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The big picture: Review embargoes have lifted, painting an early picture of how the Snapdragon Elite X stacks up against x86 machines powered by AMD and Intel as well as Macs featuring Apple’s own Arm-based silicon. Today the first wave of laptops powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series processors have hit shore, so it’s time to take a look at Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative up close.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.
These first Copilot+ PCs come with some early adopter compromises, meaning they won’t necessarily deliver everything we’ve been hoping for right out of the box. Microsoft recently postponed its controversial Recall feature following intense criticism, and it could take a while before native Arm versions of apps arrive.
Still, there’s a lot to like from the get go and it starts with raw performance. In multi-core testing on the Asus VivoBook S 15 using Geekbench 6, several publications including Tom’s Guide noted impressive performance that outpaced Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air.
In Cinebench 2024, the Snapdragon X Elite-equipped VivoBook turned in a single-core score of 108 and a multi-core score of 956 at Notebook Check.
