Tuesday, June 18th 2024
First Reviews are Live and Snapdragon X Elite Doesn't Quite Deliver on Promised Performance
The first reviews of a notebook with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC have appeared today, and it looks like the promised performance isn't quite there. And yes, all the reviews that went live today are all based on Asus' Vivobook S 15 OLED, so it might be a bit too early to state that Qualcomm isn't delivering on its claimed performance, as other manufacturers might deliver better performance. Let's start with the battery life. The Vivobook S 15 OLED comes with a 70 Wh battery pack which enables it to deliver better battery life than many AMD or Intel notebooks, but Apple's MacBook Air 15 M3 delivers on average a 40 percent better battery life, with a smaller 66.5 Wh battery pack. Browsing the web or watching movies aren't really too taxing for the Snapdragon X Elite, but under heavier loads the battery life drops off a cliff.
When it comes to application performance, the Snapdragon X Elite offers good multicore performance in benchmarks like Cinebench 2024 and PCMark 10, but it falls way behind in most other tests, ranging from video encoding to file extraction and document conversion, with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H based notebooks often pulling ahead by 50 percent or more. Despite being equipped with LPDDR5X-8448 memory, the Snapdragon X Elite falls behind in both the memory copy and write tests in AIDA64 compared to the Intel powered laptops. However, it's not all doom and gloom, as the Qualcomm chip delivers an impressive memory latency of a mere 8.1 ns, compared to 100+ for the Intel based laptops. It also outclasses the Intel laptops when it comes to memory read performance.
Asus went with a fairly basic Micron 2400 SSD which is a DRAM-less Phison based drive and this might be part of the reason for some of the less flattering results in some tests. However, this shouldn't affect the gaming tests and this is another area where the Snapdragon X Elite doesn't deliver, and most games are unplayable at 1080p resolution. Many games don't run on the Qualcomm chip for obvious reasons, but many that do, suffer from texture and graphics glitches at times. Most games don't even manage 30 FPS at reduced graphics settings, let alone 60 FPS, but then again, this is hardly expected from an integrated GPU. Considering that the Vivobook S 15 OLED comes in at US$1300 with 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD, you would expect it to deliver in terms of performance, but it seems like Qualcomm and Microsoft have a lot of work to do to optimize the platform as a whole.
Sources:
Windows Central, Notebook Check (in German)
When it comes to application performance, the Snapdragon X Elite offers good multicore performance in benchmarks like Cinebench 2024 and PCMark 10, but it falls way behind in most other tests, ranging from video encoding to file extraction and document conversion, with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H based notebooks often pulling ahead by 50 percent or more. Despite being equipped with LPDDR5X-8448 memory, the Snapdragon X Elite falls behind in both the memory copy and write tests in AIDA64 compared to the Intel powered laptops. However, it's not all doom and gloom, as the Qualcomm chip delivers an impressive memory latency of a mere 8.1 ns, compared to 100+ for the Intel based laptops. It also outclasses the Intel laptops when it comes to memory read performance.
124 Comments on First Reviews are Live and Snapdragon X Elite Doesn't Quite Deliver on Promised Performance
ffs... we even wasted breath in previous yellow press thread...
That's about it then.
I’ll give it a few days until detailed reviews are in for all brands. Hopefully this is an Asus issue as I really want a WoA machine for work.
^^ from a reddit post on the surface laptop.
It's really going to depend on your use case.
I'm personally very intrigued by the proposition of the SD WoA devices, but heck not at these prices.
The fact that it's running windows even in emulation acceptably is a huge nail in the coffin for x86. I think alot of people will pick these up for the battery life alone.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/first-reviews-are-live-and-snapdragon-x-elite-doesnt-quite-deliver-on-promised-performance.323715/post-5274079
but have there been any decent reviews on the dell xps or latitudes that have the Snapdragon X Elite?? and the real performance thing I care the most about is for music production and if it would handle my complex synth patches. if bitwig studio dev team makes an ARM/SDXE version and it works good I would save up for one of those since the battery life would be worth it even if I set a higher cpu scaling governor I could get 14 hours of music production battery life and I can do stuff like a lil forest rave and not need much power sources!
I understood that MicroShaft had some years ago simply recompiled Windows to run on ARM hardware and have then spent the last several years re-writing the OS and accompanying apps and this is their big-reveal. As this is MicroShaft I wouldn't be at all surprised if literally 50% of the OS and apps are emulated rather than native and so performance comparisons vs other hardware are ultimately going to be down to exactly what software is benchmarked, that would be chaos.!
I will wait and see with fingers crossed that these products are actually good and MicroShaft has actually created and released a good "new" product on the first attempt.!
I'll give apple this, this is something they fixed before launch. By all accounts macOS ARM binary translation battery life is still really good.