yes I'm free gone are my sponsor
obligations to Qualcomm about their new Snapdragon X Elite chips I can say
everything I want and guys following our
lab running their most rigorous tests ho
what I want to say is damn these
processors are really good we got our hands on two of the machines that are
supposed to de thrown AMD and Intel with performance and efficiency that is
unheard of in a Windows laptop and while
they might not live up to every single one of qualcomm's very bold claims
there's no denying both the sheer efficiency and the shocking day one
completeness of the entire package kind of like this complete intro now that
I've done the segue to our sponsor Odo running a business is difficult
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your processes click the link below to learn more let's kick this off with a
fun little anecdote that qualcomm's lawyers cut from our sponsored video for
some reason nearly 12 years ago I had my
first hands-on experience with Windows on ARM it could browse the web with
Internet Explorer navigate with Bing Maps and even play video to say we've
come a long way would be a gross understatement you were looking at
balers Gate 3 running on an AMD powered system and on a Qualcomm system and
shockingly the results are nearly identical so of course the first big
story here is performance the conventional wisdom about ARM-based
processors is that they are extremely power efficient but that they fall
behind x86 chips when it comes to Raw grunt well a few years ago that all fell
apart when a little known fruit company out of copertino launched a processor
that made even hardcore Windows users here in our office consider making the
switch it was a huge blow to Microsoft
and their Partners who were caught with absolutely zero response to the Wombo
Combo of class leading performance and unheard of battery life that is until
now cuz Windows just had its M moment
but no really like literally the man in charge of Apple's a architecture and
presumably much of M was Gerard Williams
and after the fun design Des phase of the M processors was over Gerard and a
couple of others left to form a company called nuvia to make their own ARM
server processors which was a pretty good idea but then Qualcomm showed up
and offered them a cool 1.4 billion to
Pivot and build a mobile chip and a couple of years later why don't we let
the battery life results tell you how that went our ASUS Vivo book S15 lasted
over 14 hours away from the wall with our HP Omni book X able to crack 15
hours now you might be gearing up to get very mad about how that is absolutely
nowhere near the numbers that Qualcomm advertised but you've got to remember
that's in their tests and this is in ours and for context a MacBook Pro M3
that we bought just this week with zero battery degradation managed only 12
hours and 30 minutes in our test with the rest of our laptops getting left in
the dust which brings us to a big question how much a performance hit are
you willing to accept to get that kind of battery life it's not like Windows on
ARM is new and there's a reason that it
never got adopted well what if I told you that things are different now and
the performance hit is virtually zero
along with our MacBook Pro M3 we also tested a more price comparable MacBook
Air M2 and then representing x86 we've
got an ASUS Zenbook with an Intel Core Ultra 7 and we've got a framework 13
investment in framework disclosure with an AMD ryzen 7 all of them linked down
below now we do wish that we had a more
current ryzen 8000 chip but those are
basically the same thing as ryzen 7000 but with some more AI bolted on but then
not enough AI to meet the minimum specs of Microsoft's co-pilot plus program so
we think from a performance and battery life standpoint using 7,000 series here
is fine in multicore workloads running an application natively the Snapdragon X
Elite was able to beat literally everything we put it up against even
Apple's M3 it's not a completely clean win I mean the Snapdragon chips have 12
CPU cores in them versus just the eight in Apple's M3 so that's going to be an
obvious advantage in multi-threaded benchmarks and when we look at single
core performance apple is actually still in the lead with Qualcomm barely besting
Intel and AMD but you've got to note that it's possible Qualcomm still has
more in the single core tank currently we've only got laptops with the X Elite
x1e 78- 100 chip going to hold back ranting
about how horrible that naming scheme is for now but the important thing to take
away from here is that this is the slowest variant of the ex Elite chip
which entirely lacks dual core boosting and has the lowest multi-core speed so
instead of being stuck at 3.4 GHz the faster ex Elite could go to 4.2 which
presumably would perform a fair bit better with that said it's currently
very difficult to get reliable clock speed and power info from these chips so
we just got to kind of guess what exactly is going on under the hood what
we do know though is that we have multiple performance profiles on the
ASUS viab book S15 and we tested everything at both 35 watts and 50 Watts
with multicore performance and cinch increasing by
177% for that 43% increase in power
meaning that although more power does mean they can go more faster there are
certainly diminishing returns after 35 Watts but of course this is workload
dependent and that's why handbrake is so interesting in this Benchmark the
Snapdragon X Elite once again comes out on top in both x264 and av1 encoding
which is great but doesn't paint the whole picture for that we need to take
advantage of the fact that handbrake is available in both ARM native and x86 64
versions this allows us to look at the performance hit from emulating a more
traditional laptop architecture and ooh
40% in both x264 and av1 that is a lot
more than the 10% figure that qualcom was throwing around and the same goes
for blender where x86-64 emulation caused a 26% hit to Performance with
that said though even with that performance penalty the Snapdragon X
Elite was still able to hang with the competition while leading the way when
we were running it natively unfortunately that's kind of the end of
our productivity benchmark not because there aren't plenty of other pieces of
software that ran but because getting them to run across all of our platforms
under test in a repeatable manner was
kind of difficult to say the least with that said in general our experience with
qualcomm's x86 emulation has been largely okay I hate using this F word
but has been largely Flawless the
occasional installer would get mad but once installed we had almost no problems
running even some kind of unexpected and heavy programs like solid works there
are two situations though where you can get caught out if an application
requires avx2 support it simply won't open or if a game has kernel level
anti-che which brings us perfectly then to gaming now the raw performance of the
Snapdragon chips very impressive rivaling both AMD and Intel's integrated
Graphics when it works ah yes that's the
caveat because sometimes he know work he's so good things do seem very early
days with some games running wonderfully and some being a bit janky with others
just not launching at all because for whatever reason qualcomm's igpu shows up
as having no vram that's a strange one
one thing that's promising though is that there doesn't seem to be a performance penalty going from direct
X11 to direct X12 something that's been a huge thorn in Intel side with the
development of their Arc Alchemist gpus now given that Intel has spent the last
2 years getting their driver situation somewhat figured out for Arc it's
probably going to be quite some time before we can recommend a Snapdragon X
Elite chip for gaming but if I get my
way the end goal here will be to have a proper dedicated GPU in these things
anyway so that we can have our battery life cake and also eat our gaming pie
finally let's talk about AI Microsoft Qualcomm even your nan realist L won't
shut up lately about how AI is going to revolutionize how you use your computer
but after a week of playing with these machines
this is the number of times that we used AI outside of explicitly testing it for
this video the auto presence detection
legitimately kind of cool but can also end up being a bit distracting so we
ended up disabling it the paint co-creator probably isn't going to be
much fun if you're older than about 10 and the we were most excited for live
captions with translation didn't really live up to our expectations in our
testing it did a passable enough job going from Mandarin to English but it
completely failed Cantonese French and
Hebrew so you might just want to stick to a good old Google translate at least
for the time being also Microsoft's controversial recall feature is
completely absent at this point which is probably great because Microsoft clearly
has a lot of trust to build with the community before they're going to allow
them to screenshot and key log everything they do on their computers
the good news is that the benefits of this platform are about more than just
co-pilot plus and one that I don't think enough people are talking about is the
image quality advantage of the webcams on Snapdragon X Elite laptops this isn't
just down to laptop manufacturers using crappy webcams in their AMD and Intel
designs though it's because qualcomm's s so includes a dedicated ated image
signal processor that's built right in that conveniently allows laptop
manufacturers to use much better smartphone targeted cameras that's why
it looks so much better overall though
AI aside guys this is an incredibly
strong start for Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors we didn't get to test
everything so hit like if you guys want to see Alex and I switched to these
laptops full-time for a month yeah a month but after our initial test the
performance is good enough and the battery life makes every other processor
company blush not only that but there's a shocking lack of Jank for our first
gen product and with design wins from nearly every Windows laptop maker and
not just yeah we shoved it in this weird skew we know nobody's going to buy like
really good clean designs Qualcomm
clearly aren't the only ones that are confident in these chips and I'm very
confident in this segue to our sponsor odou if your business is super glued
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the description for a free 14-day trial or to set up a demo with their expert
team if you're interested in the AI bits of these chips maybe you'd like to check
out the last video we did at computex looking at the Snapdragon X noting of
course that those demos were curated and run by qualcom themselves so they
represent a best case scenario