Journalists were invited not to demo Snapdragon X Elite - beats Intel Core Ultra 7-155H, pulls games

A few weeks ago, journalists were invited to Qualcomm's headquarters in San Diego to demonstrate the Snapdragon X Elite platform. The company covered the participants' travel and accommodation expenses, but did not make any editorial changes. Since the announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite platform at the end of last year, there have been many rumors, leaks, and information from the manufacturer about its performance. Now, selected individuals were able to gain practical experience working with the system. Devin Arthur from Windows Latest shared the test results.

During the demonstrations, we had access to several reference hardware systems running predefined tests such as 3D Mark, Jetstream, etc. The table below shows some results of these tests conducted on Snapdragon X Elite 23W (system power consumption) compared to the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor.

As can be seen from the figures above, the X Elite outperforms the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in every individual test with much lower power consumption: 23W compared to over 100W for the Intel processor. Unlike traditional PC processor manufacturers, Qualcomm does not measure the TDP of the chip — instead, it talks about the overall system power. This means that the processor itself consumes even less than 23W, but this information needs to be verified in independent tests. Participants did not have the opportunity to measure the temperature or other indicators of the test or compared systems.

The tested system handles games well, although it is not positioned as a gaming system. However, the performance cannot be compared to modern graphics cards. Participants had the opportunity to see demonstrations of several games: Baldur's Gate 3, Control, and Redout 2, the videos demonstrate how well they work. The journalist notes that the system did not showcase gaming performance as much as the work Qualcomm did in collaboration with Microsoft to make Windows 11 and the X Elite processor work well enough to run modern games.

The graphics settings chosen in Baldur's Gate 3 are unknown, but the resolution was 1080p, and the framerate hovered around 30 frames per second without any drops.

Redout 2 ran at 1080p resolution but with a significantly higher framerate than 30 FPS.

One of the most interesting aspects of the X Elite platform is on-device AI processing. While Intel and AMD have released their own chips with dedicated NPUs, the Snapdragon X Elite seems to be the most powerful, at least in terms of numbers. AI performance is measured in TOPS (trillions of operations per second), with the results for various chip architectures provided below.

High Qualcomm values indicate that the AI models are processed very quickly. The video shows Stable Diffusion in action on a device that takes a text prompt and generates an image. Similar results can be achieved on AMD or Intel, but with higher energy consumption.