If you’ve been sleeping on Qualcomm’s bold moves into Windows PCs, these fire-engine red reference designs should be a wake-up call. Qualcomm gave tech reporters a fresh look at its salivating Snapdragon X Elite chip – and the early benchmarks have Intel and AMD squarely in the crosshairs.
Qualcomm is launching a staggering 8 different X series SKUs spread across these two lineups, upcoming X Elite chips new laptops aims to redefine performance. On the high end, the mysterious X1E84100 and X1E80100 Elite chips could be true performance beasts, with leaked benchmarks pointing to beefy 8+4 CPU core configurations and boosted clock speeds over 4GHz.
Veteran hardware chips guru Ryan Shrout got an up-close look at the X Elite silicon in action, and boy did the Arm-based chip deliver. Ryan ran his own benchmarks that exceeded Qualcomm’s charts across CPU-pounding tasks like Blender rendering and Chrome browsing.
“The results are still very impressive, showing that it can do as good or better in these scores than Intel or AMD,” Shrout wrote after hands-on testing. He said Qualcomm even pitted the X Elite against Intel’s beefy Core Ultra laptop processors across several benchmarks.
While Shrout urged the typical caveats about test environments and shipping hardware, the embedded tech evangelist oozed confidence in Qualcomm’s latest mobile-first assault on PCs after his demo session. “These machines are the real deal, and the silicon has the chops to compete and win,” he proclaimed.
AI Video Editing to Gaming Prowess
Of course, Qualcomm didn’t just let the silicon do the talking. The company showcased the X Elite reference rigs’ prowess across demanding workloads like video editing in DaVinci Resolve, leveraging the chipset’s specialized AI acceleration.
On the gaming front, Shrout said he even glimpsed Baldur’s Gate 3 running impressively on the prototypes. That’s an major feather in Qualcomm’s cap considering the punishing system requirements for Larian’s latest acclaimed RPG hit.
With Intel and AMD fortifying their PC dominance, Qualcomm clearly understands it needs to make a raucous entrance to turn heads and shake up the lethargic chip establishment. If those blazing X Elite benchmarks translate to retail systems hitting shelves soon, consider the reverberations sent.
