The Snapdragon X Elite is just starting to emerge in the wild, powering Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs, and early reviews are not promising for the future of Windows. Reddit user r/caponica23 shared his review of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge on Monday, and the benchmarks fail to meet the performance of the iPhone 12 mini, released in 2021.
Running the laptop through its paces on GeekBench and CrystalDiskMark and subjective battery and gaming tests didn't fare well for the Snapdragon X Elite processor. The computer scored 1829 on single-core and 11379 on multi-core while on battery power. Performance barely increased to 1841 points single-core and 11537 multi-score points when plugged in. These numbers are well below Qualcomm's own tests at press events, showing off 2977 single-core points and 15086 multi-core points. Gaming performance was also sub-par; Resident Evil 7: Village resulted in 40-50 FPS at 1080p and with AMD's FSR on performance mode.
It should not be divisive to say that this performance is abysmal for what Qualcomm promised. Angry internet warriors have taken to Qualcomm with pitchforks in hand, rallying against the reports. One X (formally known as Twitter) user highlighted how the Samsung laptop's single-core performance falls below the level of even the iPhone 12 mini, as seen below.
For those who can’t comprehend how f*cking miserable this is, X Elite’s actual big core performance is slower than the 4-year-old A14 chip in the iPhone 12 mini.Qualcomm initially inflated the single-core score to 3200, which dropped to 2900 in an actual Windows environment,… pic.twitter.com/SFxk8sEMZmJune 13, 2024
Before you grab your pitchfork and join the mob, there are multiple possible reasons for this disappointing performance. The most obvious is a hardware fluke. The CPU never boosted above 2.52 GHz in the Reddit tests. This is an obvious concern as the Elite X advertises boost clocks up to 4.0 GHz. The above X thread alleges that the Galaxy Book4 Edge physically limited the CPU speeds to keep cooling and battery performance maintainable, but this doesn't line up with other GeekBench scores for the Samsung laptop arriving today with some of the faster scores in the Copilot+ lineup.
However, multiple GeekBench tests of various Snapdragon X Elite models coming in today also report single-core scores in the 1700s-1800s, well below the iPhone 12 benchmark. Qualcomm's review embargo has not lifted yet, and it is unclear if we will see a firmware update arrive for X Elite before then, boosting the performance of underperforming chips in the wild.
Tom's Hardware journalists enjoyed their hands-on time with Microsoft's Surface laptops at the Microsoft Build event in May, finding no proof of foul play in Microsoft's demos or benchmarks. Third-party reviewers have also gotten high results in their deeper testing, though Microsoft commissioned the reviews, so take the results with a grain of salt. In-depth day-one reviews haven't come out due to the review embargo, so withhold judgment until then. At the very least, nothing has been so bad as the severe allegations of Qualcomm's benchmark cheating from back in April.
