Asus Vivobook 17 Intel Core I5

Intel is nether assault. Its long-running tenure as the king of computing CPUs is being shaken at its foundation with the latest generation CPUs from AMD on desktop and mobile.

AMD isn't the simply contest, though. Qualcomm is also posturing up to Intel'southward mobile dominance with some intriguing chips of its own. Its laptop Snapdragon chips use the clever big/piddling core design of its smartphone system on chip (SoC) designs, but with a little more processing and graphical oomph. The 8cx is the latest attempt to topple Intel from its processing throne.

Where previous Always Connected Windows laptops powered by Snapdragon 835 and 850 chips have seen mixed results, perhaps the new Snapdragon 8cx can prove more capable. Here's how it stacks up against Intel's midrange Core i5 CPUs.

You can bank check our CPU guide if you're interested in further information.

CPU operation

The Snapdragon 8cx sports Qualcomm'southward Kryo 495 CPU cores. Information technology has viii of them to work with, four of which are lower-power Silver cores running at i.8GHz, while the others are Gold cores running at 2.84GHz. Intel'due south Core i5 mobile CPUs employ a more traditional blueprint with four general-purpose cores, but some have support for hyperthreading, meaning that they can handle up to eight threads at one time.

The best of Intel's 8th-generation Whiskey Lake Cadre i5 CPUs operate at 1.6GHz but can turbo heave up to 4.1GHz on a single core when required or up to 3.7GHz across all four cores simultaneously. Its 10th-gen Ice Lake CPUs accept a lower clock speed betwixt 0.7GHz and 1.2GHz base clock, but they turbo up to iii.7GHz on one core and three.3Ghz across all of them simultaneously. Its tenth-gen Comet Lake CPUs clock college still, reaching up to 4.4GHz in some configurations.

Ice Lake CPUs are based on a 10nm process node, which helps propel Ice Lake CPUs ahead of 14nm Whiskey Lake chips, even with a lower boost clock. Comet Lake CPUs are besides based on a 14nm procedure just nonetheless tend to be faster than Water ice Lake chips, even if they aren't as efficient. Qualcomm's 8cx is based on a more than refined 7nm process — the same one that has seen AMD make big gains with its desktop chips.

There are enough of reviews for Core i5-equipped laptops and 2-in-1s — you tin read about many of them here — but at that place are far fewer devices in the wild that support the 8cx in mid-2020. Still, there are some, and they have made some impressive results. Nosotros got our easily on the outset of the bunch, the Samsung Galaxy Book S, in August 2019 and actually liked it. Reviews of the finished product were stiff likewise, claiming that the 8cx was a great improvement over previous-generation laptop SoCs from Qualcomm. Information technology offered good operation and great bombardment life.

What information technology didn't offer, though, was Core i5 beating performance. The 8cx struggles with intensive web browsing (itself not exactly the near strenuous of tasks). In our review of the 8cx-equipped Lenovo Flex 5G, nosotros found it just about capable enough to compete with slower dual-cadre i3 Intel CPUs, and even select Core i5s in multi-threaded tasks. Unmarried-threaded tasks saw it severely hamstrung past its lower clock speed, withal.

Another comparison worth making, is with the Microsoft Surface Pro X'southward SQ1 chip, which is a modified Snapdragon 8cx. In some reviews, that CPU falls behind Intel's Core i5 and i7 processors in the Surface Pro vii and Surface Laptop iii, further highlighting the 8cx's good, but non good enough, performance.

Graphics

Intel's onboard graphics, typically its HD and UHD variants, have never been known as gaming powerhouses. They don't hold a candle to entry-level graphics cards like the Nvidia GTX 1650 and 1650 Super, even if they do enable some very low-level gaming. That all changed with Ice Lake, which proved to be far more capable at enabling decent frame rates at 1080p resolution in many popular e-sports games, and even some small FPS in older AAA games, like GTA V.

At the fourth dimension of its debut, the Adreno 680 GPU core was said to be the fastest GPU Qualcomm has ever produced, with up to twice the functioning and 60% greater power efficiency than the Snapdragon 850. Information technology as well supports the latest DirectX12 API.

In graphics tests performed at Computex 2019 against the Intel 8250U with its onboard Intel UHD 620 graphics cadre, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx performed favorably. In the PCMark x Night Raid benchmark it achieved a graphics score as high as 6,266, while the Intel bit was merely able to achieve a score of v,831. That's a more than xx% uplift in performance for the Snapdragon SoC and equates to a divergence of 29 fps for the Intel chip (at best), versus the Snapdragon's 37 fps.

While that does requite the Snapdragon CPU a lead confronting the Intel Hd graphics onboard the Comet Lake 10th-generation CPUs — fries that are often paired with dedicated graphics cards — information technology'south not much of a comparison for the Water ice Lake Core i5 processors and their onboard GPUs, which are far more capable.

App back up

One of the concerns with Microsoft's Always Continued PC style is the lack of native applications for the Qualcomm hardware nether the hood. Although the two companies have congenital emulation that allows x86 applications to run on the platforms, that's not ideal, as it does require some processing power to perform the translation.

The Electron cantankerous-platform app development system is integrated with Windows ten, making it easier than always for developers to port their programs to run on Arm hardware merely every bit well every bit Intel. That brings popular apps similar Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Spotify into the fold of native Arm applications, which could pb to a nifty increment in performance on Qualcomm chips over the long term. The Unity development engine is also consistently improving back up for, and operation on, Arm hardware, like the Snapdragon 8cx.

That said, when we tested the Lenovo Flex 5G with its Snapdragon 8cx, we found it incredibly frustrating how often Windows applications just wouldn't run well — or run at all — on the Qualcomm SoC. Emulation helps, and this problem may become less of i over time, just as of mid-2020, information technology's still a business organisation.

Cost and efficiency

Snapdragon 8cx brings faster web browsing to PCs

The big selling points of the existing E'er Continued line of products are efficiency and connectivity. Qualcomm has talked up efficiency gains for the Snapdragon 8cx, suggesting it could even deliver multi-day battery life in some products. That would exist an improvement even upon the all-encompassing battery life seen in solid entries like the HP Envy x2 and the Surface Book two.

The Lenovo Flex 5G held that promise in our testing, breaking all of our battery performance records and lasting an impressive 28 hours in our video loop exam on a single charge. The spider web examination saw the Flex 5G handle over 17 hours direct, almost two hours more than than the Surface Volume 2.

Bombardment life is an area where the Flex 5G really shines. While the 8cx isn't perfect in all areas, this is one of many tasks it handles well.

8cx intrigue tin can't trump pedigree and performance

Keeping up with all of the advances Intel has been making in mobile computing tin be challenging. Without a lot of prior knowledge, information technology can be difficult to make up one's mind betwixt a Qualcomm 8cx or a Core i5 laptop.

The Qualcomm 8cx has fantabulous bombardment life and fantastic graphics, only there'south area for improvement. While it has great app support, some users find the CPU and GPU capabilities and functioning underwhelming.

Qualcomm's 8cx has a lot of potential, and the 8cx Plus is already promising to deliver more. With that in mind, Intel'due south latest Core i5s are the all-time option on the market correct now.