Manufacturers: Snapdragon X falls short of promised performance. Qualcomm: We’ve been ticking the tests

Snapdragon X series processors were presented by Qualcomm already last year. Even then (and repeatedly since then) he presented performance data on this press line to partner manufacturers as well. However, according to SemiAccurate’s contacts with notebook manufacturers, there has been considerable disillusionment since the first processors were delivered to these manufacturers, as none of the partners managed to achieve performance even close to what Qualcomm presented.

At first, the manufacturers’ results were less than half of Qualcomm’s numbers, later they managed to get over 50% of the performance level stated by Qualcomm, but one of SemiAccurate’s sources compared the achieved performance literally to Celeron (Intel’s low-end processor). The performance values, as well as the promises of x86 emulation “better than Rosetta” from Apple, contrast sharply with the results of the manufacturers, and SemiAccurate therefore turned to its contact at Qualcomm, who, under the promise of anonymity, admitted that the numbers presented were invented by Qualcomm.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X (Plus / Elite) Official Specifications

The information indicates that the company probably expected a more significant shift in the development of “Windows on ARM”, however, according to SemiAccurate, the current state is such that what manufacturers consider “terrible”, Microsoft perceives as “perfect”. In other words, by the time these notebooks go on sale in June this year, performance can’t be expected to magically move up tens of percent to meet expectations.

Qualcomm seems to be very well aware of the situation, and although it promised the media detailed materials about the Snapdragon X during one of the previous presentations, in the end it delivered nothing but rather vague slides with performance results (which, according to SemiAccurate, do not match the reality measured by manufacturers) and “specifications” where the entire graphics core is described by one figure in TFLOPS, but we do not learn anything about the architecture, layout, number of functional units or clocks. In the same way, the analysis of the multimedia equipment was reduced to a mention of AV1 support, but data such as supported resolution, frame rate, color depth, number of streams, etc. are completely absent. Qualcomm then informs about the cache with a single value, from which it is not clear how many levels of cache the processor has or which capacity(s) it refers to. The situation seems to be that Qualcomm is trying to prepare at least a minimum room for maneuvering.

This is the umpteenth time when, after a long wait, the arrival of the ARM architecture in the PC world ended in a cold shower. Most of the time, the problem is the operating system or performance hyping above the real level – in this case it looks like a combination of both. If Qualcomm doesn’t pull off a small miracle within two months, the launch of Snapdragon X assembly sales could end in embarrassment. Users can only be recommended to order only after publishing independent reviews.