Qualcomm has announced its new Snapdragon X Elite platform, which looks to be its most powerful computing processor to date. The chips are built on a 4nm process and include 136GB/s of memory bandwidth. PCs are expected to ship in mid-2024. Qualcomm has made the ambitious claim that its Snapdragon X Elite will outperform multiple Intel Core i7 processors on the Geekbench 6 benchmark that measures multi-threaded performance.
This is just a funny claim; the X Elite has 50 percent more cores than the M2 and sucks down much more power, so of course it is going to do better on Geekbench at “peak multi-thread performance.” That’s like a professional sprinter bragging about winning the 100-meter dash against a bunch of marathon champions. But I digress. Clearly, this chip is not a potato, and I imagine that it will offer a huge step up in performance from the Snapdragon PC chips that we’ve seen in the past.