While several brands have launched their Copilot+ PCs with the ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite processors, we have yet to see detailed reviews on their performance and battery life.
However, one Reddit user, u/caponica23, got their hands on the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge early and shared some initial findings in an extensive thread. And the performance of the Snapdragon X Elite chip seems disappointing, falling short of Qualcomm’s marketing promises.
The laptop achieved a Geekbench single-core score of 1829 and a multi-core score of 11379 while running on battery power. Plugging it in offered minimal improvement, with scores of 1841 and 11537, respectively. However, these figures are significantly lower than Qualcomm’s press event claims of 2977 single-core and 15086 multi-core.
The user attributes the low benchmark scores to the CPU not reaching its advertised boost clock speeds. The Reddit review notes that the Snapdragon X Elite chip on the Book 4 Edge runs at 2.52GHz speed at maximum, which is much lower than the 4.0 GHz advertised by Qualcomm.
A thread on X (formerly Twitter) by user INIYSA suggests that the PC might be throttling the CPU for thermal and battery management. Other laptops running Snapdragon X Elite models on Geekbench also show similar disappointing single-core scores in the 1700s-1800s range.
The X user compared the X Elite’s single-core performance to that of the iPhone 12 Mini, noting that it is even slower than the 4-year-old A14 chip.
With Qualcomm’s review embargo still in place, it is uncertain if a firmware update will address these performance issues before official reviews are released.
Gaming performance was equally underwhelming at first. According to the user, Resident Evil 7: Village ran at 1080p with only 40-50 FPS and severe frame drops, even with AMD’s FSR in performance mode. However, the user later reported that a new update fixed the GPU issues, and the game now runs at 60-100 FPS with no frame drops.
The update seems to have resolved the GPU performance lag, so we are hopeful that another update could improve the processor performance to match Qualcomm’s promises. Otherwise, the initial benchmarks for the Snapdragon X Elite raise serious concerns about its capabilities in Windows on ARM devices.
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