The first generation of Apple Silicon chips took other chip makers by surprise. While everyone knew it would be good, the M1 chip was so far ahead of its competitors in both power and efficiency that there must have been a lot of worried faces in Intel and Qualcomm’s respective boardrooms.
Three generations later, Qualcomm appears to have finally caught up with Apple’s M4 chip with its new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, intended for laptops. However, that situation may not last for long …
We waited many years for Apple to launch its own chips for Macs, and when it finally did so, the results didn’t disappoint. By combining multiple chips into a single system on a chip, and having all of the hardware tightly integrated, Apple was able to leave Intel processors in the dust.
Intel made brave-sounding noises about catching up and even surpassing Apple Silicon, but nobody believed it and that hasn’t even come close to happening.
Qualcomm, however, appears to have done what Intel couldn’t. Macworld compared the benchmarks of its latest X2 Elite Extreme laptop chip with Apple’s M4.
The results? There’s essentially nothing in it.
In multi-core tests, the M4 Max beats the Snapdragon chip by 8.5 percent. But the Snapdragon chip topped the M4 in single-core tests by 7 percent […] Another set of tests, this time Cinebench 2024. Again, the results show the M4 Max and the Snapdragon as basically even.
But as the site notes, this is comparing a brand new chip which hasn’t yet made it into any laptops against a chip Apple is likely to replace early next year. We’re expecting the M5 chip to show up first in an iPad Pro sometime in the next month, and then to make it into the MacBook Pro in the first half of next year.
That means that by the time you can buy a PC laptop with Snapdragon’s shiny new chip in it, Apple will have already pulled ahead again.
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Image: Qualcomm