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
IBM took over but couldn’t justify the expense of developing such chips just for Apple, since they weren’t selling that many systems, so at that point, apple had no choice but to jump to intel, which had more efficient cpus.
The irony is that Intel own inefficient chips forced Apple to jump to Arm.
Whic is something also interesting since Apple was a founding member of Arm.The irony of your post is that Intel went full RISC (internally) with the Pentium.
right now if we just have this X1 SoC it’s hard to really assess. If I have just one choice, I pick a more mature macbook m3/m4, beauty of personal computers is having choice, SoC included.
It surprises me even more that such a wide core design, larger than Zen4, has such disgraceful performance. Strix-Point will arrive like a steamroller crushing everything. :p
Like... what a gigantic miss.
YouTube
developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0801/h/A64-Floating-point-Instructions/FJCVTZS
CISC has won. Its better to add complexity to modern processors to do 16-bit Matrix Multiplication (aka Tensor Cores), to do AES-encryption (riscv.org/news/2020/12/the-design-of-scalar-aes-instruction-set-extensions-for-risc-v/), SHA1, 512-bit SIMD and more.
Complex cores are the winner. No one is "RISC" anymore (which was, at least in the 1990s, defined as having no division instruction. Instead, you used code to perform division rather than making a "complex" instruction to do so).
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RISC vs CISC has been dead for decades. Ever since ARM and RISC-V adopted AES Instructions, Javascript instructions, and SIMD, the world has gone 100% CISC.
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ARM is a fine instruction set in any case, but ISAs don't really matter anymore. The implementation details of the cores are far more important. Apple's implementation is pretty good (though exceptionally bulky), the Intel/AMD implementations are pretty good. Qualcomm will just have to tweak its design and figure things out.
AMD's on-package L3 SRAM for the x3d chips is above 10ns of latency. Something glitched out in this discussion.Crap, I missed the discussion. Sorry for being late!
www.notebookcheck.com/Radeon-780M-vs-Arc-8-Core-vs-SD-X-Elite-Adreno-GPU-_11564_12086_11630.247532.0.html
Apple wants to protect macbook sales but their lack of vision is really limiting what their possibilities.Tuxedo announced they were developing an ARM laptop with one of these snapdragon elite chips, they'll come eventually. If Tuxedo is doing one, some big white label oem is doing one and so there will be at least a couple on offer from the usual suspects (shenker, tuxedo, system76, etc)I don't think back then "Pro" was such a marketing gimmick like it is now
Hopefully fw and software updates will improve the results, I want ARM to succeed, but I always say never buy into a brand new architecture, you'll be a beta tester for a long time.