There is currently a lot of hype about the capabilities of the Snapdragon X Elite and talk about the “end of the x86 architecture”. Well, I’d say it’s a classic marketing campaign to convince manufacturers to try to make premium products with this processor, but the question is whether it will work because we’ve had this before. Several times!
The astonishing capabilities of the Snapdragon X Elite were presented to us by a video directly from Qualcomm, which promises everything from extreme speed, the best NPU processor in laptops and stunning energy efficiency that will make Snapdragon laptops the very best AI PCs in history.
A number of videos have surfaced celebrating Snapdragon’s new processor against not only Intel Core Ultra, which is said to offer “half the efficiency per watt”, but also other advantages. It all sounds like less experienced users and reviewers would be stumped.
Those more experienced would surely wonder how exactly Qualcomm benchmarked its marvel, which undoubtedly requires some instruction translation – and that’s on prototype hardware, since no real hardware exists yet. And as everyone knows, when there is no real hardware, you cannot measure real benchmarks, because the efficiency of the processor is one thing, but the rest of the system is the rest of the system, and there the screen and, for example, the implementation of wireless communications have a lot to do with the results.
Well, and then there was the accusation of slight cheating in the benchmarks, where, according to SemiAccurate, none of the OEMs were able to even remotely replicate Qualcomm’s claimed power efficiency.
Are these statements true? We don’t know. But what we do know is that we have to take all benchmarks from devices that don’t exist yet as very indicative – and that all benchmarks given by the manufacturer very likely show the best possible result.
Optimism still reigns among news-oriented media – and they paint a bright future for us. I state bluntly: Do not trust ANY of them. No one has the final hardware, everyone is parroting Qualcomm’s propaganda and their plans for a bright tomorrow. Some cheerleaders even go so far as to predict the “death of the x86 architecture” – and I’m just saying that they join their fathers and grandfathers who have been predicting the death of the x86 architecture since at least 1985, when news of the superiority of RISC architectures first appeared on over CISC architectures.
Tags: ARM ranks brands Snapdragon kills x86 architecture
