The Snapdragon AI.
Qualcomm's SoC looks pretty good with AI acceleration considering a new YouTube video (tip to Wccftech) showing off the Snapdragon X Elite. In it, the Snapdragon
The clip shows the two CPUs running Stable Diffusion 1.5 (in the GIMP image editor) to test the capabilities of their respective NPUs (or Neural Processing Units) to accelerate AI-powered image generation.
When asked to create an image of a “berry package,” the Snapdragon X Elite produced an image in 7.25 seconds, which was much faster than the Intel chip's time of 22.26 seconds. In fact, the Snapdragon is more than 3 times faster here.
The next test was to generate an image of a 'majestic lion basking in the golden afternoon sun' and the Snapdragon
The Qualcomm SoC produced an image every second or so, while the Core Ultra 7 only achieved an image in 12 seconds. You can see the comparison in the video below.
Analysis: Happy Snap
This seems like a surprising victory for the Snapdragon X Elite. However, with internal testing we should always be somewhat skeptical, as individual (and possibly selected) tasks are one thing, while a set of independent benchmarks carried out by a third party is quite another.
Still, the margin of victory here is so large that, whichever way you look at it, it's a true revelation of the NPU power on the Snapdragon silicon compared to the Intel Core Ultra 7 laptop processor.
However, remember that this is specifically focused on AI (and NPU) acceleration, and that there are many other performance metrics outside of that narrow field (but it's certainly expanding rapidly).
The Snapdragon (Like using Windows on ARM and not being able to run popular software, or at least, not being able to run traditional x86 applications natively to the full extent of their potential performance.)
The benefits, however, include that the Snapdragon And if the leaks, and indeed Qualcomm's pre-launch benchmark claims, are correct, this is a CPU that could be a real rival to Apple's M3 silicon (also ARM-based) in terms of raw performance.
We're told that laptops with a Snapdragon
