yes, I'm free. Gone are my sponsor obligations to Qualcomm about their new Snapdragon X Elite chips. I can say everything I want, and guys following our lab running their most rigorous tests. Ho, what I want to say is, damn, these processors are really good. We got our hands on two of the machines that are supposed to de thrown AMD and Intel with performance and efficiency that is unheard of in a Windows laptop. And while they might not live up to every single one of Qualcomm's very bold claims, there's no denying both the sheer efficiency and the shocking day one completeness of the entire package. Kind of like this complete intro. Now that I've done the segue to our sponsor Odo, running a business is difficult, especially if you're jumping from app to app just to complete one transaction. With Odu's all-in-one software, you can save both time and money by streamlining your processes. Click the link below to learn more. Let's kick this off with a fun little anecdote that Qualcomm's

Lawyers cut from our sponsored video for some reason. Nearly 12 years ago, I had my first hands-on experience with Windows on ARM. It could browse the web with Internet Explorer, navigate with Bing Maps, and even play video. To say we've come a long way would be a gross understatement. You were looking at Balers Gate 3 running on an AMD-powered system and on a Qualcomm system. And shockingly, the results are nearly identical. So, of course, the first big story here is performance. The conventional wisdom about ARM-based processors is that they are extremely power-efficient but that they fall behind x86 chips when it comes to raw grunt. Well, a few years ago, that all fell apart when a little-known fruit company out of Cupertino launched a processor that made even hardcore Windows users here in our office consider making the switch. It was a huge blow to Microsoft and their partners who were caught with absolutely zero response to the wombo combo of class-leading performance and unheard-of battery life. That is until now, 'cause Windows just had its M moment.

but no, really, like, literally, the man in charge of Apple's architecture, and presumably much of M, was Gerard Williams. And after the fun design Des phase of the M processors was over, Gerard and a couple of others left to form a company called Nuvia to make their own arm server processors, which was a pretty good idea. But then Qualcomm showed up and offered them a cool 1.4 billion to pivot and build a mobile chip. And a couple of years later, why don't we let the battery life results tell you how that went. Our Asus VivoBook S15 lasted over 14 hours away from the wall, with our HP Omnibook X able to crack 15 hours. Now, you might be gearing up to get very mad about how that is absolutely nowhere near the numbers that Qualcomm advertised. But you've got to remember, that's in their tests, and this is in ours. And for context, a MacBook Pro M3 that we bought just this week, with zero battery degradation, managed only 12 hours and 30 minutes in our test.

the rest of our laptops getting left in the dust. Which brings us to a big question: how much a performance hit are you willing to accept to get that kind of battery life? It's not like Windows on arm is new, and there's a reason that it never got adopted. Well, what if I told you that things are different now, and the performance hit is virtually zero? Along with our MacBook Pro M3, we also tested a more price comparable MacBook Air M2. And then representing x86, we've got an Asus Zenbook with an Intel Core Ultra 7, and we've got a framework 13 investment in framework disclosure with an AMD ryzen 7, all of them linked down below. Now we do wish that we had a more current ryzen 8000 chip, but those are basically the same thing as ryzen 7000, but with some more AI bolted on, but then not enough AI to meet the minimum specs of Microsoft's co-pilot plus program, so we think from a performance and battery life standpoint using 7,000 series here.

is fine in multicore workloads. Running an application natively, the Snapdragon X Elite was able to beat literally everything we put it up against, even Apple's M3. It's not a completely clean win. I mean, the Snapdragon chips have 12 CPU cores in them versus just the eight in Apple's M3, so that's going to be an obvious advantage in multi-threaded benchmarks. And when we look at single-core performance, Apple is actually still in the lead, with Qualcomm barely besting Intel and AMD. But you've got to note that it's possible Qualcomm still has more in the single-core tank. Currently, we've only got laptops with the X Elite X1E 78-100 chip. Going to hold back ranting about how horrible that naming scheme is for now, but the important thing to take away from here is that this is the slowest variant of the X Elite chip, which entirely lacks dual-core boosting and has the lowest multi-core speed. So instead of being stuck at 3.4 GHz, the faster X Elite could go to 4.2 GHz.

presumably would perform a fair bit better. With that said, it's currently very difficult to get reliable clock speed and power info from these chips, so we just got to kind of guess what exactly is going on under the hood. What we do know though is that we have multiple performance profiles on the Asus VivoBook S15, and we tested everything at both 35 watts and 50 watts, with multicore performance and Cinebench increasing by 177% for that 43% increase in power, meaning that although more power does mean they can go faster, there are certainly diminishing returns after 35 watts. But of course, this is workload dependent, and that's why Handbrake is so interesting in this benchmark. The Snapdragon X Elite once again comes out on top in both x264 and AV1 encoding, which is great, but doesn't paint the whole picture. For that, we need to take advantage of the fact that Handbrake is available in both ARM native and x86-64 versions. This allows us to look at the

performance hit from emulating a more traditional laptop architecture and ooh 40% in both x264 and av1. That is a lot more than the 10% figure that Qualcomm was throwing around, and the same goes for Blender where x86-64 emulation caused a 26% hit to performance. With that said though, even with that performance penalty, the Snapdragon X Elite was still able to hang with the competition while leading the way when we were running it natively. Unfortunately, that's kind of the end of our productivity benchmark, not because there aren't plenty of other pieces of software that ran, but because getting them to run across all of our platforms under test in a repeatable manner was kind of difficult, to say the least. With that said, in general, our experience with Qualcomm's x86 emulation has been largely okay. I hate using this F word, but has been largely flawless. The occasional installer would get mad, but once installed, we had almost no problems running even some kind of unexpected and heavy programs like SolidWorks there.

are two situations though where you can get caught out. If an application requires AVX2 support, it simply won't open. Or if a game has kernel-level anti-cheat, which brings us perfectly then to gaming. Now the raw performance of the Snapdragon chips, very impressive, rivaling both AMD and Intel's integrated graphics. When it works, ah yes, that's the caveat because sometimes he know work, he's so good. Things do seem very early days with some games running wonderfully and some being a bit janky, with others just not launching at all because for whatever reason Qualcomm's iGPU shows up as having no VRAM. That's a strange one. One thing that's promising though is that there doesn't seem to be a performance penalty going from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12, something that's been a huge thorn in Intel's side with the development of their Arc Alchemist GPUs. Now given that Intel has spent the last 2 years getting their driver situation somewhat figured out for Arc, it's probably going to be quite some time.

before we can recommend a Snapdragon X Elite chip for gaming, but if I get my way, the end goal here will be to have a proper dedicated GPU in these things anyway, so that we can have our battery life cake and also eat our gaming pie. Finally, let's talk about AI. Microsoft, Qualcomm, even your nan realist L won't shut up lately about how AI is going to revolutionize how you use your computer, but after a week of playing with these machines, this is the number of times that we used AI outside of explicitly testing it for this video. The auto presence detection is legitimately kind of cool, but can also end up being a bit distracting, so we ended up disabling it. The paint co-creator probably isn't going to be much fun if you're older than about 10, and the we were most excited for live captions with translation didn't really live up to our expectations. In our testing, it did a passable enough job going from Mandarin to English, but it completely failed Cantonese, French, and

Hebrew, so you might just want to stick to a good old Google Translate, at least for the time being. Also, Microsoft's controversial recall feature is completely absent at this point, which is probably great because Microsoft clearly has a lot of trust to build with the community before they're going to allow them to screenshot and key log everything they do on their computers. The good news is that the benefits of this platform are about more than just Co-Pilot Plus, and one that I don't think enough people are talking about is the image quality advantage of the webcams on Snapdragon X Elite laptops. This isn't just down to laptop manufacturers using crappy webcams in their AMD and Intel designs, though. It's because Qualcomm's SoC includes a dedicated image signal processor that's built right in, that conveniently allows laptop manufacturers to use much better smartphone-targeted cameras. That's why it looks so much better overall, though. AI aside, guys, this is an incredibly strong start for Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors. We didn't get to test

everything so hit like if you guys want to see Alex and I switched to these laptops full-time for a month. Yeah, a month, but after our initial test, the performance is good enough and the battery life makes every other processor company blush. Not only that, but there's a shocking lack of Jank for our first-gen product, and with design wins from nearly every Windows laptop maker, and not just, yeah, we shoved it in this weird skew we know nobody's going to buy, like really good clean designs. Qualcomm clearly aren't the only ones that are confident in these chips, and I'm very confident in this segue to our sponsor, Odu. If your business is super glued together with a bunch of mismatched apps, oh, don't let it go on that way. Odu's all-in-one business management software lets you combine all of your apps into a single unified operating system. This not only saves you the time and effort of syncing everything up, but also your hard-earned money. I mean, think about it, how many $9.99 per month subscriptions

do you have right now and their list of apps is super comprehensive so you're bound to find something that suits your business. A CRM for the sales team? They've got that. A point of sale app for your brick-and-mortar location? They've got that too. How about an appointments app to make sure that your very busy boss goes from shoot location to shoot location without getting sidetracked and wandering off? Come on, you guys. Anyway, they have that too. And if you only need one single app to shore up some holes in your processes, guess what? You can get access to that for free. So go check out ODU using our link in the description for a free 14-day trial or to set up a demo with their expert team. If you're interested in the AI bits of these chips, maybe you'd like to check out the last video we did at Computex looking at the Snapdragon X, noting, of course, that those demos were curated and run by Qualcomm themselves, so they represent a best-case scenario.

The Truth about Snapdragon X Laptops…

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


The Truth about Snapdragon X Laptops…

The Truth about Snapdragon X Laptops…

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