Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus notebook SoC benchmark results revealed to be fraudulent

On April 24, 2024, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X Plus, a SoC for next-generation AI PCs. The Snapdragon X Plus is equipped with a 10-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU and a 45 TOPS NPU, the fastest in the world for notebook PCs, and is advertised as having 'up to 37% faster CPU performance than rivals.' However, the news site SemiAccurate claims, based on anonymous sources, that the benchmark results are fraudulent.

Qualcomm Is Cheating On Their Snapdragon X Elite/Pro Benchmarks - SemiAccurate

Qualcomm Continues to Disrupt the PC Industry with the Addition of Snapdragon X Plus Platform | Qualcomm

Snapdragon X Plus | Qualcomm
https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-tablets/snapdragon-x-plus

SemiAccurate said, 'We do not want to use the word 'fraud' lightly, but we cannot deny that we have received information from multiple sources,' and accused Qualcomm of 'fraudulent practices in the benchmarks it provides to OEMs and media outlets for the Snapdragon X Plus and Elite.'

SemiAccurate has previously pointed out to Qualcomm that it lacks sources for the figures it presents at presentations, and although there was an improvement when it announced the Snapdragon X Elite in the fall of 2023, it worsened again at MWC2024 in February 2024.

However, the benchmark for the Snapdragon X Elite in fall 2023 was conducted in a 'relatively clean state' in front of journalists who attended the event, but the journalists were not allowed to run any software or check the settings on the machine running the benchmark, and the execution was in a black box state.

With the launch of the Snapdragon X Plus, Qalcomm presented benchmark results that claimed it was superior to rivals such as Intel, Apple and AMD.

However, according to SemiAccurate, this benchmark score cannot be reproduced even by the OEM that received the sample. SemiAccurate points out that Qualcomm does not disclose information about the environment in which the benchmark was performed because it would be obvious that the score could not be obtained if the test was performed in the same environment.

According to sources, even when OEMs produced products close to the final design, the performance was less than 50% of the specifications presented by Qualcomm. The OEMs asked Qualcomm, 'Are there any known defects in the semiconductors that would reduce performance?', but Qualcomm repeatedly claimed that the semiconductors were normal. SemiAccurate says it has received this information from multiple OEMs.

Since only SemiAccurate is aware of the fraud, IT news sites such as MacWorld and Tom's Hardware have reported the matter as 'SemiAccurate claims fraud.'

According to Tom's Hardware, they reached out to Qualcomm for comment but had not received a response at the time of writing.

MacWorld also commented, 'Since you can't officially run macOS on a PC, Apple users don't have to worry about Qualcomm's new chips (which it claims to surpass Apple's M3),' and quoted sister site PCWorld's comment that 'Apple users don't really care how the Snapdragon X Plus/Elite ranks against Apple's masterpiece (the M3 chip),' and said, 'This shows Apple's importance in the market.'