Snapdragon X Elite Reviews are Out: Solid Performance and Great Battery Life | Beebom
Copilot+ PCs have started shipping and early reviews are out for the Snapdragon X Elite processor. We have collated all the reviews in one place.
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Most of the reviews I've seen so far are a bit lukewarm. Performance and bettery is good, but they're barely better than what Intel and AMD offer. They promised 20+ hours battery life, we get around 12-13 which is in line with other chips.
The screenshots in the article are from Dave2D's video which compared gaming laptops to the X Elite. Laptops without a dedicated GPU could outperform it in battery, and are usually cheaper. Not to mention the new generation of chips are reportedly way more efficient. Kind of underwhelming.
I think people believe that the ARM ISA brings a power efficient design but what really made Apple able to sip power on the M1 was a decade of phone processor design experience and full control of the software stack.
The people working on Snapdragon X Elite are supposedly the same people that worked on the M1 and M2 chips. They made their own company to make ARM chips before being acquired by qualcomm. I was hoping for similar gains...
...but you've got Microsoft writing the OS.
Power draw is not all hardware.
I've been a general skeptic of exactly how much the power and performance to power stats are attributable to the ARM instruction set or architecture versus the fact that Apple just locks up TSMC's latest and greatest node for a year before everyone else. AMD's CPUs are still x86_64 but achieve similar performance per watt as the Apple silicon on the same node and similar TDPs.
So if it turns out that TSMC has the secret sauce, then maybe we don't need to move laptops over to ARM at all.
I thought it was the deal with (what was it, TSMC?), they got the new nm generation first?
It's a mixed bag. The smaller nodes have bigger problems with static leakage power, Vs dynamic switching power (which goes down)
Performance and bettery is good, but they're barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.
And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.
Relevant Chipsandcheese article
https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter/