Qualcomm published a short video showing how a Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop outperformed an Intel Core Ultra 7-based laptop by up to 10 times in tasks involving AI image generation algorithms.
According to the description under the video, the Snapdragon X Elite is equipped with an auxiliary AI co-processor (NPU) with a performance of 45 TOPS (trillion operations per second). It was the performance of the NPU that was demonstrated in the supplier's video. The performance of Snapdragon X Elite and Intel Core Ultra 7, which, like all processors from the Meteor Lake series, is also equipped with its own NPU, was tested in image generation programs Stable Diffusion and GIMP. Qualcomm later clarified that Stable Diffusion and Fast Stable Diffusion version 1.5 were used for Snapdragon X Elite tests. The Intel Core Ultra 7 based system also used Stable Diffusion 1.5 with the OpenVINO Backend and user_guide_for_windos_users plugins.
The video starts with testing systems in Stable Diffusion. The Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop completed the task of generating a picture of fruit in 7.25 seconds. In turn, a laptop based on Intel Core Ultra 7 completed the task in 22.26 seconds. Both systems were given the same description of the desired image.
In the GIMP generator, both systems were also tasked with generating images, this time of a lion basking in the sun. For the system with Snapdragon X Elite, the native Qualcomm AI Stack plugin was used. A laptop with a Snapdragon chip managed to generate 10 different images of lions in 12.12 seconds. In turn, the Intel-based machine, using the OpenVINO plugin, generated only one image in the same time. According to our production editor Andrey Sozinov, who is currently at MWC 2024, during a live demonstration, a laptop based on Snapdragon X Elite outperformed a system based on Intel Core Ultra 7 in the same task of generating images in Stable Diffusion.
The superiority of the Snapdragon X Elite in AI tasks is quite expected, since the NPU included in the same Intel Core Ultra chips provides performance of only up to 34 TOPS. Meteor Lake is the first Intel processors equipped with an NPU. Intel previously said that future-generation Arrow Lake (desktop) and Lunar Lake (mobile) processors will offer three times the AI performance of Meteor Lake. At CES 2024 in early January, it became known that these chips are in the final stages of their development and will be presented later this year.
It should be added that a few days ago, Snapdragon X Elite appeared in the Geekbench synthetic test database, where it demonstrated convincingly high performance against x86-compatible mobile processors of competitors.
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