By the time Snapdragon X Elite devices are broadly available you probably have to compare them against the M4. Apple specifies the M4’s NPU with 38 TOPS while Qualcomm specifies the Snapdragon X Elite with 45 TOPS, but I wouldn’t bet on these numbers being directly comparable (just like TFLOPS from different GPU manufacturers).

The M4 also made quite a big jump in single core performance and multi-core performance seems to be comparable to what the X Elite can achieve unless we’re talking about its 80 watts mode, but then we’d have to take Apple’s “Pro” and “Max” chips into account. Keep in mind current M4 performance metrics stem from a 5mm thick, passively cooled device. It will be interesting to see whether Qualcomm releases bigger chips on this architecture.

Price is obviously where the X Elite could shine as there’ll be plenty of devices to choose from (once they’re actually broadly available) and if you need anything above base models (which mostly start at 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD at Apple) you’ll likely pay a lot less for upgrades compared to the absolutely ridiculous upgrade pricing from Apple. Price to performance might be very good here.

If and when Linux distributions start seamlessly supporting x86 apps on ARM I’ll be interested in a thin and light ARM device if it really turns out to be that much more energy efficient compared to x86 chips. Most comparisons use Intel as a reference for x86 efficiency, but AMD has a decent lead here and I feel like it’s not as far off of ARM chips as the marketing makes it seem, so for the time being I think going with something like an AMD Ryzen 7840U/8840U is the way to go for the broadest Windows/Linux compatibility while achieving decent efficiency.