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
I think it's a good productivity laptop too, and it's miles faster than every other WoA laptop out there. There's good value for developers here.
Certainly would have more impact then porting office.After the clusterfrick that was window s10, and windows 11, and windows 8, i'd be surprised if anyone trusted MS to get any of this right.
WoA is the problem, it gives the impression that you can do x86 things when in fact you can't yet. It's the same dumpster fire WindowsRT was, judging from all these identical problems that tanked WindowsRT 12 years ago.
Microsoft might want to be Apple, but they're clueless about what needs doing - so clueless that the killer feature - seamless emulation that makes Apple Silicon a viable product - is still woefully absent.
If Apple M had the games and SD X reliably delivered the performance of a mobile GTX 1650, for example, with good battery life and being lightweight, I'd get one in a heartbeat.
Not everyone needs 3060-class performance from a lappy.
This is exactly what I mean. Folks are arguing here that MS doesn't need to worry about gaming on WOA, then they promote gaming on WOA, which they don't seem to be supporting with their own games games out of their own storefront. Getting their own stuff to work would be a step in the right direction, but again, this should have been done before launch. At least fix the flags that keep you from even attempting an install from the Store.
The Microsoft situation is different though, they're perfectly happy not having any decent gaming performance and nudge you towards xCloud game streaming instead.
Moving onto x86 emulation, it is impressive. Now, would I compare it to Apple Rosetta? I would put it within 90%, but I think something to keep in mind is that Windows supports 100 times more peripherals and 1000 times more software than Apple does. Also, Apple has controlled their software ecosystem before ARM with much more stringent control compared to Microsoft. I am honestly eager to see how Prism will improve in the next 6-12 months. I think both Microsoft and Qualcomm understand the ultimate goal is for ISVs to make ARM64 apps available for customers, and their work to provide SDKs and compiling tools in VS has proven that.
Overall, did Qualcomm exaggerate their performance benchmarks? Yeah, a bit. However, is it a strong x86 adversary? Absolutely, especially in power consumption.