The last time I mentioned the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite was during the launch of the 2024 edition of the Cinebench benchmark. This new chip not only aims to fulfill the (long-overdue) promise of “Windows-on-ARM”, but also seeks to break previous limits on battery life. The ASUS Vivobook S15 is one of the first laptops to hit the market with the Snapdragon X Elite, and the ETA PRIME channel invites us to explore it…
We all know that Microsoft bet its future, its house, the farm, the cars, and even a couple of flying saucers on artificial intelligence. But that bet is not enough: its vision of “Copilot everywhere” needs a lot of hardware backing, and at the top of the list is the brand-new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite.
The idea of “Windows-on-ARM” is not new, but all previous attempts ended in failure. The Snapdragon X Elite wants to break that dynamic and offer users a familiar environment that is also compatible and doesn't fall behind on battery life. The people at Asus decided to use this chip in their new Vivobook S15 laptop, and ETA PRIME on YouTube managed to get their hands on one of them.
ASUS Vivobook S15: Snapdragon X Elite + Windows 11… on ARM
Unsurprisingly, a good part of the video focuses on the laptop's overall appearance, but today we can say that the Vivobook S15 uses the variant X1E-78-100 of the X Elite, with 12 cores and 12 threads at a frequency of 3.4 GHz. The chip includes 42 megabytes of cache, an Adreno graphics module, and the Hexagon “neural processor”, with enough performance to earn Microsoft's “Copilot PC” label. RAM comes to 16 GB in LPDDR5X, and storage is based on a 1-terabyte NVMe with PCI Express 4.0 interface. As for the screen, it uses a 3K OLED panel, with a resolution of 2880 x 1620 pixels at 120 Hz.
ETA PRIME used the Vivobook S15 for a while and admits its performance is much better than expected. Microsoft invested blood, sweat, and tears to polish its translation layer (known as Prism), and although it's not at 100 percent, it seems to handle “general use” without hiccups. What about gaming? Light titles (like Hades 2 and the original version of Skyrim) respond very well, but even more interesting is seeing a game of the caliber of Cyberpunk 2077 surpassing the 30 FPS barrier at 1080p Low and FSR 2.1 Performance. On the other hand, the situation with emulators is more delicate: Dolphin works, but the rest needs updates.
In short, even though we're dealing with a first-generation product... the Snapdragon X Elite isn't terrible. Its software support can only improve from here, and a stripped-down Windows 11 will definitely help.
