Early Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks seemingly confirm the chip's incredible performance and battery life potential

Microsoft Surface Laptop
(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's all-new Surface Laptop sporting Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC has been tested and reviewed by a third party, Signal65. The review was commissioned by Microsoft, and other reviewers haven't been able to chime in just yet, but the results seem to confirm what Qualcomm has been saying. The testing compared the X Elite-equipped Surface to four other devices in a plethora of benchmarks, including thermal testing, to see how Qualcomm's new silicon stacks up.

Ryan Shrout shows that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC delivers as advertised. The chip boasts outstanding AI performance and features incredibly long battery life in Microsoft's latest Surface laptop. CPU performance was also excellent, often outperforming Intel's Meteor Lake processors and, at times, outperforming Apple's M3 silicon. The chip also boasts good thermal behavior, featuring competitively low surface temperatures even under maximum load.

The new X Elite Surface laptop was compared with Microsoft's older Surface Laptop 5 sporting an Alder Lake Core i7-1255U, the Surface Pro 9 with SQ3 silicon, MSI's Prestige 16 AI EVO sporting Intel's latest Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H, and Apple's latest MacBook Air 15 running on M3 silicon.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • ThomasKinsley
    This looks good, but I'm still nervous that the benchmark is commissioned by Microsoft and therefore is not truly independent. We need tech review sites to get their hands on these machines to get real results.
    Reply
  • Pierce2623
    Wait…so 12 full fat p cores beats big.LITTLE chips in a multithreaded test? Who would’ve ever guessed that?
    Reply
  • kealii123
    So as far as I can tell, this is roughly on par with AMD's 780m? Kinda disappointing on the graphics side.
    Reply
  • Pierce2623
    kealii123 said:
    So as far as I can tell, this is roughly on par with AMD's 780m? Kinda disappointing on the graphics side.
    I mean that was expected. The 780m is 4.2tflops and this is 4.5tflops. Both are limited by a 128 bit bus shared with the CPU anyways.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    Every couple years Microsoft pretends to care about ARM, pushes out a product that nobody buys, and quietly sweeps it under the rug so they can pretend like the next one is a big deal.

    At the end of the day, I think people just don't want a nerfed computer that forces you to use a phone-style app store that charges inflated prices. Because Microsoft is going to make their ARM products locked into the Microsoft store again, just like every other time, right?
    I don't think that Microsoft understands that if they limit features of their desk-sized computers to make it work like a phone... then people are just going to use their phones.

    Like I'll keep a laptop around because mobile websites are awful, feature limited, and often broken. I usually can't pay my bills with a phone, because a lot of the places I need to pay bills tend to not have an adequate mobile page. Since "desktop mode" doesn't do anything useful anymore, well that's one reason to keep a PC handy. But when Microsoft inevitably decides they can compete with android by forcing their desktop browser to only display broken mobile pages, I wouldn't say "Well it's broken in both places so I might as well leave the phone at home and take the laptop". I would just ditch the useless laptop.

    Microsoft could delete their app store and lean into the high performance, customizability, flexibility, open marketplace, wide compatibility, or any of the other things a PC can do a lot better than mobile... but they refuse. Their current leadership apparently has no idea what product they are supposed to be selling.
    Reply
  • Notton
    Pierce2623 said:
    Wait…so 12 full fat p cores beats big.LITTLE chips in a multithreaded test? Who would’ve ever guessed that?
    What's crazy is that X Elite's die size is only around 171mm². (estimated to be a range between 165mm² and 182mm²)
    For comparison, Zen4 Phoenix (7840, etc.) is 178mm²
    It's hard to judge the GPU portion die size, but they perform similarly.

    I think the key takeaway here is Snapdragon fit 12 full cores in where as AMD could only fit 8.
    Reply
  • tigerseal12
    Was this a sponsored article? Seriously, your headline says "incredible performance and battery life" but 10% battery life on Procyon over a 8-month old Core Ultra and "equivalent" to M3 does not scream game-changer. This from an opaque sponsored reviewer which at best set up ideal conditions for the Snapdragon X. Behind the M3 and only 5% difference vs the 7H on single-threaded performance. It still could not outperform with emulated apps, merely "matching", likely on a cherry-picked app. It's an improvement over the 8cx sure but the headline is hyperbolic.
    Reply
  • Quirkz
    A warning sign to me was the comparison to a macbook air. A passively cooled lower power version of the device compared under a sustained workload to an actively cooled device. Yeap. I'd expect the any actively cooled device to beat the macbook air during sustained workloads.
    The better comparison for pure performance would have been the macbook pro.

    (Value for money is a different question of course. If this device retails at better performance than the air at the same pricepoint, then that's quite a win.)
    Reply
  • NeoMorpheus
    Crtl+F “AMD= zero.

    Amazing writing skills that somehow manages to ignore one important CPU player in such manner.

    Anyways, hopefully that wont happen when real reviews are done.
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    Giroro said:
    Microsoft could delete their app store and lean into the high performance, customizability, flexibility, open marketplace, wide compatibility, or any of the other things a PC can do a lot better than mobile... but they refuse. Their current leadership apparently has no idea what product they are supposed to be selling.
    Microsoft isn't interested in your optimal personal computer experience or empowering you.

    Microsoft wants to become another fruity cult that sells dependency and addiction and rest assured that the bucks will keep on coming.

    And unfortunately nobody else wants you satisfied either, because that's when you stop spending.
    Reply