite.
The site said that Asus granted it permission to test pre-production implementations of a new Asus Vivobook and Zenbook laptop, running pre-production firmware and operating support. For this reason, Hardware Canucks was not allowed to run battery benchmarks, it said, because a future firmware update would be released to optimize the X2 Elite’s performance on battery power.
Qualcomm had allowed journalists to “test” Snapdragon X2 Elite devices last September at its event in Maui, though the laptops were hand-picked by Qualcomm and the benchmarks were preloaded, meaning that the tests weren’t as meaningful as they could be. Still, the CPU tests and even some of the graphics tests outperformed the competition at the time by a substantial amount.
The two laptops that Hardware Canucks were allowed to test included a Snapdragon X2E-88-100, not the X2E-96-100 Elite Extreme at the top of the Snapdragon computing stack. That meant that performance came in slightly under what the September tests revealed: 160 on a single-threaded Cinebench 2024 test for the X2E-96-100, versus the 146 score Hardware Canucks recorded for the X2E-88-100. That was still a bit less than the score of 200 the site recorded for the Apple M5, but way over the score of 108 that the first-generation X1 Elite produced.
But when real-world tests like Handbrake and Blender were used, the Snapdragon X2 Elite outpaced the Apple M5 and every other chip in both tests, even shaving off two minutes against the M5 (3:31 vs. 5:33) in a render using the Blender rendering software.
In games, however (Cyberpunk:2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3) the chip failed to eke out framerates over 60 fps in both 1200p Medium and 1200p Low settings, respectively, falling behind Intel’s “Panther Lake” chips and the M5.
Still, Qualcomm is setting the stage for another competitive chip offering. Battery life will be a critical element, and we don’t know the answer to that question yet. Watch the Hardware Canucks video, however, for even more benchmarks. In the meantime, we’ll be waiting for our own test machines, Qualcomm.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers’ News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.