X2 Elite is Qualcomm’s latest attempt to bring Apple’s M-series magic to the PC Qualcomm revealed the second act in its bid to overtake Intel and AMD as the leading laptop CPU maker this week with the paper launch of its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme processors. The company seeks to bring the kind of battery life and performance Apple has gotten out of its Arm-based M-series silicon to the Windows …
I have the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge which has the Snapdragon X[1] Elite.
It is not as fast as the M4 in my MacBook Air, but it is also a lot cheaper.
The M4 is vastly over-powered for most people - the non-binned M4 (Apple's second slowest laptop chip) is about the same speed as the non-K i9 (Intel's second fastest laptop chip).
If you are looking for a gaming laptop, don't buy either of them, but in everyday use, the only time I actually notice the difference in speed between the M4 and X-Elite is when I run benchmarking software on them. There are just no delays or lagginess when doing things on either of those laptops.
This is all about latency. These little 0.5s-1s moments to wait for something add up. You might think this is nothing, but it adds massive friction especially to people who are sensitive to it like me. I try to buy the fastest machine I can get even if it means just writing notes and letting that power sit "idle" most of the time.
How much die space are Qualcomm wasting on this that could have been used for something useful like another core?
Not that I'm the target market for these chips. I've tried Apple's M series and have no idea what all the fuss is about. I found the Macbook Air to be slow as molases and a pain to use compared to my PCs. It has sat in a cardboard box at the back of a cupboard since I moved house 18 months ago.
