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
Thats a good trait to copy. :)
They were already porting when the iPad Pro came out. On top of having a tighter software stack, they spent at least 10x the time and money porting.
Bottom line is, you cant come out with a $1300 machine that gets beaten by $900-$1000 machines on all sides. I can't imagine these are selling well.
ISA compatibility is a gigantic brick wall that consumers don't want to have to surmount.
They'll just keep buying x86 and just deal with the minor inconvenience of slightly more frequent charging.
But I might add that even the sample of 1 device that we know something of has actually better results than I expected. Compared to the pathetic 8cx, Qualcomm evolved leaps and bounds with the X Elite.
x.com/zacbowden/status/1803050279363023302
www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-M3-review-A-lot-faster-and-with-Wi-Fi-6E.811129.0.html
www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-15-M3-review-Apple-s-large-everyday-MacBook-gets-a-power-up.811701.0.html
PowerPC failed mostly because of Apple.
The original plan was to have an open platform (CHRP) that would accept all OS (Win NT, OS/2, Unix and MacOS)
NT and Unix were ported, OS/2 was delayed (and then canceled) and Apple pretended to be stupid and never released MacOS as originally planned (they went with the clones though.)
Everyone bailed, Apple volumes weren’t enough to sustain the development cost and ended moving to Intel.
Its more complicated than that (and I’m going by memory) but its the gist as to why PowerPC died.
Also, those specs aren't much to brag about, as again, there a many better-spec'd lappys out there in this price range that will outperform it...
Just another lesson to NEVER PREORDER.
Dave2D posted numbers that are very good, even on the GPU front. Not Meteor Lake good on the GPU but still, quite good.