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The Snapdragon X Elite is slower than an iPhone 12 Mini in early testing

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A photo of a laptop with the Snapdragon X Plus CPU.
Arif Bacchus / Digital Trends

Benchmarks for the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite chip are already making the rounds, and they’re disappointing. One user on Reddit, u/caponica23, received the Samsung Galaxy Book Edge 14 early and published an extensive post with some initial findings. And the performance of the Snapdragon X Elite chip inside the PC is much lower than expected.

In Geekbench, the user showed single-core results of 1,841 and multi-core results of 11,537. That’s bad. For reference, Qualcomm said in early demos that the Snapdragon X Elite could reach a score of 2,977 in single-core and 15,086 in multi-core performance. The user also took the laptop out for a spin in Resident Evil Village at 1080p, and said there were “severe frame drops” even with AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) set to Performance mode.

Performance for the Snapdragon X Elite
Arif Bacchus / Digital Trends

These results run counter to the handful of times we’ve seen the Snapdragon X Elite in action. It provided a solid gaming experience for us in Control, and we heard from Qualcomm that it would be able to beat Apple’s M3 inside the MacBook Air. These benchmark results tell a different story.

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Perhaps the most damning comparison comes on X (formerly Twitter), where one user says that the Snapdragon X Elite’s single-core performance is slower than an iPhone 12 Mini. Yikes.

For those who can’t comprehend how f*cking miserable this is, X Elite’s actual big core performance is slower than the 4-year-old A14 chip in the iPhone 12 mini.

Qualcomm initially inflated the single-core score to 3200, which dropped to 2900 in an actual Windows environment,… pic.twitter.com/SFxk8sEMZm

— INIYSA (@lafaiel) June 13, 2024

There is an explanation here. The unit that was tested was limited to a clock speed of 2.52GHz, while the Snapdragon X Elite should be able to reach 4GHz. It’s just tough to say if the chip is intentionally limited or if there will be some sort of update that will improve performance before the first Snapdragon X Elite laptops launch next week.

One reason the chip could be limited is battery life. In their testing, the user found that the Samsung Galaxy Book Edge 14 lasted about 14 hours on a full charge. That’s a massive improvement over most Windows laptops, though still short of the MacBook Air. What’s concerning is that, if the Snapdragon X Elite will indeed run at higher clock speeds at launch, that battery life will likely diminish rapidly.

Based on these results, you’re either looking at lower performance or shorter battery life with the Snapdragon X Elite, but it’s still too soon to say anything conclusive. The first laptops will release next week on June 18, but we recommend waiting for reviews before investing in this yet unproven computing platform.

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Jacob Roach
Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
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