Microsoft announced at the beginning of the week the upcoming launch of the first PC AI. They will begin to arrive in June, led by the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro from Microsoft along with models from manufacturers such as Asus, Lenovo, Dell, HP, Samsung and Acer. More than two dozen models, most of them laptops and some convertible tablets, that will carry the label Copilot+ PC to reflect an integration with artificial intelligence that other computers with Windows 11 cannot access due to not having the appropriate hardware. That, at this moment, is only the processor Snapdragon Series that powers all these equipment, well the model X Plus or the most powerful X Elite.
Qualcommafter the presentation of the Snapdragon Series would crush the products of its competition. Now comes the time to check if what sounded like bravado at the time is true, and in light of the first performance tests that do not come from Qualcomm itself, the company seems to be on the right path. This is the first time that a chip with architecture ARMwhich is mainly used in mobile phones, puts the x86 that produce in trouble Intel and amd and they have dominated desktop and laptop computers for decades.
According to the tests published by the Signa65 consultancy, Qualcomm chips surpass Intel and Apple proposals in aspects as important as multi-threaded performance, making use of all its cores, energy efficiency and AI.
The X Elite is 10% faster that a Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and is surpassed in a fifteen% for him M3 of Manzana, both models launched late last year, in the single-core performance test conducted with Geekbench 6.3. Things change in multithread performance, where the X Elite is clearly ahead of the other processors included in the test. It's a 15% faster that an M3 and a 5% on an Intel Core Ultra 155H. It also stands out for its efficiency. By playing video locally, it outperforms its competitors in the test and lasts a 16% more than the second, the M3.
But the biggest differences come when we talk about the AI performance. In this field, under tests carried out with the Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark, the Qualcomm NPU outperforms by one 70% to that of Intel and in a fifty% to that of Apple. And here is the key to the presence of Snapdragon Series X in IA PCs.
For run language models locally on Copilot+ PCsMicrosoft requires an NPU, a coprocessor integrated with the CPU that is a Neural Processing Unit dedicated to AI operations, with a performance of 40 TOPS o Tera operations per second.
Current Intel NPUs offer 10that of the M3 18 and Qualcomm Four. Five. The study does not include any AMD processors, but the performance of its NPU reaches up to 16 TOPS. It is clear why Qualcomm is the only current supplier of processors for Copilot+ PC.
This will change before the end of the year when AMD and Intel launch their next generation of AI processors with NPUbut for the moment, the Snapdragon Series X are the best processors for IA PCs.