While the Snapdragon X2 Elite of Qualcomm normally has no more secrets for you – if this is not the case, do not hesitate to take a look at our dedicated microarchitectural summary -, a major problem arises: but where are the products and the associated tests? While some are already calling out firmware issues – energy consumption is said to be the cause, which would explain the firm’s silence on this subject a few months earlier – some media (but not H&Co, sniff) have nevertheless been able to get their hands on the first copies, without measuring consumption accurately (well, well!). However, some copies are in circulation or, in any case, are still being tested, since two scores Geekbench have leaked on the web, both concerning an ASUS Zenbook A16 in its 48 GiB version of tri-channel LPDDR5 (yes, it’s a dream!).
On the menu, both the CPU and the GPU have been put on the test bench, yay! The first mentioned displays 4033 points in single core and 23,198 points in multicore, thus surpassing the Apple M4 by a hundred points on a thread, but beaten by around 2,000 points on multithreaded loads. Opposite, the competitors that are the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and the Core Ultra An unexpected comeback for Qualcomm, ensuring incredible performance against the competition? Not really. On the one hand, these scores were already announced and freely demonstrated during the presentation of the pre-production models last November. On the other hand, this type of synthetic benchmark is not always representative of the bousin’s performance in practice, and could for example be very fond of on-package RAM, if the latter is correctly optimized (which we have no doubt given the firm’s expertise in the matter on smartphones). Finally, such performances are remarkable, it is still necessary that the heating is correctly controlled in boost, which we cannot be sure of by looking at the report alone.
On the GPU side, it’s difficult to give much credit to GeekBench in view of the single MHz detected as a frequency and the 16 associated CUs; on the other hand, the 44,768 points in OpenCL place the beauty slightly above an Intel Arc A380 and double the performance of its predecessor, the Snapdragon X Elite. However, given the Arm ecosystem, in-game performance will also be linked to the efficiency of the software part (Ray Tracing/Upscaling on the front line). So many encouraging elements, but incapable of answering the main question on our minds: damn it, when will we finally be able to fiddle with the beast! (Source: NotebookCheck)
