Qualcomm claims its new chips are 21% faster than Apple’s M3

Qualcomm has tested its Oyron CPU in the Snapdragon X Elite chip against Apple's M3 chip and claims that its new chip outperforms the latest ARM-architecture.

Dec 17, 2023 - 21:03

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Qualcomm claims its new chips are 21% faster than Apple’s M3

Fionna Agomuoh / DigitalTrends

We were able to check out some demoes and see a dummy unit running the company’s new Snapdragon X Elite PC chip, and Qualcomm is making some big performance claims against Apple’s latest silicon.

The Snapdragon’s Qualcomm Oyron CPU, which was announced in October, was being compared to the Apple M2 Max chip at the time. The brand stated in October that its component can match the peak performance of an ARM-compatible competitor using 30% less power. But since then, the competition has changed.

A Qualcomm demo laptop with a slide showing performance comparisons.

Fionna Agomuoh / Digital Trends

Apple notably announced its M3 series chips and accompanying laptops a week after Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X Elite. Performance has been the best point of comparison, especially since Apple has yet to truly delve into the AI space. Qualcomm has compared the CPU to the new M3 chip, similarly claiming that its chip outperforms the leading ARM-compatible competitor for single-threaded CPU performance. Qualcomm also says the Oyron chip is 21% faster than the M3 in multi-core performance. That’s quite the bold claim.

Speaking with Qualcomm, the manufacturer noted that there are bound to be differences in the software experiences, but the hardware remains a consistent metric.

“The experience is not going to be the same because they’re running macOS and we’re running Windows, but in terms of hardware, which is the only thing we can control, it’s good hardware,” Sascha Segan, senior public relations manager told Digital Trends.

In October, Qualcomm also rated its Oyron CPU as faster than the leading x86 CPU on the market. However, Intel has announced its latest 14th-gen Meteor Lake processors as of Thursday. Intel has shared its own specifications for the chips, which also include AI capabilities and various performance statistics, including some really impressive integrated graphics. However, Qualcomm says it has not yet gotten a chance to compare the new series to the Snapdragon X Elite.

Snapdragon-powered PCs are set for mid-2024 availability from vendors including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Honor, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface, Samsung, and Mi. Meanwhile, Qualcomm has had staff members using unbranded reference devices internally to positive reviews that note not only the performance improvements, but the long-rumored induction of on-device AI capabilities for AI PCs.

Segan said to take advantage of the first class of Snapdragon-powered PCs, consumers should forgo purchasing laptops now and wait until the middle of next year.

The hype is real, and we won’t have to wait too much longer to see if it lives up to the big claims.

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Fionna Agomuoh

Fionna Agomuoh is a technology journalist with over a decade of experience writing about various consumer electronics topics…

Apple just did something unprecedented with its new M3 chips

Logos for Apple's M3 chips.

Apple announced the M3 series of chips today but has switched up the rollout in a significant way. In previous years, the company started with the base configuration of the chip series, whether that's the M1 or the M2. The initial releases would build the foundation of what these chips could do on entry-level devices like the MacBook Air or Mac mini.

Intel rolls out its chips in a similar way, starting its annual refresh of laptop chips with its entry-level stuff first.

Snapdragon X Elite is a showstopper chip arriving at the worst possible time

Two Qualcomm Snapdragon chips.

While Apple has been making huge strides with its own Mac chips in recent years, we haven’t really seen anything in the Windows world that can match it for both performance and efficiency at the same time. Now, Qualcomm is claiming its upcoming Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite chips can finally do just that -- but there’s a serious catch involved.

According to PC World, Qualcomm demoed the Snapdragon X Elite at its Snapdragon Technology Summit, where the chipmaker claimed that its latest efforts would trounce everything that came before it, in particular Intel’s 13th-generation processors.

Qualcomm says Oryon chips are faster than Macs’, but we’ve been here before

Qualcomm representative unveiling a new chipset.

Qualcomm wants to "revolutionize" PCs ... again. At its annual Snapdragon Summit, the company announced the first processor under its Snapdragon X branding for PC. The Snapdragon X Elite is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed around Qualcomm's Oryon CPU and Adrendo GPU that comes with a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU).

The CPU includes 12 high-performance cores nestled into three clusters. These cores run at 3.8GHz, according to Qualcomm, but two of them can boost up to 4.25GHz at a time. In addition to the CPU and GPU, the X Elite SoC sports LPDDR5x memory on a memory interface that can deliver 136GB/s of bandwidth.