Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite is nearing release, but questions remain about product availability, and testing. Although a detailed microarchitectural review is available, actual devices and benchmarks have been scarce. Concerns about power consumption have circulated, with some reports suggesting it may have contributed to the delay, but early hands-on experiences are now emerging.
Recent Geekbench scores, reportedly from an ASUS Zenbook A16 with 48GB of LPDDR5 tri-channel memory, have surfaced online. The CPU achieved scores of 4033 in single-core and 23,198 in multi-core tests. This performance surpasses Apple’s M4 by roughly 100 points in single-core, but falls approximately 2,000 points behind in multi-threaded workloads. The Snapdragon X2 Elite likewise significantly outperformed the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and Intel Core Ultra X9 288H, with around 1,000-point and 5,000-point advantages in single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. The Snapdragon X2 Elite represents a significant push by Qualcomm into the laptop processor market, aiming to challenge established players like Intel and Apple.
However, these scores were previously demonstrated in pre-production models in November, and synthetic benchmarks don’t always reflect real-world performance. The results may be influenced by the optimized on-package RAM. Maintaining thermal control under sustained boost conditions remains a key question.
In GPU testing, Geekbench reported a score of 44,768 in OpenCL, placing the Snapdragon X2 Elite slightly above an Intel Arc A380 and doubling the performance of its predecessor, the Snapdragon X Elite. However, performance in games will also depend on software optimization, particularly for features like Ray Tracing and upscaling. The emergence of these benchmarks fuels anticipation for wider availability and independent testing of the Snapdragon X2 Elite.
The primary question remains: when will consumers be able to get their hands on devices powered by this new processor? (Source: NotebookCheck)
