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First Reviews are Live and Snapdragon X Elite Doesn't Quite Deliver on Promised Performance

TheLostSwede

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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.

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@TheLostSwede TheLostSpellingError

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But but but... the mighty NPU!@!!

ffs... we even wasted breath in previous yellow press thread...
 
Performance numbers can be explained away by a poor cooling solution (maybe). But disappointing battery life... that's not something other designs can easily fix.
 
It seems to be fine, as long as you don't run something CPU intensive...

Good for browsing, email, online banking and online shopping, netflix and prime video...
That's about it then.
 
Performance numbers can be explained away by a poor cooling solution (maybe). But disappointing battery life... that's not something other designs can easily fix.

Could also be janky bios/firmware that is not allowing the chip to run at its full potential. Its something different so we'll have to wait and see how it turns out.
 
Followed this topic closely today and it’s a mixed bag. Some people are getting excelent battery life, others not. From what I can gather the Surface lineup is better in this regard, although the batteries are smaller than in this laptop.

I’ll give it a few days until detailed reviews are in for all brands. Hopefully this is an Asus issue as I really want a WoA machine for work.
 
So in other words, despite the hype, x86 is still alive and well? This is no x86 killer? AMD mobile zen 5 and lunar lake/arrow lake will be better options ?
Well GPD just leaked some Strix Point benchmarks; those benchmarks are showing the obnoxiously named Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 as having a Cinebench 24 MT scores of 1525 vs the 950-1000 MT scores these new Snapdragons are getting.
 
cherry picked native benchmarks on prototype custom hardware not reflective of real world binary translator performance ?

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Good for browsing, email, online banking and online shopping, netflix and prime video...
That's about it then.
The price point is all wrong for the use case though...

Followed this topic closely today and it’s a mixed bag. Some people are getting excelent battery life, others not. From what I can gather the Surface lineup is better in this regard, although the batteries are smaller than in this laptop.

I’ll give it a few days until detailed reviews are in for all brands. Hopefully this is an Asus issue as I really want a WoA machine for work.
Which is why I specifically wrote that the Asus model doesn't deliver, as I don't want to draw any hastily conclusions.
 
The price point is all wrong for the use case though...
Yup. Give 'em OLED screens all they want, but 1300 bucks is preposterous for the performance they deliver.
 
Yup. Give 'em OLED screens all they want, but 1300 bucks is preposterous for the performance they deliver.
That's going to be the case for any emulation scenario

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^^ from a reddit post on the surface laptop.

It's really going to depend on your use case.
 
Every year we're promised that ARM will replace x86 in the performance category, and the next new ARM processor is hyped up. Every year that hype dies because it turns out the ARM processor isn't as fast. Someday it might happen, but looks like, yet again, it's not this year.
 
I just picked one up today. I will say the my first experiences are very impressive. The emulation layer works exceptionally well. I played a bit of CS2 and it worked pretty flawless. I will post more as I explore.
Please do. Benchmark numbers on media only tell so much of any story.
I'm personally very intrigued by the proposition of the SD WoA devices, but heck not at these prices.
 
I think the 15 hour battery life is the impressive bit, if you're hoping for it to crush x86 on a price/performance point it's not going to happen just yet.

The fact that it's running windows even in emulation acceptably is a huge nail in the coffin for x86. I think alot of people will pick these up for the battery life alone.
 
Every year we're promised that ARM will replace x86 in the performance category, and the next new ARM processor is hyped up. Every year that hype dies because it turns out the ARM processor isn't as fast. Someday it might happen, but looks like, yet again, it's not this year.
If you look at the benchmarks, there are things that the Snapdragon chips are really good at, but then there are things that they simply suck at. It's the latter that's the issue and in most cases it won't be fixable, at least not without a native port of said software.

I think the 15 hour battery life is the impressive bit, if you're hoping for it to crush x86 on a price/performance point it's not going to happen just yet.
Yet there are two Intel notebooks that deliver similar battery life. Both models have longer battery life, but also bigger batteries.
 
they just want love like everyone else! :(


but have there been any decent reviews on the dell xps or latitudes that have the Snapdragon X Elite?? and the real performance thing I care the most about is for music production and if it would handle my complex synth patches. if bitwig studio dev team makes an ARM/SDXE version and it works good I would save up for one of those since the battery life would be worth it even if I set a higher cpu scaling governor I could get 14 hours of music production battery life and I can do stuff like a lil forest rave and not need much power sources!
 
they just want love like everyone else! :(


but have there been any decent reviews on the dell xps or latitudes that have the Snapdragon X Elite?? and the real performance thing I care the most about is for music production and if it would handle my complex synth patches. if bitwig studio dev team makes an ARM/SDXE version and it works good I would save up for one of those since the battery life would be worth it even if I set a higher cpu scaling governor I could get 14 hours of music production battery life and I can do stuff like a lil forest rave and not need much power sources!
As far as I searched, I only found comments over the Vivobook. Nothing on the Dell, Samsung, Lenovo and whoever else fronts yet.
 
If you look at the benchmarks, there are things that the Snapdragon chips are really good at, but then there are things that they simply suck at. It's the latter that's the issue and in most cases it won't be fixable, at least not without a native port of said software.


Yet there are two Intel notebooks that deliver similar battery life. Both models have longer battery life, but also bigger batteries.
I think that has more to do with the test suite and Asus decisions, the power usage seems promising of the actual chip... but you're right from a raw product perspective it's definitely a miss. I would opt for the competition here, given the performance/price/battery on offer.
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As far as I searched, I only found comments over the Vivobook. Nothing on the Dell, Samsung, Lenovo and whoever else fronts yet.
dern... cuz yeah I only find press release and speculation type posts on those
 
I think the 15 hour battery life is the impressive bit, if you're hoping for it to crush x86 on a price/performance point it's not going to happen just yet.

The fact that it's running windows even in emulation acceptably is a huge nail in the coffin for x86. I think alot of people will pick these up for the battery life alone.
What's the real-World performance of this running a native (not emulated) OS, "if" W11 for ARM is indeed emulated rather than being ARM native.? I am not suggesting that you have tested this, but the simple fact that you bought one on day-1 and I don't even want one suggests that you know far more about the chip, OS's etc than I likely ever will, so you might be able to help me out here, thanks.

I understood that MicroShaft had some years ago simply recompiled Windows to run on ARM hardware and have then spent the last several years re-writing the OS and accompanying apps and this is their big-reveal. As this is MicroShaft I wouldn't be at all surprised if literally 50% of the OS and apps are emulated rather than native and so performance comparisons vs other hardware are ultimately going to be down to exactly what software is benchmarked, that would be chaos.!

I will wait and see with fingers crossed that these products are actually good and MicroShaft has actually created and released a good "new" product on the first attempt.!
 
oh .. didn't I "told you so" :banghead:
 
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