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

After 12 years of trying to make Windows on Arm happen, Microsoft has made Windows on Arm happen. That’s a long time to keep throwing money at a version of Windows that, historically, has lacked compatible software, reliable emulation, and capable enough performance for even light workloads. But it seems like Microsoft’s 12-year odyssey is starting to pay off now that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips are turning Windows on Arm into a viable platform.

We’ve spent the past week and a half testing seven Copilot Plus PCs, representing all four Snapdragon X chips, against a slate of similar laptops running Apple Silicon, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen processors. This isn’t the final word on Snapdragon performance — app compatibility is changing on a near-daily basis, and we’ll have full reviews for many of these laptops in the next few weeks — but we now have a good idea of how the first wave of Snapdragon X laptops stack up against the competition and how they still fall short.

This is the fiercest Microsoft has been able to compete with MacBooks in price, performance, and battery life, and while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips don’t outright beat Apple’s M3 chip (with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU) in every single one of our benchmarks, they could make Intel and AMD scramble to catch up to another competitor — this time, on their home turf.

A new focus on power efficiency

For the last few years, laptop makers have focused on increasing power efficiency (and therefore battery life) without sacrificing performance. For Apple, that meant ditching Intel and using its own Arm-based chips; Intel wasn’t improving the power efficiency of its own fast enough.

Arm is a processor architecture with a more efficient instruction set than the x86 set found in Intel and AMD CPUs. It uses smaller, more optimized instructions, so the CPU can process tasks faster using less power, which is one reason smartphone chips are Arm-based. Microsoft’s 12-year journey to make Windows work on Arm and reap those power savings has been slow going because the chips haven’t been fast enough to run Windows and emulate apps that aren’t compatible with the Arm instruction set — until now.

Qualcomm currently has four Snapdragon X chips: three under the “X Elite” brand and one under “X Plus.” They all share an Adreno GPU, an NPU capable of 45 TOPS, and support for LPDDR5X memory up to 8448MHz, but their core counts and max clock speeds change as you go down the lineup, from a 12-core chip with a 3.8GHz top speed and 4.2GHz dual-core boost to a 10-core at 3.4GHz with no dual-core boost.

With the Snapdragon X Elite lineup, Qualcomm ditched the hybrid architecture of its previous laptop chips. Instead of using a mix of performance cores for heavy workloads and efficiency cores for less intensive work, Qualcomm now uses a homogeneous architecture — every chip can run both types of tasks.

Competing against its new CPUs are Apple’s hybrid core Arm chips, AMD’s homogeneous core x86 chips, and Intel’s hybrid core x86 chips. (Though Intel is adjusting its hybrid core architecture by ditching just the LP cores in its next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which arrive this fall.)

The best CPU performance Windows on Arm has ever seen

We ran Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 because they work across Windows and macOS as well as on Intel and AMD’s x86 chips and Apple and Qualcomm’s Arm chips. Together, they provide a broad overview of a processor’s capabilities when handling various workloads. While we tested laptops of different sizes from different brands, these benchmarks are still a great baseline of how these chips fare compared to their competitors and how they stack up.

Single-core performance

Among the laptops we tested, Apple’s M3 chips still lead the pack in single-core performance, but Qualcomm’s higher-end X Elite chips are a touch faster in single-core workloads than the M2 Max chip in the early 2023 MacBook Pro — between 2 and 3 percent in our tests. They are also up to 24 percent faster than the performance cores in 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 still push out impressive scores and pull ahead — albeit barely — of most of the Intel-based laptops in the table below.

Multicore performance

The Snapdragon chips really shine in multicore benchmarks, overtaking all the other CPUs aside from Apple’s M2 Max and M3 Max. The M3 chip in the MacBook Air only has eight cores compared to the 12 or 10 cores of the Snapdragon chips, so it makes sense why it fell behind. The 16-core M3 Max far outpaces the rest of the field, and the 12-core M2 Max is slightly faster in Cinebench 2024 multicore than the fastest X Elite chips.

Our results are mostly in line with what Qualcomm claimed during my hands-on in April, though, as you can see in the graph above, there are some outliers — notably the multicore scores for the 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 and Galaxy Book4 Edge. But I suspect those outliers are either due to core count and clock speed or how much power the CPU draws.

Power profiling

There’s no meaningful performance difference between AC and battery power on any of the Snapdragon laptops we’ve tested, provided they’re using the same power profile each time. The numbers above are from the “best performance” power profile or equivalent, on wall power; manufacturers have the ability to tweak the power profiles on their devices.

We repeated our CPU benchmarks on the Dell XPS 13, Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, and Microsoft Surface Pro 11 with balanced or recommended power settings enabled to compare to the results above. With the recommended power setting enabled, the Surface Pro 11’s performance decreased between 7.5 and 16 percent across all CPU tests.

But the XPS 13 and Galaxy Book4 Edge’s performance actually increased slightly on most tests in balanced mode: between 0.9 and 2.7 percent on the XPS 13 and between 1.3 and 8.3 percent on the Book4 Edge.

Snapdragon falls behind in GPU performance

Qualcomm has been careful to position this wave of Snapdragon X laptops as productivity machines, rather than gaming or workstation PCs, and the integrated GPUs are fine for that. They can run laptop displays at up to 4K at 120Hz and up to three 4K external displays at 60Hz.

But integrated GPUs aren’t great for gaming, 3D rendering, or any other heavy graphical workloads, and that includes all of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. (Apple’s integrated GPUs are an exception, especially as they scale up; the massive 40-core GPU on the MacBook Pro M3 Max blows past AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.)

Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs lag behind higher-end Intel and AMD integrated GPUs in our initial benchmarks. In Geekbench 6 GPU, Intel Arc is 29 percent faster than the more powerful Adreno chip in the highest-end Snapdragon chip and about 39 percent faster than the other Snapdragon chips. The AMD Radeon 780M is 17 to 29 percent faster, respectively, but the MacBook Air 15 is about 39 percent slower.

Only two of the Snapdragon laptops fared a little better in the PugetBench Adobe Photoshop benchmark. Photoshop has a native 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 just an early snapshot of iGPU performance, though. It’s hard to get a real feel for it when most of the benchmarking programs we use, including games, don’t have native Arm64 versions yet — and when emulated versions often don’t hit the GPU properly or at all.

Gaming on Arm

These Snapdragon laptops are not gaming laptops, but they can run games — sometimes. Very few games have native Arm64 versions, so Microsoft leans heavily on emulation here. Microsoft automatically enables Auto SR (its own version of Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR, which increase frame rates by dropping the in-game resolution and then upscaling with AI) on a short list of games, which includes The Witcher 3 and Control. But those games have already been optimized to run well on processors with integrated graphics, so they don’t actually need Auto SR — and in most cases run better without it.

The same goes for some games that haven’t been optimized, like Palia and What Remains of Edith Finch. In those games, there was no discernible difference in frame rate, responsiveness, or visual fidelity between having ASR on or off. In other games that are supposed to be optimized for Windows on Arm, like Control and Borderlands 3, turning on ASR degraded the visual quality with distracting flickering lines on or around fine details like mesh screens and hair.

Control was the only game I was able to try on a reference laptop with a Snapdragon X Elite chip during a hands-on demo back in April, but it runs just as well on the XPS 13, Galaxy Book4 Edge, and Yoga Slim 7x I tested. To get a stable 30fps, the graphics preset must be set to low and the resolution can’t be higher than 1200p, but it runs smooth and is responsive.

If a game doesn’t work, you will learn quickly: it will crash as soon as you launch it, or after you load one of your saves, or if you have the resolution or graphics settings too high. In the best-case scenario, it will run under 20fps even on low settings. There are a lot of variables, and they differ from game to game in the dozen I tested.

There is a third-party website that tracks what games are compatible on Snapdragon Windows Arm PCs, but it won’t always tell you what resolution or graphics setting to select or if it will work on a system with less than 32GB of memory. You game at your own risk with Windows on Arm.