Qualcomm counters Intel about its performance claims

In the year since Qualcomm first debuted its Snapdragon X Elite, the competition hasn’t been silent. Intel released both Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake chips, the latter of which felt like a legitimate response to Qualcomm’s advances in battery life and efficiency.

But Qualcomm isn’t impressed by Intel’s latest offerings.

Qualcomm doesn’t have new PC chips to announce at its annual summit — instead, the company spent some time with journalists pointing out that some of the claims made by Intel are leaving out some important details.

Qualcomm has two main criticisms of how Intel has talked about its new Lunar Lake or Core Ultra Series 2 chips. First, that Intel has left off from its direct comparisons Qualcomm’s highest configuration, the X1E-84-100. Instead, Intel relies on the X1E-80-100 and X1E-78-100 in its comparisons. According to the numbers Qualcomm presented, as you can see in the graph below, leaving out the X1E-84-100 allows Intel to take the lead in some performance benchmarks. The other slight wrinkle, according to Qualcomm, in Intel’s marketing is that its own highest-end configuration, the Core Ultra 9 288V, isn’t yet available in retailers. That call into question Intel’s claim that these are “the fastest cores.”

The larger argument, of course, is that Qualcomm’s part still offers better power efficiency. In particular, Qualcomm calls out the fact that Lunar Lake chips consume 38% more power at peak performance.

Of course, performance wasn’t Intel’s biggest claim with the Core Ultra Series 2. It was all about battery life. And in my own testing, I was thoroughly impressed by just how long these laptops last, especially in the most demanding workloads. For now, it takes the crown in terms of battery life.

Qualcomm doesn’t dispute Intel’s ambitious claims, but notes that Intel isn’t telling the whole story. As we learned in our own testing, Core Ultra Series 2 chips don’t perform well on battery, which is a strength of Arm chips, including both Snapdragon X Elite chips and Apple Silicon. Qualcomm shows that across the board, Intel’s latest chips have a serious dip in performance while on battery, dropping as much as 54% in some tests.

To be fair, this has always been true of Intel’s chips, but Qualcomm has a point. As long as Intel’s battery life is, it’s true that you’re losing a solid amount of performance. That’s not true with the Snapdragon X Elite.

For most people, however, they just might choose the extra hours of battery life over some performance. Let’s not forget: we’re talking about small, thin-and-light laptops — not high-performance machines. That calculation might change in larger, more powerful laptops. But right now, Intel’s focus on battery life feels like the right choice — even if it was being a bit misleading when comparing against Qualcomm.