Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite can’t touch Apple’s M3 — new benchmarks reveal Apple silicon wins nearly every major category
Now that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips are out in the wild, housed in a swathe of newly-released Windows laptops, we’re finally starting to see the very first real-world benchmark performance tests. The results? Looks like Apple has nothing to worry about.
A notable set of figures shared this week into the performance of the new X1E-78-100 and X1E-80-100, housed respectively in ASUS’ new Vivobook S 15 OLED and the Microsoft Surface Pro 11, can’t hold a candle to Apple’s M3 chips when it comes to single-core scores, power efficiency, multi-core power efficiency, GPU performance, GPU efficiency, and power consumption.
While the Snapdragon scores are notably the best Windows offerings on the market, in some tests, the X Elite chips couldn’t even outscore Apple’s previous-generation M2 chip. Apple’s M3 chip outscored the Snapdragon in almost every test despite only having 8 CPU cores versus the X Elite’s 12. The figures, shared by NotebookCheck, seem to confirm Apple’s stunning silicon ascendancy, so let’s dive in.
Apple M3 vs Snapdragon X Elite
In NC’s Cinebench single-core tests, Apple’s M3 chip outscored the more potent “80” variant of the X Elite chip by 141 points to 123, the latter matching Apple’s older M2 Pro. Likewise, both the M3 and M2 Pro scored much higher in single-core power efficiency (12.7 points per watt and 8.98 points per watt), almost double the 6.76 of the X Elite.
The X Elite did beat the M2 Pro and M3 Pro chips in the Cinebench multi-core scores, with Apple’s M2 Pro scoring 1030 points versus a high of 1132. However, when it comes to power efficiency in multi-core, Apple’s M3 chip is again unparalleled, with M3 scoring 28.3 points per watt versus 22.6 for the X Elite. These figures match up with the ASUS VivoBook S 15 review from our friends at Windows Central, which revealed single-core Cinebench scores of 108 but multi-core scores of an impressive 1,128.
3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited yielded more considerable gains for Apple. Apple’s M3, M3 Pro, M2 Pro, and M4 chip all outshone Snapdragon’s X Adreno GPU, which scored barely half that of the M2 Pro’s 12997 GPU score.
Running The Witcher 3, Apple was also the top dog in power consumption, scoring a whopping 1.207 fps per Watt with M3 versus 0.725 on the X Elite.
Finally, when it comes to power consumption, Apple’s M3 MacBook Air showed the best idle and playback consumption of any chip tested, using up less than half the power at both idle and consumption than the Asus Vivobook S 15.
CPU multi-core scores from Cinebench indicate Apple does at least have some room to grow, and its M4 chip, expected to debut in Apple’s best MacBooks before the end of the year, will likely close that gap. If you were on the fence about hardware, clearly Apple still has the upper hand thanks to Apple silicon.
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