Apple Slayed? Snapdragon X Elite Reigns Supreme in Battery Life, Intel has no chance
Apple and their M-powered MacBooks are the kings when it comes to efficiency and battery life, but that might not be the case anymore. The Snapdragon X Elite is an ARM-based chip made directly for laptops, targeting to meet or exceed the performance and efficiency of the Apple M-series, finally giving Windows users a capable ARM alternative.
These chips are going to be the new status quo when it comes to thin and light laptops, as there are even rumblings of Intel and AMD coming up with their own ARM-based designs. NVIDIA was going to outright buy ARM Ltd, but couldn’t due to regulatory pressure. NVIDIA is heavily invested in ARM processors, as many of its AI chips utilize the architecture.
Nevertheless, let’s get back on track and see how well the Snapdragon X Elite compares to the Apple M3. Other participants include the Core Ultra 7 155H and the Core i7-1255U.
Local video playback
For this test, the internet is off, and the screen brightness is adjusted to 150 nits. The looped video uses H.264 encoding, which is a more common and efficient codec. Here we have another addition to the field, the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G, with Microsoft’s very own ARM-based SQ3. You can see that the test uses relative performance and doesn’t give us the exact hours, however, the Snapdragon X Elite is the longest-lasting of them all, followed by the Apple M3. Next is the Core Ultra 7 155H, which is also quite a powerful chip. The least efficient CPU is the Core i7-1255U, which is crazy considering that it has just a 15W TDP.
Productivity
Here we have the Procyon productivity benchmark, created by the same people who make the 3DMark benchmarks. It tests the performance of office apps, having the ability to simulate workflows in Office apps, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and more. Here we have the Office Productivity benchmark, which goes through Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more to calculate performance. Here, the X Elite has the highest score, followed by the Core Ultra 7 155H, the Microsoft SQ3, and the Core i7-1255U. The Apple M3 is missing, since the Procyon benchmark isn’t supported on macOS.
All laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite: