In the year since Qualcomm first introduced its Snapdragon X Elite, the competition has not been silent. Intel launched the Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake chips, the latter of which seemed like a legitimate response to Qualcomm's advances in battery life and efficiency.
But Qualcomm isn't impressed with Intel's latest offerings.
Qualcomm has no new PC chips to announce at its annual summit; Instead, the company spent some time with journalists pointing out that some of the claims made by Intel leave out some important details.
Qualcomm has two main criticisms of how Intel has talked about its new Lunar Lake or Core Extremely Collection 2 chips. First, that Intel has left Qualcomm's highest configuration, the X1E-84-100, out of its direct comparisons. Instead, Intel relies on the X1E-80-100 and X1E-78-100 in its comparisons. Based on the numbers presented by Qualcomm, as you can see in the chart below, dropping the X1E-84-100 allows Intel to take the lead in some performance benchmarks. The other small drawback, according to Qualcomm, in Intel's marketing is that its own high-end configuration, the Core Extremely 9 288V, is not yet available in stores. That calls into question Intel's claim that these are “the fastest cores.”
The biggest argument, of course, is that the Qualcomm part still offers better energy efficiency. Specifically, Qualcomm highlights the fact that Lunar Lake chips consume 38% more power at maximum performance.
Of course, performance wasn't Intel's biggest claim with the Core Extremely Collection 2. It was all about battery life. And in my own testing, I was deeply impressed by the durability of these laptops, especially in the most demanding workloads. For now, it takes the crown in terms of battery life.
Qualcomm doesn't dispute Intel's ambitious claims, but notes that Intel isn't telling the whole story. As we learned in our own testing, the Core Extremely Collection 2 chips don't perform well on battery power, which is a strong point of Arm chips, including the Snapdragon X Elite and Apple Silicon chips. Qualcomm shows that, overall, Intel's latest chips have a significant drop in battery performance, dropping as much as 54% in some tests.
To be fair, this has always been true for Intel chips, but Qualcomm is right. As long as Intel's battery life is long, it's true that you're losing a lot of performance. That's not true with the Snapdragon X Elite.
However, for most people, they may prefer the extra hours of battery life over some performance. Let's not forget: we're talking about small, thin and light laptops, not high-performance machines. That calculation could change on larger, more powerful laptops. But right now, Intel's focus on battery life seems like the right choice, even if it was a little misleading when compared to Qualcomm.
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