Tested: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite is faster, but the battery life hit is real

A 140-watt charger. As soon as I pulled the Asus Zenbook A16 with from its box, with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E94100 chip inside, I knew that performance was going to be the priority here. Battery life is probably a secondary goal.

And that’s true, to an extent. My first look at Qualcomm’s second-generation Windows on Arm platform, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, shows me that it wants to amp up the processing power to push productivity tasks more quickly. Qualcomm seems willing to sacrifice some of the platform’s battery life instead.

I’m still testing the Asus Zenbook A16, with an eye toward two key axes in productivity laptops, which are battery life and performance. I feel more confident in addressing the first aspect (battery life) using our own Netflix video streaming benchmark. And you know what? Qualcomm’s latest notebook chip isn’t bad, but its predecessor was better.

In search of a better battery test

In February, I began testing representative laptops for battery life while streaming One Piece, an epic Japanese anime, on the Netflix streaming service, as a way to provide a better battery benchmark.

I’ve never been quite happy with how battery life is tested on laptops. Laptop manufacturers typically dim the laptop screen to light levels that are far darker than most people would ever use, then loop a benchmark over and over until the battery runs down. We turn the screen brightness up to levels we think most users would use, for starters. Our battery tests have also evolved.

We’ll use benchmarks that try to reproduce office tasks, as well as simply looping a movie over and over. That last test is what we traditionally thought of as a “true” battery test, watching movie after movie on an international flight.

Now, the definition has changed. Watching a movie means streaming a movie rather than just recording and downloading video. That engages the screen, the wireless radio, and the CPU, all at once. I used One Piece as a metric because the series has tons of episodes, engages all of the components I’m interested in, and is fun.

We’ll take a different look at the issue — pure productivity versus battery life — in a follow-up story. But for now, let’s keep it simple.

For comparison, I used the Asus Zenbook A16 with a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E94100) inside it, Qualcomm’s second most-powerful Elite Extreme chip. Inside are 12 Prime cores and 6 performance cores, all running at a top speed of 4.7GHz. (Qualcomm put all of the specifications in this PDF document.)

To that, we add:

• Asus Zenbook S16 (AMD Ryzen AI 9 365, 2880×1800 display, and 78Wh battery) (Note: Our original platform test used a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 instead.)
• Asus Zenbook Duo (Intel Core Ultra X9 388H, 2880×1800 display, and 99Wh battery)
• Asus Zenbook S 14 (Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 2880×1800 display, and 72Wh battery)
• Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 (Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, 2304×1536 display, and 54Wh battery)

The sequel ain’t as good as the original

We then set the laptops to a fixed brightness, began streaming One Piece, and walked away. We used Windows to tell us when the battery ran down. With the Asus Zenbook A16 with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, it worked out to 13 hours 4 minutes. The top performer, the Asus Zenbook Duo with Intel’s Core Ultra 300 (Panther Lake), lasted about 16.5 hours.

On the face of it, Qualcomm’s latest chip inside the Asus laptop doesn’t perform all that well, finishing near the bottom of the heap near AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 processor, which also emphasized performance as much as anything else. But the numbers don’t tell the full story.

We can only review what a laptop manufacturer provides us. But one of the tricks that Intel pulled with its Core Ultra 300 series laptops (“Panther Lake”) was to bundle a 99Wh battery inside. That’s the maximum size allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration for use on planes. Clearly, a smaller battery won’t deliver as much battery life. On the other hand, a smaller battery means less weight.

Just for fun, I divided the battery life by the capacity in watt-hours to arrive at the power efficiency of the individual laptop processors. It’s an abstract number, though it does tell us one thing. If a laptop maker had created a laptop with a 99Wh battery paired with a Snapdragon X Elite, that would have been something to behold.

In practical terms, streaming for over 13 hours is still an accomplishment. That’s a flight from San Francisco to Taipei in a seat where the power outlet doesn’t work. Battery life may not be as critical in a world with nearly ubiquitous power, but any stored battery power is also consumed far more readily by always-on radios in a world of ubiquitous connectivity.

Qualcomm appears to have adjusted its design goals for its second-generation processor. It’s still quite effective, but I’d still recommend a first-generation Snapdragon X Elite laptop if you’re seeking the most power-efficient processor available in the productivity PC space.