Qualcomm officially took the wraps off the Snapdragon X Elite, revealing that there was not one but three SKUs that will be found in various premium notebooks, with the fourth one being the less powerful Snapdragon X Plus. The SoC was recently benchmarked in the upcoming Microsoft Surface Laptop 6, operating at 4.00GHz, suggesting that it is one of the two versions that supports boost clock technology. The scores show that Qualcomm’s latest and greatest silicon continues to outpace Apple’s M3, but it has yet to overtake the higher-end chipsets.
Snapdragon X Elite running in the Surface Laptop 6 is 16 percent faster than the M3 in Geekbench 6’s multi-core score
The Surface Laptop 6 is titled ‘OEMBR OEMBR Product Name MFG’ in Geekbench 6, with the Snapdragon X Elite’s CPU configuration comprising of eight performance and four power efficiency cores. However, Qualcomm’s fastest Snapdragon X Elite was not tested in Microsoft’s premium notebook, as that version can reach a boost clock speed of 4.20GHz. Instead, we have the ‘middle of the pack’ SKU, whose base frequency is 3.40GHz, and it touts a slower Adreno GPU with 3.8TFLOPs.
Regardless, the Geekbench 6 results show that the Snapdragon X Elite obtained a single-core and multi-core result of 2,714 and 14,078. Compared to Apple’s M3, Qualcomm’s newest chip is 16 percent faster in the multi-core benchmark but 12.5 percent slower in single-core results. You should note that the Snapdragon X Elite has the upper hand against the M3 because it has eight performance cores, whereas the latter sports just four.
With the 12-core CPU cluster, the Snapdragon X Elite would always have the edge in the multi-core run, which is probably why Qualcomm kept on marketing one benchmark and comparing it against the M3. Interestingly, we have not spotted any performance slides showing how the M3 Pro fares against its latest competitor, but we all know the answer to that. We can also see that the Surface Laptop 6 version tested in Geekbench 6 has 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, but Qualcomm’s partners have the option to add up to 64GB, which is the of the Snapdragon X Elite’s maximum supported memory limit.
Microsoft is said to host a hardware event next month, with one report stating that the software giant is preparing demos that showcase the Snapdragon X Elite’s superiority over Apple’s M3 when officially announcing its brand-new Surface lineup of machines. At least in the multi-core department, Qualcomm’s flagship SoC has no competition, but we might be surprised when other benchmarks are run.
News Source: Geekbench 6