Snapdragon X Elite is all the rage. For some, these new SoCs are simply going to shake up the PC industry. These ARM solutions, which will run Windows, are announced as a kind of equivalent to Apple Silicon chips in the Windows world. In their euphoria, some analysts are even predicting that these solutions will push Intel and AMD out of the notebook PC market for some time to come.
Snapdragon X Elite: fake benchmarks?
The problem in this industry is that when teasing goes on for a long time, even far too long, there may be a wolf somewhere. For several months now, Qualcomm has been announcing that its Snapdragon X Elite will outperform all other processors in the sector. For months now, we’ve been seeing leaks and tests showing just how much faster Qualcomm’s baby is, and how much less power it consumes, than the best processors from other brands. But now someone has come along to cool things down. The disrupter is SemiAccurate. It claims that no OEM has been able to match Qualcomm’s most recent test results. They state that, according to their sources, OEM performance is 50% below what the company has shown. Qualcomm engineers claim that this is due to poor Windows optimization with Arm and poor cooling. The accusations are direct and well-founded. Thus, Qualcomm would avoid any pointed technical questions on the subject. The technical briefing is said to be “pathetic” (a word used by the author): 11 slides, three of them empty, five “reference” slides with woefully inadequate disclosure and two infographic summary slides. But the insincerity of the benchmarks published by Qualcomm would be self-evident. The information comes from two Tier 1 OEMs and other sources.
WART (Windows on ARM): a disaster?
The problem is that Qualcomm won’t let anyone carry out independent tests on its new Snapdragons. We’re just a few weeks away from Microsoft’s official announcement on May 20, and the laptops will go on sale in June. Another aspect of the problem concerns claims of better emulation than Apple’s Rosetta 2 x86 emulation. Here again, these claims are clearly not true. In fact, silicon emulation may be better, but everything else undeniably is not. Qualcomm’s only “response” to these potentially bogus figures is to pass the buck to Microsoft. As far as they’re concerned, their chips are clean and definitive, but the lamentable state of WART (Windows on ARM) is the cause of all these misunderstandings… In that case, what OS were these fabulous benchmarks running on?
