CPU Showdown: Snapdragon X vs. Intel Core vs. Apple M3

By now you’ve probably heard that Qualcomm is pushing hard to get its Arm-based processors into Windows machines, including the new Surface devices revealed in May.

Without getting them into our lab, we don’t know if all those performance boasts actually hold water. Fortunately, Gordon got ahold of some hard data and covered it in the latest PCWorld YouTube video below.

Sponsored analyst firm Signal65 has some relevant benchmarks of the new Surface Laptop with a Snapdragon X Elite processor. They compared it to a Surface Laptop 5 rocking an Intel 12th Gen laptop CPU, the newer Intel Core Ultra 7 Meteor Lake in an MSI Prestige, Apple’s newest M3-equipped MacBook Air (also an Arm processor), and an older Surface Pro 9 5G with the Qualcomm-supplied Microsoft SQ3 chip.

The benchmarks were wide—including heat and noise levels—but the real meat of the results come elsewhere. For example, the new Surface Laptop beats out all the competition with 21 hours of local video playback.

That’s more than double the Surface Laptop 5, nearly double the Surface Pro 9, and past the MacBook Air by a healthy margin. Similar results were achieved in Procyon Productivity testing. Of course, battery life isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples (or indeed Apple) comparison, since each machine varies in battery size, screen size, resolution, etc.

What about raw number-crunching? There again, the new Snapdragon X Elite handily beats previous-gen Windows machines and beats the older Qualcomm-equipped Surface Pro 9 by nearly double in Geekbench. The MacBook’s M3 wins out by a 15 percent margin in single-threaded performance, but loses by the same percentage in multi-threaded tasks.

We see similar results in Cinebench, including the MacBook’s edge in single-thread and the Snapdragon X Elite’s in multi-thread. In Handbrake video transcoding, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is a surprise champ, offering 40 percent faster performance than the Snapdragon X Elite. But the new Arm-based Surface Laptop still beats the rest of the field handily.

In Chrome, running natively on Windows and macOS in both x64 and Arm varieties, the MacBook wins easily. It bested the Surface Laptop with Snapdragon by 27 and 40 percent on Speedometer and JetStream tests. Again, the newest Windows machine beats out the rest, though only narrowly besting the Intel Core Ultra 7-equipped MSI laptop.

In Microsoft Office tasks, the field was mostly even except for the Surface Pro and its previous-gen Arm chip, with the MacBook getting a significant edge only in the PowerPoint test.

In terms of graphics, the Snapdragon X Elite isn’t looking so hot. While it easily bested the older machines in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme demo, it only narrowly beat out the Intel Core Ultra 7, while the MacBook’s M3 smoked it by 31 percent. The Core Ultra 7 and M3 also performed better on the Solar Bay test. And though there’s no Mac version of Steel Nomad, the latest Intel chip beat Qualcomm’s by a commanding 35 percent. It’s clear that if you want gaming performance, a Snapdragon PC may not be for you—at least this generation.

And what about those vaunted NPU metrics every manufacturer seems so hot to trot out? While neural processing units have yet to truly prove their utility, Qualcomm is winning that race by a country mile, for whatever it’s worth. It doubled the performance of both the older SQ3 Arm processor and the Apple M3, and tripled the performance of the Intel Core Ultra 7 in Procyon’s AI Computer Vision test.

These results give us a good idea of what to expect from this latest round of Snapdragon X-equipped laptops: very-good-but-not-miraculous battery life, excellent performance in most basic tasks, and graphics that are underwhelming compared to other integrated designs.

But, of course, for a more in-depth look we’ll need to wait until we get some review units. Until then, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube to stay informed on the latest in the world of laptops.