So I keep seeing these articles and videos about how Qualcomm made a CPU that can beat Apple’s M2 Max and even Intel’s i9 series. I wasn’t aware that Qualcomm was a player in the desktop CPU space. Does that mean we’ll soon be able to buy gaming laptops powered by Oryon CPUs? Will I be able to build a desktop PC with the Oryon CPU? I’ve only ever used Qualcomm’s Snapdragon CPUs which are for Android phones and definitely can’t compete with Apple’s laptop chips, so I’m not sure how their desktop lineup works.
Hardly. Comparing cores to cores, the latest Cortex X4 in the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 is slightly slower than the two year old A14. In multi core performance Snapdragon is slightly ahead, sure, mostly because it packs entire six performance cores against Apple’s two. Different design priorities. Not to mention that it’s much easier to pack together multiple slow cores than it is to design fast ones.
The M2 in the iPad Pro scores 2480 in GB6 ST vs 2325 for the 8g3 in a phone with an inferior cooling solution, that’s a 6% lead for M2. That’s definitely within the same ballpark. Alongside Qualcomm’s bold performance claims from the oryon presentation there’s no reason to believe they’ll be substantially behind Apple in laptops for ST, at least against the current M2 generation.
At the end of the day, Snapdragon SoC can be used by all windows, can’t say the same for Apple.