Qualcomm’s 8-Core Snapdragon X Plus, Tested: A Competitive, Cheaper Chip
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In the year since Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon X series of laptop processors, two concerns have undermined their promise of an Apple Silicon-esque combination of long battery life and high performance.
One has been compatibility with Windows apps and drivers written for AMD and Intel processors—a big part of its announcements at the Snapdragon Summit this week. Another has been cost, with the first round of Snapdragon X Elite laptops starting at relatively high prices.
Qualcomm took one step toward addressing that second concern when it introduced the cheaper Snapdragon X Plus series of chips, first in a version with 10 cores and now in a still more affordable eight-core version.
Laptops based on this branch of the Snapdragon X family tree are starting to arrive at considerably cheaper prices. For example, Lenovo’s lineup starts at just $749. But what kind of performance can you expect from Qualcomm’s cheaper Snapdragon X Plus eight-core chips?
Testing Eight-Core Snapdragon X Plus’ Mettle
Back at IFA 2024, Qualcomm hosted a benchmarking session for journalists to give them a sense of the cheaper X Plus’s performance. The company provided a set of Asus Vivobook S 15 ($839.99 as tested) laptops, each running on a Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 processor representing the low end of the Snapdragon X hierarchy (PDF). The laptops were set up with a suite of benchmarking apps, and journalists were then allowed to run those apps as they saw fit.
The major takeaway, as you can see in the charts below comparing the Vivobook S 15 with a few peer systems running Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm chips, is that the eight-core X Plus provides a reasonable less-for-less trade-off that should draw people who buy laptops with price and battery life, not raw speed, foremost in mind.
The results we saw (which matched the tests Qualcomm had run in advance on these laptops and shared with the press) show visible but tiny drops in performance relative to the Snapdragon X Elite. They also show the cheaper chip besting Intel’s previous-generation Meteor Lake laptop chip and, in places, AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 Series.
For example, in Cinebench 2024, the Asus X Plus laptop’s multi-core render score edged out an Asus Zenbook Duo ($1,499.99 as tested) running a Core Ultra 7 155H and an Asus Zenbook S 16 ($1,699.99 as tested) with an AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series but fell considerably short of a Dell XPS 13 9345 ($999.99 as tested) powered by a Snapdragon X Elite. It also outpaced a new-model Intel “Lunar Lake” Core Ultra 7 by a big margin, due in big part to that line’s dropping of thread-doubling Hyper-Threading with these new Intel chips.
Another way to look at these results, especially if you are reading this on a laptop that’s two or more years old: A machine with an eight-core X Plus chip should feel dramatically faster than your current system. For example, the Asus laptop’s score in the Speedometer in-browser benchmark is more than double the 10.4 points I recorded on the 13th Gen Core i7 laptop on which I’m writing this post, an HP Spectre x360 (2022).
What These Tests Tell (and Don’t Tell) About Snapdragon X Plus’ Future
But it’s also important to call out two observations that don’t appear in those stats.
One is that the testing process itself revealed some compatibility problems: GFXBench crashed twice until I remembered to select the Qualcomm PR-specified test of Aztec Ruins Vulkan. At the same time, the UL Procyon suite couldn’t run one of the default tests, AI Computer Vision.
Non-technical users don’t run benchmarking apps more complicated than broadband speed-test tools, so those glitches should not represent a genuine concern for most people. But they do suggest the enormity of the task Microsoft and Qualcomm are undertaking in making Windows an operating system that coexists on two separate processor architectures. (See our feature on the state of Windows on Arm’s emulation layer, Prism.)
The other observation came via my fingertips, not my eyes: Even as these benchmarking apps had the Snapdragon X Plus chip cranking away in extended, processor-intensive tasks like video rendering, the Vivobook laptop stayed cool the whole time. This is particularly important for portability and overall system longevity.
These early benchmark results, albeit from one laptop in a single configuration, preview a computing experience from eight-core Snapdragon X Plus that will generally keep pace with comparably equipped and priced systems—not to mention laptops twice its price, in some cases. That’s a promising position to be in for Qualcomm, legal troubles or not.
(Disclosure: IFA’s organizers covered most of my travel costs and those of other invited US journalists and analysts.)
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