We're now less than two months away from laptops launching with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite chipset, and this is going to be big. It's not going to be like previous Snapdragon PC chips, where there would only be two or three mainstream products available. We're talking big-time premium laptops, such as the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, along with entries from every other major OEM, all within the first week or so of launch. OEMs are so confident in this chipset that products like Microsoft's best-selling Surface PCs won't even be offered to consumers in an Intel variant.

But consumers are still skeptical, and I don't blame them. To this point, Windows on Arm has been riddled with issues. Ever since 2019, Qualcomm made big promises for its Snapdragon 8cx chipset, promising it was on par with an Intel Core i5. Back that, that was supposed to be the big launch that made Snapdragon PCs mainstream. The hardware really didn't deliver, but you wouldn't have even known it because there was almost no native software either. Apps ran slowly because they were supposed to.

This time, things are really different. Apple switching to Arm has lit a fire under Microsoft and Qualcomm, and both companies are really taking it seriously. The Snapdragon X Elite certainly seems to be the real deal, and more apps are going native, such as Google Chrome (yes, you no longer need to run Edge for a decent experience).

Native apps like the new Chrome run great on existing hardware, but emulation has been such a pain point. With the Snapdragon X Elite being so much more powerful than the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, what's going to be the deal with those few apps that are still x86-only?

I got a chance to find out. For most of the last six months, Snapdragon X Elite laptops were look but don't touch, and when we could touch them, it was under controlled conditions. This time, I was given some time to do "whatever I want" with one, so naturally, I took that time to run apps that aren't going to run natively.

The systems

We tested five different systems

The five PCs I used for testing were the 23W Snapdragon X Elite reference design, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s (Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3), the Dell XPS 14 (Core Ultra 7 155H, RTX 4050), the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (Core Ultra 7 155U), and the Asus Zenbook 14 (Core Ultra 7 155H). The Snapdragon X Elite machine is the same configuration as the one we benchmarked back at Snapdragon Summit.

There's something of a caveat here though. Qualcomm measures the system wattage, while Intel gives you CPU power, so you might see an Intel CPU running at 28W, but Qualcomm is accounting for all of the other parts.

What's really worth noting is that this testing represents the least of what the Snapdragon X Elite can do. Qualcomm actually has three reference designs. This one is 23W, but there are also 45W and 80W models, which don't show their faces in public as often. The point is, however, that OEMs can tune this chipset however they want.

Adobe Lightroom Classic on Snapdragon X Elite

The results weren't as good as I'd hoped

Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom are both compiled natively for Arm64 devices, as buggy as Photoshop might be. And while technically any x64 app can be emulated on Arm64 PCs, Adobe locks you out of installing most of them. It does, however, let you run Lightroom Classic in emulation, which is still receiving new features despite the fact that it was meant to be replaced a while back.

It's a tool I use regularly, so I gave it a shot. First, I ran the new Denoise feature on an image. It's an AI feature, and with Qualcomm's big claims on AI performance, I had high hopes. It did not go well.

I timed how long it took each product, so lower is better.

I called it around 10 minutes because frankly, it took so long that I lost track of the timing a bit. The point is that it took way longer on the Snapdragon X Elite; however, it's worth noting that Adobe still isn't running this feature on the NPU, so those 45TOPS that Qualcomm is promising don't mean anything. This feature runs on the GPU. While emulation improvements are an expected feature of Windows 11 version 24H2, it's worth noting at this time that GPU performance has always been pretty bad in emulation, with OpenGL compatibility issues and more.

Note that I didn't finish testing the above on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, because it was only about a third of the way done when the Snapdragon X Elite finished, and I wasn't trying to spend all of my limited amount of time waiting for something to finish on a machine that's probably the least important of the ones I tested.

Next, I did a simple export of 24 images, and timed that as well.

The timing of the export was more impressive, roughly on par with the Core Ultra 7 155H that's in the Asus Zenbook. That's the chip that Qualcomm is claiming superiority over in all of its comparisons. The Core Ultra 7 155U in the Yoga Book is a lower-powered chip, and the Dell XPS 14 pairs the more powerful CPU with dedicated graphics.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results, although I do hope they can sort out the GPU performance on the Denoise task. Windows on Arm emulation has to get to a point where it's just as good, if not better, than running the software natively on an Intel processor. Otherwise, you might as well buy Intel knowing that everything will work.

Slack

Does Slack run well on anything though?

The other key app I downloaded was Slack, which was the one other app I use frequently that isn't native to Arm64, and it's always been a pain point for me. The bad news is that it's still a pain point; moreover, I didn't see some specific improvements that I wanted to see.

I've long complained about how the default Slack app that gets downloaded from the Microsoft Store is actually not the one you want. Whether you go to the Store or to Slack's website, you'll get the x64 version. It's bad, and it didn't even feel much snappier than it does with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.

What does feel much faster, just as it does on the 8cx Gen 3, is the 32-bit version of the app. You have to find this in Slack's download center, and it's in tiny letters. We know there are emulation improvements coming with Windows 11 version 24H2, I was just hoping that those improvements fixed this.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel. Qualcomm listed Slack as a partner on a recent slide, so there's a native app on the way. And as my colleague João Carrasqueira said when I told him it didn't run well, "It's just like an Intel PC."

Gaming with Baldur's Gate 3 and Redout

Gaming is impressive, so far

At a recent briefing, Qualcomm showed off more recent benchmark scores to show how it smokes Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen, also noting that it beats the Apple M3 in multi-core benchmarks (not single-core), since they weren't out yet when Snapdragon X Elite was announced. I'm not going to get into that for two reasons: the scope of this is to talk about real-world experience, and we ran our own tests to compare Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks to its newer generation of competitors.

While there, it also had some demos to show off. I saw the AI stuff, watching these things generate images in seconds, transcribe live video, and do some cool stuff with the upcoming Arm64 version of DaVinci Resolve. Fun fact: Blackmagic Design didn't just recompile DaVinci Resolve for Arm64; it built a new app. It's pretty great.

I also got to play some games running in emulation, particularly Baldur's Gate 3 and Redout. Both games consistently ran at between 30fps and 45fps, which was pretty solid. I didn't feel any lag with the controls or anything.

I'd say it's good enough. These aren't gaming laptops. Similar to Intel's messaging with integrated graphics, Snapdragon X Elite isn't made for gaming, but you should be able to pick up a game and play if you want to. And when products start to launch, there will be a list of hundreds of games that have been tested to work on the platform.

It only gets better

More native software is coming

I've been reporting for half a decade that Google had Chrome for Arm64 ready to go but never shipped it. Part of the reason was regular old politics, but while it might be fun to believe that Google never shipped its browser for Arm PCs over some vendetta against Microsoft, who can blame it? Windows on Arm has not taken off in any meaningful way. The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is a year and a half old, and there are only two mainstream products that have it. No one even remembers the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 because it was such a minor launch.

The timing of Chrome's release is no coincidence. This is going to be big. Two months from today, there will be Snapdragon X Elite laptops that have been announced from every major PC OEM, and that's not even the end of it. There will be more throughout the year.

With that, software is going to follow. Adobe promised to bring all of its CC suite to Windows on Arm back in 2019, and in those five years, it's released Photoshop, Lightroom, and Fresco. Also in those five years, it's released the entire CC suite for Apple Silicon. Why? Because Apple had more Arm Macs in customer hands shortly after launch than Windows on Arm has had in its existence.

The PC landscape is about to shift, and with that, it means software support and more competition across the board. It's going to be an exciting year for PCs.