Here’s how Qualcomm’s New Laptop Chips Really Stack Up to Apple, Intel, and AMD

After 12 years of trying to make Windows on Arm happen, Microsoft has made Windows on Arm happen. That’s a long time to keep throwing money at a version of Windows that, historically, has lacked compatible software, reliable emulation, and capable enough performance for even light workloads. But it seems like Microsoft’s 12-year odyssey is starting to pay off now that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips are turning Windows on Arm into a viable platform.

We’ve spent the past week and a half testing seven Copilot Plus PCs, representing all four Snapdragon X chips, against a slate of similar laptops running Apple Silicon, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen processors. This isn’t the final word on Snapdragon performance — app compatibility is changing on a near-daily basis, and we’ll have full reviews for many of these laptops in the next few weeks — but we now have a good idea of how the first wave of Snapdragon X laptops stack up against the competition and how they still fall short.

This is the fiercest Microsoft has been able to compete with MacBooks in price, performance, and battery life, and while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips don’t outright beat Apple’s M3 chip (with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU) in every single one of our benchmarks, they could make Intel and AMD scramble to catch up to another competitor — this time, on their home turf.

A New Focus on Power Efficiency

For the last few years, laptop makers have focused on increasing power efficiency (and therefore battery life) without sacrificing performance. For Apple, that meant ditching Intel and using its own Arm-based chips; Intel wasn’t improving the power efficiency of its own fast enough.

Arm is a processor architecture with a more efficient instruction set than the x86 set found in Intel and AMD CPUs. It uses smaller, more optimized instructions, so the CPU can process tasks faster using less power, which is one reason smartphone chips are Arm-based. Microsoft’s 12-year journey to make Windows work on Arm and reap those power savings has been slow going because the chips haven’t been fast enough to run Windows and emulate apps that aren’t compatible with the Arm instruction set — until now.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series Specs

Source: Qualcomm

Qualcomm currently has four Snapdragon X chips: three under the “X Elite” brand and one under “X Plus.” They all share an Adreno GPU, an NPU capable of 45 TOPS, and support for LPDDR5X memory up to 8448MHz, but their core counts and max clock speeds change as you go down the lineup, from a 12-core chip with a 3.8GHz top speed and 4.2GHz dual-core boost to a 10-core at 3.4GHz with no dual-core boost.

With the Snapdragon X Elite lineup, Qualcomm ditched the hybrid architecture of its previous laptop chips. Instead of using a mix of performance cores for heavy workloads and efficiency cores for less intensive work, Qualcomm now uses a homogeneous architecture — every chip can run both types of tasks.

Competition Specs

Competing against its new CPUs are Apple’s hybrid core Arm chips, AMD’s homogeneous core x86 chips, and Intel’s hybrid core x86 chips. (Though Intel is adjusting its hybrid core architecture by ditching just the LP cores in its next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which arrive this fall.)

The Best CPU Performance Windows on Arm Has Ever Seen

We ran Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 because they work across Windows and macOS as well as on Intel and AMD’s x86 chips and Apple and Qualcomm’s Arm chips. Together, they provide a broad overview of a processor’s capabilities when handling various workloads. While we tested laptops of different sizes from different brands, these benchmarks are still a great baseline of how these chips fare compared to their competitors and how they stack up.

Single-core Performance

Among the laptops we tested, Apple’s M3 chips still lead the pack in single-core performance, but Qualcomm’s higher-end X Elite chips are a touch faster in single-core workloads than the M2 Max chip in the early 2023 MacBook Pro — between 2 and 3 percent in our tests. They are also up to 24 percent faster than the performance cores in Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H processor and up to 17 percent faster than the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS cores. The bottom-tier X Elite and X Plus are the slowest, but they still push out impressive scores and pull ahead — albeit barely — of most of the Intel-based laptops in the table below.

Multicore Performance

The Snapdragon chips really shine in multicore benchmarks, overtaking all the other CPUs aside from Apple’s M2 Max and M3 Max. The M3 chip in the MacBook Air only has eight cores compared to the 12 or 10 cores of the Snapdragon chips, so it makes sense why it fell behind. The 16-core M3 Max far outpaces the rest of the field, and the 12-core M2 Max is slightly faster in Cinebench 2024 multicore than the fastest X Elite chips.

CPU Benchmarks

Our results are mostly in line with Qualcomm’s own reported scores and those of others, with some discrepancies that likely come down to cooling solutions. For instance, the XPS 13 beat out the Yoga Slim 7x despite using the same X Elite X1E-80-100 chip. The XPS 13’s thermal management is excellent, with loud fans, while the Yoga Slim 7x is quieter and doesn’t hit thermal limits as easily.

GPU Performance Is Getting There

All the Snapdragon X chips have the same Adreno GPU with 4.6 teraflops (for the highest-end X Elite) of theoretical processing power, meaning their graphics capabilities only change if the CPU’s cooling solution gets in the way. In our tests, the Snapdragon X Elite chips performed similarly across laptops in GFXBench and 3DMark benchmarks, with a slight dip for the X Plus.

Still, the Adreno GPU falls behind the competition. It’s the best Qualcomm has delivered yet, but we’re comparing it to AMD’s Radeon 780M integrated GPU, which can handle modern games at lower resolutions. The Snapdragon X GPU isn’t quite there yet. Our benchmarks show a decent improvement over Intel’s integrated Arc Xe graphics in the Core Ultra 7 155H, but Qualcomm is no match for AMD’s Radeon 780M or the 10-core GPU in the Apple M3.

GPU Benchmarks

While the Snapdragon X Elite chips fall behind, they’re a far cry from Qualcomm’s older GPUs, which regularly failed to even meet Intel’s integrated graphics. In our tests, the Snapdragon X Elite chips beat out Intel’s UHD 770 graphics in the Core Ultra 7 155U (and even Arc Xe, depending on the laptop’s cooling) but couldn’t keep up with AMD’s Radeon 780M or the 10-core GPU in the Apple M3.

Qualcomm says it’s working on future versions of the Adreno GPU with more power and the ability to handle heavier workloads, but for now, the X Elite chips are best suited for light gaming, creative work, and day-to-day tasks.

Conclusions: Progress, but Not Perfection

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips are the company’s best effort yet to bring Arm chips to Windows laptops. They show that Qualcomm is serious about competing with Intel and AMD on performance and battery life, though they still fall short of Apple’s M3 in some areas.

The Snapdragon X Elite chips are the best Qualcomm has delivered yet, but they still need improvement in some areas, like GPU performance. For now, the Snapdragon X Elite chips are best suited for light gaming, creative work, and day-to-day tasks, but future versions of the Adreno GPU could close the gap with AMD and Apple.

Windows on Arm is no longer a pipe dream — it’s a viable platform for anyone who wants a powerful, efficient laptop. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips have brought us closer than ever to a future where Arm-based Windows laptops can compete with the best that Intel, AMD, and Apple have to offer.