The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme plays catch-up with a chip Apple is ready to retire

Qualcomm recently invited a few journalists to check out the company’s new laptop chip. Our friends over at PCWorld were able to run benchmarks on it, and they said the chip is “once again threatening to upend the PC CPU market.” But hey, we’re Macworld, and we weren’t invited to the Snapdragon party, but we are interested in how Qualcomm’s new chip fares. Especially against Apple’s chips.

So we took the results posted by PCWorld and compared them against the numbers we have for Apple’s M-series laptops. To help make sense of the numbers, you should know how each chip is configured:

• Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme: 18 CPU cores; 12 “prime” cores at 4.4GHz, and 6 performance cores at 3.6GHz
• M4 Max: 16 CPU cores; 12 performance cores at 4.52GHz, and 4 efficiency cores at 2.59GHz
• M4 Pro: 14 CPU cores; 10 performance cores at 4.52GHz, and 4 efficiency cores at 2.59GHz
• M4: 10 CPU cores; 4 performance cores at 4.41GHz, and 6 efficiency cores at 2.59GHz

In mult-core tests, the M4 Max beats the Snapdragon chip by 8.5 percent. But the Snapdragon chip topped the M4 in single-core tests by 7 percent. Call it a wash; it’s difficult for users to perceive a difference when benchmarks show a separation of less than 10 percent.

What’s the takeaway from all this? Qualcomm’s new chip does well against Apple’s M4 Max, which was released last November. Apple’s M5 chips are almost ready to be released, and if history tells us anything, it’s that we can expect a 15 to 20 percent CPU increase of the M5 over the M4–and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme.

So by the time the first laptops with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme start showing up in stores, its closest competition will probably be a MacBook Apple doesn’t sell anymore.