Snapdragon X2 falls short of Intel's Panther Lake in early gaming tests

A sponsored performance-preview video of Qualcomm's second‑generation Snapdragon X2 Elite X2E-88-100 presents a mixed showing: the chip uses all 18 CPU cores and the full‑spec iGPU, but its CPU clocks are a touch lower than the top‑spec Extreme models and it runs on a 128‑bit memory bus rather than the Extreme's 192‑bit bus.

In multi‑threaded workloads the 18‑core X2 is very strong, outperforming the 10‑core Apple M5, the 12‑core AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Intel's 16‑core Core Ultra X9 388H (Panther Lake) in synthetic tests like Cinebench and real‑world tasks such as Blender. Single‑core performance still favors Apple's M5, though the Snapdragon edged the AMD and Intel chips in Cinebench 2024 with a score of 146 versus 130 for Panther Lake and 112 for the AMD part.

Gaming is where the X2 lags.

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