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Qualcomm has been generating a lot of hype for its upcoming Snapdragon X Elite and Plus CPUs for Windows. As the first competitive Arm-based processors for Windows, the chip giant’s forthcoming CPUs promise to deliver the same power and efficiency that Apple has become famous for with its M-series SoCs to Windows users. However, according to a muckraking analyst, Qualcomm is not honest with its performance numbers, a claim that Qualcomm now says is false.
The site Semiaccurate published the bombshell piece about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs yesterday, igniting a firestorm of controversy and speculation throughout the tech world. The heart of the controversy is performance claims made by Qualcomm for its X Elite and X Plus SoCs, the latter of which was announced yesterday. Both SoCs are claimed to offer far superior performance to every other mobile CPU, and the benchmarks provided to the media so far have mostly backed up these claims. It’s also allowed media to run benchmarks, but only pre-selected tests, in a controlled environment, on its own machines.
Adding to the mystery is Qualcomm has published specs and performance numbers without much clarity about how it was arriving at some of these numbers.
Credit: Qualcomm
However, Semiaccurate says these benchmark numbers are cooked and that none of Qualcomm’s OEM partners have been able to replicate them on their systems. The site says its sources for this claim are two “Tier 1” OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo) and “other sources.” The site said that when OEMs got their own samples to test, their performance was about 50% lower than the numbers in Qualcomm’s technical documentation. Qualcomm blamed the discrepancy on inferior cooling and benchmarks not native to Arm. However, after time passed, more OEMs with considerable engineering talent reported findings similar to Semiaccurate’s findings, leading the site to conclude something was rotten in Denmark.
Qualcomm has denied the claims in a statement to Tom’s Hardware. “We stand behind our performance claims and are excited for consumers to get their hands on Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus devices soon,” said a spokesperson for Qualcomm. This boilerplate statement doesn’t address any of the underlying claims by Semiaccurate, but we suppose it’ll all come out in the wash eventually. Microsoft is expected to reveal the first Snapdragon X Elite/Plus hardware at its Build conference next month, hopefully allowing the press to test it on its own so we can get to the bottom of this situation.