Initial review of Snapdragon X Elite shows it’s slower than the four-year-old iPhone 12

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Initial review of Snapdragon X Elite shows it's slower than the four-year-old iPhone 12

Although several brands have released their Copilot+ computers with ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite processors, we have yet to see detailed reviews of their performance and battery life.

However, one Reddit user, u/caponica23, got his hands on a Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge earlier and shared some initial findings in a lengthy article. And the performance of the Snapdragon X Elite chip seems disappointing, falling short of Qualcomm’s marketing promises.

The laptop scored 1829 points in the single-core Geekbench test and 11379 points in the multi-core test while running on battery power. Connecting to the mains gave a minimal improvement – 1841 and 11537 points, respectively. However, these figures are significantly lower than those announced by Qualcomm at press events: 2977 single-core and 15086 multi-core points.

The user explains the low results in the tests by the fact that the processor does not reach the declared clock speed. The review on Reddit notes that the Snapdragon X Elite chip on the Book 4 Edge operates at a maximum frequency of 2.52 GHz, which is much lower than the 4.0 GHz claimed by Qualcomm.


In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), user INIYSA suggests that the computer may throttle the processor to manage thermal conditions and battery power. Other laptops running Snapdragon X Elite models on Geekbench also show similar disappointing single-core results in the 1700-1800 range.

An X user compared the single-core performance of the X Elite to that of the iPhone 12 Mini, noting that it was even slower than the 4-year-old A14 chip.

Since the Qualcomm review embargo is still in effect, it is unknown if the firmware update will resolve these performance issues before official reviews are published.

Performance in games was initially just as impressive. According to the user, Resident Evil 7: Village was running at 1080p with 40-50 frames per second and severe frame drops, even with AMD’s FSR in performance mode. However, the user later reported that a new update fixed the GPU issues, and now the game runs at 60-100 frames per second without frame tearing.

The update seems to have resolved the GPU performance lag issue, so we hope the next update can improve the processor performance as promised by Qualcomm. Otherwise, the initial benchmarks of the Snapdragon X Elite raise serious concerns about its capabilities in Windows on ARM devices.

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