Qualcomm Claims Snapdragon X Elite Is Superior To Intel Lunar Lake & AMD Strix, Shows 2nd Gen Oryon CPU Up To 134% Than Core Ultra 200V

Qualcomm has shared new benchmarks of its Snapdragon X Elite & 2nd Gen Oryon CPU, which show far superior performance than Intel & AMD.

Qualcomm’s Benchmarks Puts Its Snapdragon X Elite Laptop SoC Ahead of Intel’s Lunar Lake & AMD Strix Point, But Inconsistencies Are Present

It looks like Qualcomm has taken a dig at Intel’s Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake” CPUs, where Team Blue claims that their newest mobile SoCs are faster than ARM-based counterparts.

The San Diego chipmaker presented a series of benchmarks, which involved a more extensive comparison of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite SKUs with Intel’s Lunar Lake, and Qualcomm’s Director of Engineering Sriram Dixit disclosed that Intel didn’t put the Snapdragon platform at “level grounds” when advertising its Lunar Lake benchmarks.

Qualcomm has provided benchmarks stacking up their Snapdragon X1E-84-100 with Intel’s mid-tier Core Ultra 7 256V, where the chipmaker claims that they managed to witness a 10% performance gap with Intel’s Lunar Lake counterpart in Geekbench single-core testing and with multi-core, this gap increased up to 52%, which is a massive figure. It’s important to note that these performance bumps also come with higher power efficiency numbers, so overall, things are solid for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform.

However, the above testing has some disparities, mainly in the difference in core configurations; Intel’s Core Ultra 7 256V is an eight-core chip, while the Snapdragon X1E-84-100 comes with twelve Oryon chip cores onboard. Hence the testing isn’t too fair when it comes to the difference in specifications. However, Qualcomm does say that its flagship Snapdragon chip surpasses Intel’s flagship counterpart, the Core Ultra 9 288V, in multi-core testing, revealing that they utilized benchmarks from PCWorld to support their claim since they didn’t have access to Intel’s chip.

At Cinebench R24, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X1E-84-100 surpasses Intel Core Ultra 9 288V by three points, and while the gap is slim here, the performance difference increases in Geekbench 6’s multi-core benchmark by a whopping 44% difference, showing that Qualcomm is indeed leading in both single-core and multi-core testing, which is undoubtedly interesting to witness.

Raw performance is where Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X1E-84-100 has a slight edge, and in terms of power efficiency, Qualcomm says that they are a leader in this segment, too.

Qualcomm’s newly surfaced benchmarks depict that the chipmaker isn’t taking competition from Intel’s Lunar Lake lightly.

The firm does claim that it is superior in raw performance and efficiency, but the benchmarks posted aren’t even grounds, showing that the talk isn’t conclusive yet. During the Snapdragon Summit 2024, the company showcased even more benchmarks that the X Elite is claimed to deliver:

• 12% Faster CPU Performance vs AMD Ryzen AI 9 at ISO-power (43% More Power)
• 10% Faster CPU Performance vs Intel Core Ultra 7 at ISO-Power (38% More Power)

These new benchmarks were conducted within Geekbench Single-core tests where Qualcomm further showcased the “Unplugged” performance of each respective platform. The Intel Lunar Lake “Core Ultra 7 256V” was about 45% slower while the AMD Strix Point “Ryzen AI 9 HX 370” was 30 percent slower when the battery wasn’t plugged in.

Snapdragon X Elite is shown to have no CPU performance loss even when plugged in though do keep in mind that this is just one benchmark and Qualcomm isn’t sharing any multi-threaded or single-core benchmarks outside of Geekbench which is a popular test for sure but has usually showcased strong results for X Elite chips in the past even though real-world performance can be a lot different as made evident in reviews.

Moving forward, Qualcomm also showcased its 2nd Gen Oryon CPU’s performance which is first going to power smartphones and then move over to laptops in the same Elite segment. This CPU will offer a big performance bump with up to a 134% improvement showcased over the Intel Lunar Lake SoCs. The company once again claims that Snapdragon 2nd Gen Oryon CPUs will offer up to 62% faster performance vs Intel’s Core Ultra 7 Series 2 chips at ISO and the Lunar Lake chips.

• 2nd Gen Oryon CPU: 3209 Single-Core / 10,205 Multi-Core (Geekbench 6.2)
• Intel Lunar Lake CPU: 1370 Single-Core / 7,361 Multi-Core (Geekbench 6.2)

Do note that Geekbench 6.2 is an older version since it’s been replaced by 6.3. Also, the testing was done using an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V on the Dell XPS 13 with a Balanced power mode but it looks like this might be once again unplugged performance rather than plugged in.

So yeah, it looks like Qualcomm is once again offering some big performance demos and numbers to accompany their existing and upcoming Snapdragon CPUs with Oryon cores. The 2nd Gen cores are likely to appear on laptops by the middle of next year so stay tuned for more info.