Performance-wise, Qualcomm shared two main details. The company claims that Snapdragon X is faster than x86 and Arm-based competitors. It beats M2 Max in single-threaded performance and matches competitor peak performance at 30% less power consumption.

It was shared on the stage that the Snapdragon X scores 3227 vs 2841 for the M2 Max for Apple in Geekbench. This is the first time since M1's introduction in 2020 that the ARM competitor managed to beat Apple in a single performance.

The performance comes from Nuvia Core (now Qualcomm Oryon), acquired by Qualcomm two years ago. Gerard Williams III and his team, including industry veteran John Bruno, co-founder, and P. Engineer, created the best single-threaded performance CPU today, and all the magic started in 2019. This is one impressive work in a relatively short time.

Compared with the Intel X86 i9-13980HX, Snapdragon X Elite should beat it in single-threaded performance and match peak performance at 70% less power consumption. The Snapdragon X is slightly faster than the i9 13980HX performance 3227 vs. 3192 but at a significant 70 percent less power. It will be interesting to see how it compares to Meteor Lake, but again, we strongly believe that Qualcomm will retain the power consumption advantage.

One number that we are interested in is the platform level performance and battery life, as Meteor Lake Core ultra looked very efficient on some demos that we've seen.

Qualcomm will try to push for its AI story due to its capable NPU, but it won't be easy against a heavyweight Intel that has already invested a lot in this ecosystem.

Apple announced its Scary Fast live streaming only, a rushed-out event for Monday, October 30th, 5 PM PST, 2 AM Central European time, just in time for Halloween. Is that a reactionary event to launch the Apple M3? We will learn that on Monday of the coming week.