THIS MIGHT BE ONE of the most exciting notebooks we’ve ever taken a look at. There’s something quite unique about it, and it’s all to do with processing. Don’t let the buzzwords and marketing hype get to you first; yes, it does have AI features baked in as standard, and a lot of those are unique software elements well worth talking about, but the key thing is what’s hidden away under the hood: the Snapdragon X Elite ARM processor.
Yep, this is none other than Qualcomm’s 4nm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 CPU (catchy name). It packs in 12 cores, 42 MB of cache, a 3.4 GHz clock speed, and an Adreno GPU producing 3.8 TFLOPs of processing power, along with a dedicated NPU (neural processing unit, for AI operations) generating 45 TOPS. And all of that with a TDP of just 45 watts. That has been paired with 16GB of non-expandable soldered DDR5 RAM running at 8,440 MT/s. 16GB is on the low end, for sure, especially as the chip is capable of housing up to 64GB total. But it’s not dissimilar to Apple’s M3 series chips. It still has all the modern-day bells and whistles here too. There’s support for WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and plenty of clout for graphical rendering as well. One downside is that it lacks support for PCIe 5.0, but that’s about it. Pair that with a phenomenal 18-hour battery life, and it’s an absolute beast of a unit.
Here’s the thing: throw this through some benchmarks, and it quickly gets interesting. In GeekBench 6.2.1, the Snapdragon scored 2,444 points in singlecore, and 9,008 in the multi-core tests. For comparison, Huawei’s Matebook D 16, featuring an Intel Core i9-13900H, landed 2,605 points in single core, and 12,568 points in multi-core respectively. Clearly that’s a win for Intel, albeit just 6.5 percent in single-core, and 39.5 percent in multi-core (although it packs in 66 percent more threads). However, the 13900H tops out at 115W of power draw, versus the Snapdragon’s 45W. For efficiency, the difference is astronomical. Take that single core percentage, divide it to see performance per watt, and you’re left with 54.3 for Snapdragon and 22.7 points per watt for Intel. Even AMD is nowhere near that efficiency. But we’re not done, because this isn’t a normal run; this Snapdragon is emulating Windows, and these benchmarks, as it does this.