Here’s how Qualcomm’s new laptop chips really stack up to Apple, Intel, and AMD

After 12 years of trying to marque Windows connected Arm happen, Microsoft has made Windows connected Arm happen. That’s a agelong clip to support throwing wealth astatine a mentation of Windows that, historically, has lacked compatible software, reliable emulation, and susceptible capable show for adjacent airy workloads. But it seems similar Microsoft’s 12-year odyssey is starting to wage disconnected present that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips are turning Windows connected Arm into a viable platform.

We’ve spent the past week and a fractional investigating 7 Copilot Plus PCs, representing each 4 Snapdragon X chips, against a slate of akin laptops moving Apple Silicon, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen processors. This isn’t the last connection connected Snapdragon show — app compatibility is changing connected a near-daily basis, and we’ll person afloat reviews for galore of these laptops successful the adjacent fewer weeks — but we present person a bully thought of however the archetypal question of Snapdragon X laptops stack up against the contention and however they inactive autumn short. 

This is the fiercest Microsoft has been capable to vie with MacBooks successful price, performance, and artillery life, and portion Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips don’t outright bushed Apple’s M3 spot (with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU) successful each azygous 1 of our benchmarks, they could marque Intel and AMD scramble to drawback up to different rival — this time, connected their location turf.

A caller absorption connected powerfulness efficiency

For the past fewer years, laptop makers person focused connected expanding powerfulness ratio (and truthful artillery life) without sacrificing performance. For Apple, that meant ditching Intel and using its ain Arm-based chips; Intel wasn’t improving the powerfulness ratio of its ain accelerated enough. 

Arm is simply a processor architecture with a more businesslike acquisition set than the x86 acceptable recovered successful Intel and AMD CPUs. It uses smaller, much optimized instructions, truthful the CPU tin process tasks faster utilizing little power, which is 1 crushed smartphone chips are Arm-based. Microsoft’s 12-year journey to marque Windows enactment connected Arm and reap those powerfulness savings has been dilatory going due to the fact that the chips haven’t been accelerated enough to tally Windows and emulate apps that aren’t compatible with the Arm acquisition acceptable — until now.

Qualcomm presently has 4 Snapdragon X chips: 3 nether the “X Elite” marque and 1 nether “X Plus.” They each stock an Adreno GPU, an NPU susceptible of 45 TOPS, and enactment for LPDDR5X representation up to 8448MHz, but their halfway counts and max timepiece speeds alteration arsenic you spell down the lineup, from a 12-core spot with a 3.8GHz apical velocity and 4.2GHz dual-core boost to a 10-core astatine 3.4GHz with nary dual-core boost.

With the Snapdragon X Elite lineup, Qualcomm ditched the hybrid architecture of its erstwhile laptop chips. Instead of utilizing a premix of show cores for dense workloads and ratio cores for little intensive work, Qualcomm present uses a homogeneous architecture — each spot tin tally some types of tasks.

Competing against its caller CPUs are Apple’s hybrid halfway Arm chips, AMD’s homogeneous halfway x86 chips, and Intel’s hybrid halfway x86 chips. (Though Intel is adjusting its hybrid halfway architecture by ditching conscionable the LP cores successful its next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which get this fall.)

The champion CPU show Windows connected Arm has ever seen

We ran Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 due to the fact that they enactment crossed Windows and macOS arsenic good arsenic connected Intel and AMD’s x86 chips and Apple and Qualcomm’s Arm chips. Together, they supply a wide overview of a processor’s capabilities erstwhile handling assorted workloads. While we tested laptops of antithetic sizes from antithetic brands, these benchmarks are inactive a large baseline of however these chips fare compared to their competitors and however they stack up. 

Single-core performance

Among the laptops we tested, Apple’s M3 chips inactive pb the battalion successful single-core performance, but Qualcomm’s higher-end X Elite chips are a interaction faster successful single-core workloads than the M2 Max spot successful the aboriginal 2023 MacBook Pro — betwixt 2 and 3 percent successful our tests. They are besides up to 24 percent faster than the show cores successful Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H processor and up to 17 percent faster than the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS cores. The bottom-tier X Elite and X Plus are the slowest, but they inactive propulsion retired awesome scores and propulsion up — albeit hardly — of astir of the Intel-based laptops successful the array below. 

Multicore performance

The Snapdragon chips truly radiance successful multicore benchmarks, overtaking each the different CPUs speech from Apple’s M2 Max and M3 Max. The M3 spot successful the MacBook Air lone has 8 cores compared to the 12 oregon 10 cores of the Snapdragon chips, truthful it makes consciousness wherefore it fell behind. The 16-core M3 Max acold outpaces the remainder of the field, and the 12-core M2 Max is somewhat faster successful Cinebench 2024 multicore than the fastest X Elite chips.

Our results are mostly successful enactment with what Qualcomm claimed during my hands-on successful April, though, arsenic you tin spot successful the graph above, determination are immoderate outliers — notably the multicore scores for the 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 and Galaxy Book4 Edge. But I fishy those outliers are either owed to halfway number and timepiece velocity oregon however overmuch powerfulness the CPU draws.

Power profiling

There’s nary meaningful show quality betwixt AC and artillery powerfulness connected immoderate of the Snapdragon laptops we’ve tested, provided they’re utilizing the aforesaid powerfulness illustration each time. The numbers supra are from the “best performance” powerfulness illustration oregon equivalent, connected partition power; manufacturers person the quality to tweak the powerfulness profiles connected their devices. 

We repeated our CPU benchmarks connected the Dell XPS 13, Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, and Microsoft Surface Pro 11 with balanced oregon recommended powerfulness settings enabled to comparison to the results above. With the recommended powerfulness mounting enabled, the Surface Pro 11’s show decreased betwixt 7.5 and 16 percent crossed each CPU tests.

But the XPS 13 and Galaxy Book4 Edge’s show really accrued somewhat connected astir tests successful balanced mode: betwixt 0.9 and 2.7 percent connected the XPS 13 and betwixt 1.3 and 8.3 percent connected the Book4 Edge.

Snapdragon falls down successful GPU performance

Qualcomm has been cautious to presumption this question of Snapdragon X laptops arsenic productivity machines, alternatively than gaming oregon workstation PCs, and the integrated GPUs are good for that. They tin tally laptop displays astatine up to 4K astatine 120Hz and up to 3 4K outer displays astatine 60Hz. 

But integrated GPUs aren’t large for gaming, 3D rendering, oregon immoderate different dense graphical workloads, and that includes each of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. (Apple’s integrated GPUs are an exception, particularly arsenic they standard up; the monolithic 40-core GPU connected the MacBook Pro M3 Max blows past AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.)

Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs lag down higher-end Intel and AMD integrated GPUs successful our archetypal benchmarks. In Geekbench 6 GPU, Intel Arc is 29 percent faster than the much almighty Adreno spot successful the highest-end Snapdragon spot and astir 39 percent faster than the different Snapdragon chips. The AMD Radeon 780M is 17 to 29 percent faster, respectively, but the MacBook Air 15 is astir 39 percent slower.

Only 2 of the Snapdragon laptops fared a small amended successful the PugetBench Adobe Photoshop benchmark. Photoshop has a autochthonal Arm64 version; the Surface Pro and 15-inch Surface Laptop surpassed the Dell XPS 14 and Acer Swift Go 14 AMD by 10 percent. The MacBook Air 15 wins here, though, by 42 percent.

This is conscionable an aboriginal snapshot of iGPU performance, though. It’s hard to get a existent consciousness for it erstwhile astir of the benchmarking programs we use, including games, don’t person autochthonal Arm64 versions yet — and erstwhile emulated versions often don’t deed the GPU decently oregon astatine all.

Gaming connected Arm

These Snapdragon laptops are not gaming laptops, but they tin tally games — sometimes. Very fewer games person autochthonal Arm64 versions, truthful Microsoft leans heavy connected emulation here. Microsoft automatically enables Auto SR (its ain mentation of Nvidia’s DLSS oregon AMD’s FSR, which summation framework rates by dropping the in-game solution and past upscaling with AI) on a abbreviated database of games, which includes The Witcher 3 and Control. But those games person already been optimized to tally good connected processors with integrated graphics, truthful they don’t really request Auto SR — and successful astir cases tally amended without it.

The aforesaid goes for immoderate games that haven’t been optimized, similar Palia and What Remains of Edith Finch. In those games, determination was nary discernible quality successful framework rate, responsiveness, oregon ocular fidelity betwixt having ASR connected oregon off. In different games that are expected to beryllium optimized for Windows connected Arm, similar Control and Borderlands 3, turning connected ASR degraded the ocular prime with distracting flickering lines connected oregon astir good details similar mesh screens and hair.

Control was the lone crippled I was capable to effort connected a notation laptop with a Snapdragon X Elite spot during a hands-on demo backmost successful April, but it runs conscionable arsenic good connected the XPS 13, Galaxy Book4 Edge, and Yoga Slim 7x I tested. To get a unchangeable 30fps, the graphics preset indispensable beryllium acceptable to debased and the solution can’t beryllium higher than 1200p, but it runs creaseless and is responsive.

If a crippled doesn’t work, you volition larn quickly: it volition clang arsenic soon arsenic you motorboat it, oregon aft you load 1 of your saves, oregon if you person the solution oregon graphics settings excessively high. In the best-case scenario, it volition tally nether 20fps adjacent connected debased settings. There are a batch of variables, and they disagree from crippled to crippled successful the twelve I tested.

There is simply a third-party website that tracks what games are compatible connected Snapdragon Windows Arm PCs, but it won’t ever archer you what solution oregon graphics mounting to prime oregon if it volition enactment connected a strategy with little than 32GB of memory. You crippled astatine your ain hazard with Windows connected Arm.

Emulation is good for the small stuff

One of Microsoft’s large claims was that Snapdragon-configured Windows laptops would person “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2,” Apple’s emulation bundle that lets x86 Mac apps tally connected Apple Silicon. Microsoft hasn’t had the top estimation erstwhile it comes to x86 emulation connected Arm, and portion its caller Prism emulator is overmuch faster, it’s inactive not accelerated capable for heavyweight apps. 

We tested each the Snapdragon laptops utilizing the emulated x86 mentation of Blender, a fashionable escaped 3D modeling and rendering programme that’s a halfway portion of our benchmarking suite. We besides tested a fewer with an alpha physique with autochthonal Arm64 support. Neither the emulated x86 mentation nor the alpha autochthonal mentation detected the Adreno GPU, truthful the CPUs had to bash each the work, but the autochthonal mentation inactive performed astir 40 percent faster. 

But faster doesn’t mean accelerated — portion the CPU rendering times with the Arm64 mentation were wrong a infinitesimal of integrated GPU rendering times connected the Intel Arc, and adjacent identical to the AMD Radeon 780M, it inactive took implicit 4 times longer than the basal MacBook Air M3.

While these Snapdragon laptops are not what you’d privation to bargain for 3D rendering — you’ll privation a discrete GPU for that, careless of level — the monolithic quality betwixt emulated and autochthonal CPU rendering shows however important it is for developers to person Arm64 versions of their software, particularly if it’s designed to grip dense workloads. 

We couldn’t tally our Premiere Pro benchmark since Adobe hasn’t released a autochthonal Arm version, and Adobe blocks the x86 mentation from emulation connected Arm. (For a mates of days, it didn’t artifact all the Snapdragon X CPUs, but the emulated results were not great.) My workfellow Tom Warren has a wonderful heavy dive into the existent authorities of Windows connected Arm if you’re looking for much accusation connected x86 emulation, and we’ll proceed to trial the Prism emulator arsenic we find opportunities to bash so.

Battery life

Microsoft claims that its Copilot Plus PCs with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor volition connection “20 percent much artillery beingness than the latest MacBook Air 15-inch.” When I tested the latest 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs, they lasted astir 18 hours connected a complaint erstwhile I utilized them arsenic I usually would during a regular week, with the show brightness acceptable arsenic adjacent to 200 nits arsenic possible. 

None of the Snapdragon laptops’ batteries lasted 18 hours similar the M3 Air, but astir weren’t acold behind, averaging 14 to 16 hours. That’s inactive a batch longer than astir of the Intel- and AMD-based laptops I tested, with the objection of the Intel-based Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, which got adjacent identical artillery beingness to the Snapdragon-based Galaxy Book4 Edge, astatine implicit 14 hours each.

In Tom’s testing, the Microsoft Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X Plus CPU lasted astir 7 hours with the brightness acceptable to 100 percent portion being pushed with each sorts of tasks similar downloading games from Steam and taking video calls. In lighter workloads connected 50 percent brightness, the artillery drained conscionable 25 percent aft 4 hours. My ain acquisition with the Snapdragon Dell XPS 13 was similar.

At 75 percent brightness (or arsenic adjacent to 200 nits arsenic possible), the XPS 13 kept a complaint for astir 15 hours — 2 to 3 hours longer than the Dell XPS 14 I precocious reviewed with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, contempt the smaller artillery connected the XPS 13. It besides lasted longer than the Acer Swift Go 14 AMD I tested with a Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU. That 1 got maine betwixt 12 to 14 hours, depending connected however often I utilized it, however I utilized it, and however precocious I had the show brightness cranked.

We person much investigating to bash connected each of these laptops — the Surface Pro successful peculiar hasn’t gotten the artillery beingness we expected, and we’re moving with Microsoft to effort to fig retired wherefore — but truthful far, the Copilot Plus PCs look to bushed comparable AMD and Intel machines connected artillery by respective hours. 

Here’s wherefore I’m not mentioning the NPU

Yes, these are Copilot Plus PCs. Yes, they tally a clump of AI stuff. But my colleagues and I person yet to fig retired a reliable method to trial comparative NPU show successful a meaningful way. The Copilot Plus AI features, with the imaginable exceptions of Studio Effects and Live Captions translations, presently consciousness much similar gimmicks than utile apps astir radical tin incorporated into their day-to-day life, and Microsoft doesn’t program to release Recall, its most-hyped AI app, until it addresses information concerns.

But the NPUs are determination — and not conscionable connected Arm PCs — truthful we expect apps to instrumentality much vantage of that processing powerfulness soon. We’ll revisit NPU benchmarks arsenic it makes sense.

More for less… much oregon less

This question of Snapdragon Copilot Plus PCs starts astatine $999 and tin outgo successful excess of $2,500. They diagnostic astir everything astir different laptops successful that terms scope do: beauteous OLED displays; precocious retention capacity; agelong artillery life; accelerated processors; metallic chassis; and successful immoderate cases, the latest Wi-Fi 7 adapter. It’s each the aforesaid worldly you get with Intel- and AMD-based laptops, and adjacent MacBooks, often for little money.

As MacBook Air competitors, they person a fewer nifty features that person been baked into Windows for a portion that Apple is lone conscionable adding to macOS, similar telephone mirroring and automatic model tiling — and you tin usage up to three external monitors, with oregon without the lid closed. They tin besides beryllium priced much reasonably. At $1,099, the basal 13-inch MacBook Air M3 has an eight-core processor, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. But astatine $999, the basal 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 has a 10-core processor, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of retention — and you tin easy upgrade that retention yourself. 

The Snapdragon laptops are mostly cheaper than their Intel oregon AMD counterparts, too. The Qualcomm Dell XPS 13 is $200 cheaper and the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is $150 cheaper, portion the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is $100 more. Better show and longer artillery beingness for little wealth are going to beryllium the large selling points for astir radical — and these Snapdragon Copilot Plus PCs deed each three.  

Where does Qualcomm spell from here?

Unlike erstwhile Windows connected Arm laptops — adjacent up to 2022’s Surface Pro 9 (SQ3), these Copilot Plus PCs yet person processors accelerated capable to tally the operating strategy and emulate astir x86 programs. And present that each large Windows laptop shaper has astatine slightest 1 Snapdragon X-based machine, determination should yet beryllium capable of an instal basal to entice developers astatine ample to make autochthonal Arm64 versions of their apps, which volition marque these an easier sell.

But with Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI coming soon, it’s unclear however agelong Qualcomm volition clasp onto its lead. Lunar Lake volition beryllium person successful plan to Apple Silicon, with RAM incorporated into the spot itself, and Intel claims that getting escaped of hyperthreading volition alteration powerfulness consumption, truthful laptops with these chips volition supposedly get amended artillery beingness than its current-gen processors. Ryzen AI volition person a 12-core and 10-core variant, conscionable similar Qualcomm Snapdragon, connected its Zen 5 architecture, timepiece speeds up to 5.1GHz, and a much almighty iGPU, truthful that could summation the graphics show pb it presently has implicit immoderate of the Snapdragon X Elite chips.

We’ll person plentifulness much to trial successful the coming weeks arsenic app compatibility improves and afloat reviews of galore of these Snapdragon X laptops soon. Qualcomm has shown america that Windows connected Arm is yet feasible. Now, it’s up to Intel and AMD to person radical not to marque the jump.

Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge