Qualcomm disputes Intel’s performance claims

In the year since Qualcomm debuted its Snapdragon X Elite, the competition hasn’t been quiet. Intel released Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake chips, the latter of which seemed like a legitimate response to Qualcomm’s advances in battery life and efficiency.

But Qualcomm isn’t impressed by Intel’s latest offerings.

Qualcomm has no new PC chips to announce at its annual summit; instead, the company spent some time with reporters noting that some of the claims made by Intel are leaving out some important details.

Qualcomm has two main criticisms of how Intel has talked about its new Lunar Lake or Core Ultra Series 2 chips. First, that Intel has left Qualcomm’s highest configuration, the X1E-84-100, out of its direct comparisons. Instead, Intel relies on the X1E-80-100 and X1E-78-100 in its comparisons. According to the numbers presented by Qualcomm, as you can see in the chart below, leaving out the X1E-84-100 allows Intel to take the lead in some performance benchmarks. The other slight wrinkle, according to Qualcomm, in Intel’s marketing is that its own high-end configuration, the Core Ultra 9 288V, is not yet available at retailers. This calls into question Intel’s claim that these are “the fastest cores.”

The biggest argument, of course, is that the Qualcomm side still offers better power efficiency. In particular, Qualcomm highlights the fact that Lunar Lake chips consume 38% more power at peak performance.

Of course, performance wasn’t Intel’s main claim with the Core Ultra Series 2. It was about battery life. And in my own testing, I was very impressed with how long these laptops last, especially under the most demanding workloads. For now, it takes the crown when it comes to battery life.

Qualcomm doesn’t dispute Intel’s ambitious claims, but notes that Intel isn’t telling the whole story. As we’ve learned in our own testing, the Core Ultra Series 2 chips don’t do well with battery life, which is a strength of Arm chips, including the Snapdragon X Elite and Apple Silicon chips. Qualcomm shows that, in general, the latest Intel chips have a significant drop in performance while on battery, dropping as much as 54% in some tests.

To be fair, this has always been true of Intel chips, but Qualcomm has a point. As long as it’s Intel’s battery life, you’re admittedly losing a fair amount of performance. This is not true with the Snapdragon X Elite.

However, for most people, they may just choose the extra hours of battery life over some performance. Let’s not forget: we’re talking about small, thin and light laptops, not high-performance machines. This calculation could change on larger and more powerful laptops. But right now, Intel’s focus on battery life seems like the right choice, even if it was a little misleading when compared to Qualcomm.