Qualcomm officially unveiled the Snapdragon X Elite in October last year, materializing a worthy Apple Silicon competitor that would eventually power a slew of Windows-powered notebooks. Fast forward to September 2024, and Intel and AMD have introduced their offerings that duke it out with the latest silicon on a ‘performance per watt’ basis. It has been nearly a year since Qualcomm’s announcement, and there has been no die shot examining the various clusters of the SoC until now. The Snapdragon X Elite gets compared with the M4, showing that it is physically larger, with several other differences, as you will soon find out.
Surprisingly, the Snapdragon X Elite’s Adreno X1 GPU cluster is 25 percent smaller than the M4’s
There is a major technological difference between the Snapdragon X Elite and Apple’s M4, with the latter mass produced on TSMC’s more advanced second-generation 3nm process, which may explain why it can accomplish a ton in a smaller die. Chinese media outlet MyDrivers uploaded the comparison of the two chipsets, showing that the Snapdragon X Elite measures 169.6mm², making it slightly larger than the M4’s 165.9mm² measurement. Qualcomm’s latest and greatest silicon for notebooks is armed with 12 custom Oryon cores, divided into eight performance and four efficiency ones.
The performance cores make up 2.55mm², slightly smaller than the 3.00mm² of the M4’s own four performance cores. The 12-core CPU cluster may have been the reason for the Snapdragon X Elite’s larger die size because the report states that the entire CPU cluster measures 48.2mm², making it 78 percent larger than the M4’s. However, the Adreno X1 GPU was not given much preference, as it only takes 24.3mm² of space, making it 25 percent less than what the M4 GPU cores occupy.
The massive architectural differences between the M4 and Snapdragon X Elite can be witnessed in various benchmarks, such as Geekbench 6, where Apple’s 3nm SoC outpaces the Snapdragon X Elite and M3 Pro by a considerable margin. The M4 also one-ups the Snapdragon X Elite by adopting the ARMv9 architecture, allowing it to run complex workloads more efficiently, along with having Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) support, which raises performance across the board.
In short, Qualcomm had to raise the Snapdragon X Elite’s capabilities through a die size increase, and while this approach made the silicon faster than the M3, Apple bounced back strongly with the M4 announcement earlier this year.
News Source: MyDrivers
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
