First Reviews are Live and Snapdragon X Elite Doesn't Quite Deliver on Promised Performance

[LukeTbk]

It is a bit nuts, still trying to find a single visualcode-compilation benchmark, but to be fair to reviewer of laptops, stuff like battery life by definition are really long to test (using it a week has your main working device being I imagine an obligetory part of it).

And the performance gap between balanced vs ultra performance mode is huge:


View: https://youtu.be/nDRV9eEJOk8?t=397

14355 geekbench score on microsoft surface at high performance vs 9000 on a Galaxy at balanced., that big enough that any benchmark should come with the powerplan running at.

They need to test WSL, auto-sr if it even work ?, ml and AI task, reviews are quite complex with many of them having no pre-made benchmark right now you can just run, build same program in arm-x86 to look at prism, etc....

Once they launch one with a real gpu, a lot of task of interest of long battery modern laptop use a gpu now and can't with this (say the 2025 Nvidia ARM windows pc) then it will get interesting

 

[DukenukemX]

It is a bit nuts, still trying to find a single visualcode-compilation benchmark, but to be fair to reviewer of laptops, stuff like battery life by definition are really long to test (using it a week has your main working device being I imagine an obligetory part of it).

It's not long to test when you actually put a load on the machine. Run a game like Cyberpunk2077 and even these machines will only last 2 hours at best. Marees's video does a pretty good job explaining how much power it consumes, and Snapdragon is not very good. The tests do revolve a lot around gaming, but it's still not as good as AMD's 8840u. You could plug in a power monitering meter to see how much power is consumed. You could run any number of benchmarks, (not Geekbench) to see how well it does in any number of tasks.

And the performance gap between balanced vs ultra performance mode is huge:

So is the power consumption but nobody really wants to talk about that. In most reviews you just see someone give their testimony that it lasts 2 days like Apple, when tests show it's worse than AMD. There's a lot of apologetic people that are reviewing these products that aren't giving proper info.

View: https://youtu.be/nDRV9eEJOk8?t=397

14355 geekbench score on microsoft surface at high performance vs 9000 on a Galaxy at balanced., that big enough that any benchmark should come with the powerplan running at.

This malaka in the video just learned how power management works on Windows. The guy in that video didn't point out how much power it was consuming but he assured us it must be great. That's for another video.

They need to test WSL, auto-sr if it even work ?, ml and AI task, reviews are quite complex with many of them having no pre-made benchmark right now you can just run, build same program in arm-x86 to look at prism, etc....

I haven't seen any video editing tests.

Once they launch one with a real gpu, a lot of task of interest of long battery modern laptop use a gpu now and can't with this (say the 2025 Nvidia ARM windows pc) then it will get interesting

Keep in mind that Qualcomm are using a defunct old Radeon mobile GPU that has been heavily modified since. Adreno is just Radeon with the letters rearranged. What made people think they could compete against the likes of AMD and Intel? If Nvidia made a SoC for Windows then shit gets real. Nvidia has in the past had a hard time fighting Qualcomm for the mobile market. Qualcomm had successfully pushed Nvidia out of the mobile market with ease. Then again, this isn't the mobile market.

 

[LukeTbk]

It's not long to test when you actually put a load on the machine. Run a game like Cyberpunk2077 and even these machines will only last 2 hours at best. Marees's video does a pretty good job explaining how much power it consumes, and Snapdragon is not very good. The tests do revolve a lot around gaming, but it's still not as good as AMD's 8840u. You could plug in a power monitering meter to see how much power is consumed. You could run any number of benchmarks, (not Geekbench) to see how well it does in any number of tasks.

That usually not what battery life are about, Snapdragon is incredible at low to high idle type scenario which will tend to be most of the day and will take a whole day to empty the battery. It is how well does it do 1-2 day in a bag (if you want it to wake up instant regardless).

So is the power consumption but nobody really wants to talk about that

I think the double the performance for 3 time the power has been talked quite a bit

This malaka in the video just learned how power management works on Windows.

He has PowerShell script to set its own custom one, I doubt he just learned anything.

 

[DukenukemX]

These Snapdragon chips are must worse than Apple when it comes to gaming.

View: https://youtu.be/o2EJnLOSOOc?si=uCJ7EEa8ljtMzVkO

 

[Red Falcon]

These Snapdragon chips are must worse than Apple when it comes to gaming.

View: https://youtu.be/o2EJnLOSOOc?si=uCJ7EEa8ljtMzVkO

It would really be interesting to pair one of these with a discrete GPU, internal or external, and see how far it can push these titles.
These laptops really feel like they are meant for an average office or business worker for Microsoft and business applications, more so than gaming - especially at their price point.

The battery life in these means far more than gaming performance, but I do appreciate the guy taking the time to test these titles out on it.
It certainly did better than I thought it would, and is a world apart from the 32-bit ARM era with Windows RT and its respective x86 emulation from a decade ago.

 

[DukenukemX]

It would really be interesting to pair one of these with a discrete GPU, internal or external, and see how far it can push these titles.

It'll likely do a lot better, but it would kill the battery efficiency just like it does with AMD and Intel chips. Nvidia needs to really figure out a way to make their discrete GPU's more power efficiency, but I think that's also a Windows issue. Compared to MacOS which doesn't need any power setting set for it to perform. Sounds like something Microsoft should have fixed a long time ago.

These laptops really feel like they are meant for an average office or business worker for Microsoft and business applications, more so than gaming - especially at their price point.

It's funny because I haven't seen any benchmarks for average office work.

It certainly did better than I thought it would, and is a world apart from the 32-bit ARM era with Windows RT and its respective x86 emulation from a decade ago.

These chips are leagues better than what Microsoft/Qualcomm had before, but it's going to have to compete against AMD's new Ryzen AI chips and Intel's Lunar Lake. Also, David's video shows that these laptops are buggy. He couldn't get his external drive to work with USB-C and the screen would bug out when plugging in an external monitor. That's not good for productivity.

 

[LukeTbk]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mCZ3WUcM8s

Set up a new Surface Laptop 7 for Software Development​

Testing Linux for arm application via WSL on them seem to work well, Docker have a native windows arm version now, fresh from 1 month ago.

He couldn't get his external drive to work with USB-C and the screen would bug out when plugging in an external monitor. That's not good for productivity.

Someone in one review said it took like 25-30 minutes to get a 3 externals monitor + laptop monitor to have a 4 screens setup working correctly (but once it did, could reboot and have the monitor-application in the good place and good to go) lot of little example of the sorts still.

 

[Lakados]

The part that gets me here is there isn't even an Intel offering this year for them, and I have a renewal up for my Surface Pro's and many in my admin team loves their existing ones, I don't think the snapdragons will be a downgrade over their existing offerings but do I risk it for them? Or do I convince them to use a different device instead?

 

[Lakados]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mCZ3WUcM8s

Set up a new Surface Laptop 7 for Software Development​

Testing Linux for arm application via WSL on them seem to work well, Docker have a native windows arm version now, fresh from 1 month ago.


Someone in one review said it took like 25-30 minutes to get a 3 externals monitor + laptop monitor to have a 4 screens setup working correctly (but once it did, could reboot and have the monitor-application in the good place and good to go) lot of little example of the sorts still.

Shit, this is the exact video I needed to see. Thanks.

 

[LukeTbk]

but do I risk it for them?

This apparently is a server core that was rapidly put into a laptop cpu that was rapidly put into laptop chassis, with the current push (and how much telemetry will be on by default) the amount of data about actual windows arm day to day usage and list of issue will be big and the push to fix them will be big, a lot of headache could be avoided with those 6 months from now products versus right now. Multi monitor, a bit more complex than basic mouse-keyboard but still popular usb device, gpu drivers for about everything should get much better before the end of the year. native app support for the Google drive, skype type of app as well.

If they can open the competition to the samsung, themselve, nvidia and not be stock behind the very close x86 monopoly, they could jump on it.

For a business use right now, probably good if one can validate every use case before making a massive transition.

 

[DukenukemX]

The part that gets me here is there isn't even an Intel offering this year for them, and I have a renewal up for my Surface Pro's and many in my admin team loves their existing ones, I don't think the snapdragons will be a downgrade over their existing offerings but do I risk it for them? Or do I convince them to use a different device instead?

No more Surface Pro's with Intel's in them? Microsoft is determined to go ARM, even though the enterprise isn't ready to move onto ARM. Ignoring that these laptops have ARM, they are extremely buggy. You will make your admin team beta testers for these products. Find them another device or wait for Lunar Lake.

 

[Lakados]

This apparently is a server core that was rapidly put into a laptop cpu that was rapidly put into laptop chassis, with the current push (and how much telemetry will be on by default) the amount of data about actual windows arm day to day usage and list of issue will be big and the push to fix them will be big, a lot of headache could be avoided with those 6 months from now products versus right now. Multi monitor, a bit more complex than basic mouse-keyboard but still popular usb device, gpu drivers for about everything should get much better before the end of the year. native app support for the Google drive, skype type of app as well.

If they can open the competition to the samsung, themselve, nvidia and not be stock behind the very close x86 monopoly, they could jump on it.

For a business use right now, probably good if one can validate every use case before making a massive transition.

Yeah I only have a dozen or so Surface Pro users who swear by them, the rest will use whatever I put in front of them and if it does the job that's all they care about, I like them, and because they are so hassle-free I often spoil them a little.... Anyways, the ones who use the Pros do use the pen and frequently do it for PDF or presentation markups, so they hold it like a clipboard and work through things. Looking at it, the bulk of what they do day to day has a native ARM variant or is so low on resource usage that the translation/emulation won't have a significant user impact if any at all. I just want to make sure that the device is a performance improvement over the existing Surface Pro fleet in every measure before signing off on it.

 

[cpufrost]

This apparently is a server core...

Yeah it would make a nice high throughput firewall handling many roles! 10+ Gbps with full IDS/IPS and 1000+ vpn tunnels. And probably a lot cheaper than a turnkey solution that's available now to boot.

 

[LukeTbk]

No more Surface Pro's with Intel's in them?

Probably they will have them by Q4 or Q1 2025, when Intel NPU are ready and strong enough. It is not like the current intel line up are that old (Ultra 7 Processor 165U are Q4 2023)

Yeah it would make a nice high throughput firewall handling many roles! 10+ Gbps with full IDS/IPS and 1000+ vpn tunnels. And probably a lot cheaper than a turnkey solution that's available now to boot.

And could be why they do not have performance and low power core a la Apple right now, has it was not meant for mobile.

 

[cpufrost]

And could be why they do not have performance and low power core a la Apple right now, has it was not meant for mobile.

It would probably scream if allowed to consume 80W which would be fine in a server chassis.

 

[Lakados]

Probably they will have them by Q4 or Q1 2025, when Intel NPU are ready and strong enough. It is not like the current intel line up are that old (Ultra 7 Processor 165U are Q4 2023)


And could be why they do not have performance and low power core a la Apple right now, has it was not meant for mobile.

Microsoft seems to struggle with differing core types, Intel had to build their hardware load balancing solution, AMD had to play with software profiles and the Xbox game bar, to then abandon the idea with their C cores, Microsoft probably said "Make it single core type and make it work!"