What you need to know
- Leaked benchmarks of the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 show a massive leap compared to the Microsoft SQ2.
- The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 appears to sit between the Intel Core i7-1065G7 and the Intel Core i7-1165G7 in terms of multi-core performance.
- As with all leaked benchmarks, these figures need to be taken with a grain of salt.
These benchmarks need to be placed in context before we dive into the numbers. Benchmarks like this always need to be taken with a grain of salt, as they can be incorrect, faked, or be for early models of devices that don't reflect the final product that will ship. These scores are also for a Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD), which means that the figures came from an engineering sample. The retail version of the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 could have better performance, but the main takeaway is that the figures need to be viewed in context.
According to the benchmarks, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 earned a single-core score of 982 and a multi-core score of 4,918. In his Surface Pro X review, our executive editor saw a single-core score of 798 and a multi-core score of 3,100 on his device running the SQ2 processor.
The scores showed in the benchmarks place the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 between the Intel Core i7-1065G7 and the Intel core i7-1165G7 in multi-core performance. The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 gets 5% better multi-core performance than the former and 9% lower than the latter.
As expected, even a leap this large still has Snapdragon's offering fall short of Apple's M1 in the same tests. The MacBook Air with an M1 chip got a single-core score of 1,687 and a multi-core score of 7,433. Apple's M1 chips are so good that when someone used virtualization software to run Windows 10 on an M1 device it still got a higher score than the leaked Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 scores.
Even if it does fall short of Apple's M1 chips, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 could be a large leap for Windows 10 on ARM PCs.
