Qualcomm has today made a bold claim that its Snapdragon X Elite processor is up to 21% faster in CPU tasks than Apple’s latest M3 chip. The company unveiled its numbers in a new interview with Digital Trends.
According to tests conducted by Qualcomm, the Snapdragon X Elite was able to achieve a CPU multi-core score of 15,300 in Geekbench 6. On the other hand, the M3 chip achived a score of about 12,100 according to Qualcomm’s own tests which do align with previous independent results. However, benchmark runs for the Snapdragon X Elite where conducted on demo PC laptop units, and its unclear so far wether the claimed perfomance gains over the M3 chip will make it into final production.
Another question which remains unanswered is the power consumption of Qualcomm’s chip during these benchmark tests and how it stacks up to the leading power efficiency performance of Apple silicon. It’s importnant to note that the Snapdragon X Elite offers two modes of power consumptions at 23 watts and 80 watts. As expected, the 80W profile can perform significantly faster but will require a more capabale thermal and cooling system. The 23W profile is designed for smaller and lighter systems with less power demands and slower performance.
In comparison, the M3 chip can achive full performance at peak power of just 21 watts. The beefier M3 Pro and M3 Max consume power at an average of 30 watts and 78 watts, respectively. The base MacBook Pro with M3 chip is acitvely cooled by a single-fan system, whereas the the M3 Pro and M3 Max variants deploy a two-fan cooling solution.
Qualcomm states that the X Elite chip, powered by its custom-designed Oryon CPU architecture, should be avaiable in consumer Windows PCs by mid-2024 from numerous vendors like Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft Surface. Apple could release the M3 MacBook Air lineup as soon as March of next year.
The Snapdragon X Elite was announced one week before Apple took wraps off its own M3 chip and accompanying MacBook Pro and iMac. Before the M3 was announced, Qualcomm also claimed that the Oryon CPU is up to 50% faster in CPU than the 18 months old M2 chip while also consuming less power, but without revealing comparisons in GPU and other tasks.
