A few days back, Qualcomm introduced Snapdragon X Elite at the Snapdragon Summit. This is the SoC for compact desktop PCs. Later Apple also unveiled the Apple M3 at the Scary Fast event. M3 is powering Apple’s latest Macbook Pro and iMac models. On the other hand, Snapdragon X Elite will be used for Windows laptops. Apple M3 and Snapdragon X Elite are for PCs, so we thought to compare them and see which chip is better in terms of performance.
Snapdragon X Elite is not yet available in consumer products. So, I didn’t get a chance to see the real-world performance. I have gone through the specs sheet and benchmark scores of both Snapdragon X Elite and Apple M3. I also saw the claims of both companies while launching their respective chips. This comparison is based on the data available in the public domain.
Apple M3 vs Snapdragon X Elite
Apple’s M3 chip is built on a 3mn process, while Snapdragon X Elite is built on a 4nm process. The small manufacturing process in M3 makes the chip faster and more battery-efficient. But the Snapdragon X Elite has more number of cores and a few more things to boast of.
Snapdragon X Elite has a 12-core CPU with a base frequency of 3.8 GHz and it computers 12 threads. Qualcomm claims that X Elite is 50% faster than M2 chip.
Apple M3 has an octa-core process with a 3.7 GHz base frequency of performance cores. While introducing M3, Apple claims that M3 is up to 35 percent faster than the M1 for CPU performance.
If we closely look at both claims, we can conclude that Snapdragon X Elite will surely be faster than M3 in terms of CPU performance.
Now we also have the performance numbers on Geekbench. M3 managed a single-core score of 3,076 and a multi-core score of 11,863. If we look at the scores of Snapdragon X Elite 23W TDP, it managed 2780 and 14000 scores on single and multi-core respectively. Snapdragon X Elite 80W TDP scored 2940 and 15130. Although M3’s single-core performance seems faster, Snapdragon X Elite has a clear advantage in multi-core performance.
These are just benchmark numbers and we cannot conclude real-world performance based on it. But this gives us an idea that the Snapdragon X Elite is slightly faster than the M3.
Apple M3 supports LPDDR5 RAM and supports up to 24GB unified memory with a max memory bandwidth of 102.4 GB/s. Snapdragon X Elite has support for LPDDR5x RAM. It supports up to 64GB memory with a max Memory Bandwidth of 136 GB/s. Snapdragon X Elite is clearly a winner by a good margin in the memory segment.
Apple added support for Wi-Fi 6E and Thunderbolt 3 in M3. On the other hand, Snapdragon X Elite supports Wi-Fi 7 and USB 4 standard. Sadly, there is no Thunderbolt support in X Elite. Wi-Fi 7 can deliver peak rates of 40Gpbs which makes it four times faster than Wi-Fi 6E.
Apple M3 is going to hit the market soon with new MacBook Pro and iMac models. Snapdragon X Elite will hit the market next year. From the specs sheet, the Snapdragon X Elite looks good against the M3. The biggest advantage M3 has the software optimization. Apple manages to optimize its macOS well for the hardware it uses because it has specific chips that will be running the macOS.
Qualcomm’s first Oryon-based CPU looks good and has managed to be better than we were expecting. It is surely a good attempt. Although we compared the Snapdragon X Elite with the Apple M3, the Snapdragon X Elite is actually a threat to Intel. Snapdragon X Elite is up to twice as fast as the Intel Core i7-1355U. If everything goes well, Snapdragon X Elite could replace Intel in compact laptops.
