During the Snapdragon Summit this year, Qualcomm rebuffed Intel’s Lunar Lake roll out at IFA a month prior with several side-by-side comparisons that proved the company was pulling numbers out of thin air.
During the Snapdragon Summit this year, Qualcomm rebuffed Intel’s Lunar Lake roll out at IFA a month prior with several side-by-side comparisons that proved the company was pulling numbers out of thin air.
Intel made a show of its latest Lunar Lake chip release as the answer to the surge in positive press Apple had been getting with its M-series chip but also the more immediate threat Qualcomm posed to the Wintel duopoly with its own Snapdragon X series desktops architecture. Intel tossed out a lot of numbers, metrics, and benchmarks to show that its Lunar Lake chips should be the go-to option for Windows OEMs thanks to their superior performance output.
Unfortunately for Intel, Qualcomm presented receipts this week that appear to debunk most of Intel’s comparison claims.
According to Qualcomm, Snapdragon X Elite chips manage to outperform Intel’s Lunar Lake single and multicore CPU benchmarks despite Intel propagating otherwise. In a rebuttal slide, Qualcomm shows that its X Elite chip is ten percent faster than its competition which includes Intel and AMD.
More damning for Intel is that the Qualcomm chip manages to outperform Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) base chip while consuming roughly thirty eight percent less power. Intel’s claims become even more ludicrous when examining multicore performance. According to Qualcomm, its X Elite chip took the crown, fifty to percent faster than its competition in multicore benchmarking while Intel was caught sucking down 113 percent more power to match it.
As much as Intel would love to point to nebulous Apple-like benchmarking of the X Elite as a defense, Qualcomm references industry trusted benchmarking tools such as Geekbench and Cinemark to prove its points. Beyond the ambiguous numbers Intel threw out at IFA last month, the company is called out for direct lies about its Cinebench R24 single core test results.
Intel claimed that running its Lunar Lake chip through the Cinebench R24 single core test netted the company a six percent advantage over the X Elite’s performance. However, when Qualcomm ran the same test, it produced seven percent gain in favor of the X Elite chip as well as a positive 92 percent speed cliff between itself and Lunar Lake when it comes to multicore processes.
Qualcomm delivered a litany of other benchmarks that refute Intel’s claims across a handful of other software tests that display a negative trend for the Lunar Lake chip when compared to the X Elite chip. And just like the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef, AMD was caught with some stray shade like J. Cole, but for its part, AMD did manage to outperform Intel as well.
Where Intel may have been the most dishonest in its battery performance obfuscation. While Lunar Lake chips do provide more battery life over previous Intel generations, it really pales in comparison to what an X Elite chip can provide. When unplugged, Lunar Lake devices tend to experience performance drop-off as dramatically as up to 56 percent when compared to its X Elite counterpart. Meanwhile, the Qualcomm’s X Elite performance ceiling for throttling hovers around 14 percent.
Not only does the Lunar Lake chip throttle its performance when on battery, it just comes up short comparatively with about 16 percent less battery power when put up against the X series of chips.
Even Lunar Lake’s neural processing unit claims have been dissected by Qualcomm which shows Intel’s claims were also highly exaggerated. The Lunar Lake NPUs are less performative than previously claimed and that the chip needs up to 133 percent more battery power to achieve similar Qualcomm metrics.
With that much power being sucked in, it is no wonder that Intel Lunar Lake devices are starting to exceed heating observations. On average, the Qualcomm-powered devices remained 44 degrees cooler than the Intel Lunar Lake PC.
It will be interesting to see how Intel responds to being debunked so thoroughly by Qualcomm, who is already promising another leap in performance from its next desktop chip in 2025 while Intel had to move up its production schedule by three years to ship its Lunar Lake chips.
While I understand the marketing one-upmanship from Intel, it seems the company would have been better served highlighting GPU performance for the Lunar Lake chip where the company maintains a legitimate lead over AMD and Qualcomm as well as offering businesses an integrated experience rather than sourcing silicon from two differ partners.
Nevertheless, it’ll be on Intel to try and actually match the performance lead Qualcomm enjoyed most of 2024 and presumably in 2025, and until it can, it looks like the Snapdragon X Elite will continues to be a be a better value proposition over the spec equivalent Intel Lunar Lake device.
Unfortunately for Intel, Qualcomm presented receipts this week that appear to debunk most of Intel’s comparison claims.
According to Qualcomm, Snapdragon X Elite chips manage to outperform Intel’s Lunar Lake single and multicore CPU benchmarks despite Intel propagating otherwise. In a rebuttal slide, Qualcomm shows that its X Elite chip is ten percent faster than its competition which includes Intel and AMD.
More damning for Intel is that the Qualcomm chip manages to outperform Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) base chip while consuming roughly thirty eight percent less power. Intel’s claims become even more ludicrous when examining multicore performance. According to Qualcomm, its X Elite chip took the crown being fifty to percent faster than its competition in multicore benchmarking while Intel was caught sucking down 113 percent more power to match it.
As much as Intel would probably love to point to nebulous Apple-like benchmarking of the X Elite as a defense, Qualcomm references industry trusted benchmarking tools such as Geekbench and Cinemark to prove its points. Beyond the ambiguous numbers Intel threw out at IFA last month, the company is called out for what appears to be direct lies about its Cinebench R24 single core test results.
Intel claimed that running its Lunar Lake chip through the Cinebench R24 single core test netted the company a six percent advantage over the X Elite’s performance. However, when Qualcomm ran the same test, it produced seven percent gain in favor of the X Elite chip as well as a positive 92 percent speed cliff between itself and Lunar Lake when it comes to multicore processes.
Qualcomm delivered a litany of other benchmarks that refute Intel’s claims across a handful of other software test that showcase a negative trend for the Lunar Lake chip when compared to the X Elite chip. And just like the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef, AMD was caught with some stray shade similar to J.Cole, but for its part, AMD did manage to outperform Intel as well.
Where Intel may have been the most dishonest in its battery performance obfuscation. While Lunar Lake chips do provide more battery life over previous Intel generations, it really pales in comparison to what an X Elite chip can provide. When unplugged, Lunar Lake devices tend to experience performance drop off as dramatically as up to 56 percent when compared to its X Elite counterpart. Meanwhile, the Qualcomm’s X Elite performance ceiling for throttling hovers around 14 percent.
Not only does the Lunar Lake chip throttle its performance when on battery, it just comes up short comparatively with about 16 percent less battery power when put up against the X series of chips.
Even Lunar Lake’s neural processing unit claims have been dissected by Qualcomm which shows Intel’s claims there were also highly exaggerated. The Lunar Lake NPUs are less performatives than previously claimed and that the chip needs up to 311 percent more battery power to achieve similar Qualcomm metrics.
With that much power being sucked in, it’s no wonder that Intel Lunar Lake devices are starting to exceed heating observations. On average, the Qualcomm-powered devices remained 44 degrees cooler than the Intel Lunar Lake PC.
It’ll be interesting to see how Intel responds to being debunked so thoroughly by Qualcomm, who is already promising another leap in performance form its next desktop chip in 2025 while Intel had to move up its production schedule by three years to ship its Lunar Lake chips.
While I understand the marketing one-upmanship from Intel, it seems the company would have been better served highlighting GPU performance for the Lunar Lake chip where the company maintains a legitimate lead over AMD and Qualcomm as well as offering businesses an integrated experience rather than sourcing silicon from two differ partners.
Nevertheless, it’ll be on Intel to try and actually match the performance lead Qualcomm enjoyed most of 2024 and presumably in 2025, and until it can, it looks like the Snapdragon X Elite will continues to be a be a better value proposition over the spec equivalent Intel Lunar Lake device.
