Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 shows strong single-core lead in Geekbench

Qualcomm's second-generation Snapdragon X2 has appeared in Geekbench and posted strong single-core numbers, beating the best laptop CPUs from AMD and Intel by over 30%. Geekbench is only one metric and not a direct measure of real-world use, but it tends to align reasonably well with single-thread performance.

The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 also looks capable in multi-core tests, though it is an 18-core design. The picture for PC and gaming performance is more complicated. As an Arm chip many games must run under x86 emulation, and systems with discrete GPUs are rare, so most implementations rely on Qualcomm's integrated Adreno GPU.

Qualcomm says the second-gen X2's GPU is much improved, but it remains integrated. In Geekbench's OpenCL test the chip scored 44,786 points, compared with over 55,000 for Intel's Panther Lake iGPU; because those graphics tests run natively, emulation overhead when playing x86 games could widen the real-world gap.

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