Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has humiliated Intel at its own game. The Arm-based SoC, which features its own Hexagon NPU, is considerably faster at generating images from text using the “Stable Diffusion” model. Qualcomm has shared two benchmarks. In the first one, the text-to-image model was used to generate an image of berries. The Snapdragon X Elite finished the task in just 7.25 seconds, while the Core Ultra 7 155H took 22.26 seconds. This makes the Snapdragon X Elite over 3x faster than the Core Ultra 7.
In the second test, a picture of a lion was rendered repeatedly. The Snapdragon X Elite generated ten images in 12 seconds, while the Core Ultra 7 155H could only produce a single still. Ergo, the SD X Elite is up to 10x faster than Intel’s new Core Ultra processors. This result is likely an outlier but indicates that Meteor Lake has a relatively primitive NPU.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite can deliver a peak throughput of 45 TOPS through its NPU alone, while the Core Ultra 7 155H can use its CPU and GPU, in addition to the NPU, to deliver a maximum AI performance of just 34 TOPS. Since we’re throwing numbers around, the AMD Ryzen 8040 series “Hawk Point” processors can manage up to 39 TOPS (CPU + GPU + NPU), 10 TOPS higher than the Ryzen 7040 “Phoenix” parts.
The Snapdragon X Elite SoC is expected to ship with select laptops by mid-2024. In comparison, Intel and AMD will ship their next-gen processors, Arrow Lake, and Strix Point, either by the end of 2024 or early 2025.
