Recent Geekbench 6 scores have revealed that the Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm's upcoming CPU, has surpassed AMD's flagship laptop APU, the Ryzen 9 7940HS, in both single- and multi-core ratings, indicating that the next generation of Arm-based CPUs might compete with x86 chips used in laptops and desktop PCs.
According to Geekbench results spotted by Tom's Hardware, the Snapdragon X Elite was tested on a “Qualcomm ZH-WXX” PC, believed to be a Snapdragon X Elite reference computer. It is unclear if the performance of this reference PC matches that of the final product.
The Snapdragon X Elite is anticipated to be Qualcomm's fastest Arm consumer processor ever, packing 12 Oryon cores built by Nuvia (acquired by the company in January 2021). The CPU is manufactured on TSMC's N4 node, featuring two cores that can boost up to 4.3GHz each, while the remaining ten can go up to 3.8GHz.
On paper, the Snapdragon X Elite may not seem like it could win the battle against the top-tier mobile processors from AMD and Intel, which can exceed 5GHz and have more threads and cores. However, the results show otherwise, as the Ryzen 9 7940HS APU was outperformed in the single- (2,574 vs 2,475) and multi-core (12,562 vs 11,667) Geekbench tests against the Snapdragon X Elite. The Ryzen 9 7945HX, however, does beat the upcoming Snapdragon chip, but only by a small margin for single-core workloads. As for multi-core loads, the Ryzen 9 7945 HX comfortably outperformed the Snapdragon X Elite by 24%.
With this level of performance, Qualcomm may even consider making the Snapdragon a CPU suitable for mini PCs and AIO systems, as it could match the Ryzen 5 7600's multi-core performance and nearly match its single-core performance.
There are some concerns regarding the legitimacy of the benchmark results, as the base CPU clock speed is stated as 4.01GHz instead of 3.8GHz, and there are two CPU clusters with eight and four cores each. Nonetheless, there are solid reasons to believe that this benchmark is authentic, including many consistent results for what appears to be the Snapdragon X Elite on Geekbench 6.
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KitGuru says: This is still early silicon, so there is still work to be done before these chips are ready to roll out. From the sounds of it, we'll be seeing much more on the Snapdragon Elite X at Computex later this year.