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Lenovo’s Snapdragon X-Powered, 2.8 Lb Yoga Slim 7x Made The Cut In My Demanding Laptop Bag

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has caused quite the shake-up in the laptop market, with very competitive performance, fantastic battery life and a dedicated 45 TOPS neural engine for currently evolving AI workloads. I’ve written about Snapdragon X-based laptops and the platform in the past, but in this report, I’m going to delve into my experience living on Lenovo’s new Snapdragon X Elite-powered Yoga Slim 7x laptop, using the machine as my daily driver and travel workhorse.

Not only is this a premium ultra-light, with a gorgeous 90Hz, 14-inch, 3K OLED HDR display, a 1080p Windows Hello IR webcam, WiFi 7 and 16GB of fast LPDDR5X 8,448MHz memory, but it puts up some of the best performance I’ve experience in this class of machine. And it looks great too, if Cosmic Blue strikes your fancy like it does mine. But let’s dive in, because there’s more here than meets the eye than just a sleek design and top specs.

Addressing The Elephant In The Room: Software Compatibility

Let’s get this out of the way early, because it’s the one area that might give some folks trepidation on moving to a Windows on Snapdragon-based machine. The software ecosystem is still evolving, though Microsoft is heavily resourcing the effort now, in conjunction with Qualcomm of course, and big name ISVs like Adobe are finally getting on board as well. Regardless, there are undoubtedly some applications and games that will have compatibility issues or have to run under Microsoft’s Prism emulation mode, but my common, semi-challenging creator workflow was met with zero issues.

I should also point out that this isn’t a gaming machine, but if Qualcomm can work out AVX support for the platform, which causes issues with some games, and continually update their graphics drivers with optimizations for new games, Snapdragon X Elite machines will come a long way in terms of gaming performance and compatibility. Beyond gaming, which I rarely get time to enjoy these days, my workflow is driven by a mix of Office productivity apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Chrome web browsing, as well as Adobe Photoshop for image editing and Cyberlink Power Director for video production. A handful of additional utilities for bulk file renaming and image resizing get called upon occasionally as well.

General Performance Experience In Creator And Office Workloads

Photoshop and Power Director are heavier lifts, but the Snapdragon-powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x handled both with ease. Typically, I work in 4K30 or 4K60 video content and transcode to H.265 HEVC final video output from the road, when I’m traveling at trade events and client briefings. Scrubbing through a video’s timeline is always snappy and fluid, and rendering for output is typically just as quick or even a bit faster than any previous laptop I’ve owned. I’m also beginning to make use of AI-generated effects, as well as video and audio clean-up now, to improve production quality, and this machine handles it all really well. Although, I did notice that, at least in Power Director, AI-processing was not currently being offloaded to the NPU, but rather handled on the CPU and integrated GPU. Other apps, like Davinci Resolve do make use of the NPU on board, for AI-enhanced functions like the app’s Magic Mask feature, for example.

On a similar—perhaps under-appreciated—note, Qualcomm also helped solve a big problem music creators have had on Windows PCs for many years now, with respect to IO latency, when plugging instruments and other devices into their PCs. Qualcomm, in conjunction with Microsoft and Yamaha engineers, helped build and test a new Audio Stream Input/Output driver such that instrument input latency is a thing of the past now on PCs. Check out the demo I captured at Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit in Maui, HI this year, to get the full effect (around the 4 min mark) of this new ASIO driver. It’s impressive stuff…

Regardless, as the software ecosystem around these new class of Copilot+ PCs continues to evolve, making use of the best engine and right tool for the job will only get better for Snapdragon X-based machines like Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7x.

Maintaining Performance And Battery Life Is Snapdragon X’s Secret Weapon

Another under-appreciated strength for Snapdragon X-based laptops like the Slim 7x is the fact that, generally speaking, the platform maintains its performance on battery power, which is how people actually use laptops, obviously. Though part of this is up to the laptop OEM configuration, the trend I’ve seen is that Snapdragon X-based laptops generally maintain more of their performance on battery power, versus current-gen Intel or AMD-based machines. First, let’s look at how this laptop stacks up in a popular 3D design and rendering benchmark called Cinebench, then we’ll look at how that performance holds up on battery power as well…

As you can see, in this specific benchmark, Lenovo’s Snapdragon-powered machine scores near the top, right behind the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge which is powered by a slightly higher-clocked Snapdragon X Elite processor as well. Its single-threaded score is more middle of the pack, but its multi-threaded score is top tier. Conversely, Intel’s new Core Ultra 200 series (bottom of the graph), though trailing significantly in multi-threaded performance, scores particular strong in single threaded throughput. However, let’s look at what happens on battery power…

As you can see, depending on how the OEM configures the machine and its on-battery power profile, current generation and previous generation Intel Core Ultra laptops bleed off significant performance when running on battery, whereas the two Snapdragon X-based laptops from Lenovo and Samsung here, bleed off only about 2 – 3%. Of note, however, is Dell’s Core Ultra 200-powered XPS 13 in its lower power Optimized mode, which bleeds off less, but also has a much lower top score versus the similarly-equipped Asus ZenBook, for example. Also, though I’m not showing single-threaded compares here, that picture looks even worse for the competitive machines listed, but about the same for the Snapdragon X-powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.

In any event, though again, this aspect of performance is up to OEM configuration somewhat, performance on battery power is indeed one of this Snapdragon X laptop’s superpowers.

Key Take-Aways And What The Future Of The Platform Holds

Starting at $1199, or $1289.99 with a larger 1TB Solid State Drive, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x definitely weighs in at a premium laptop price point, though I’d offer my experience with the machine thus far was also met with premium performance and a great user experience, along with a gorgeous 3K OLED display. I would like to see more 5G modem-equipped options amongst these new Snapdragon machines, as well as a microSD card slot on the Slim 7x, however. It would also seem that Qualcomm could help drive broader 5G connectivity adoption in laptops, with its lineage of 5G modem leadership. Further, the Yoga Slim 7x’s keyboard is not quite as nice as Lenovo’s ThinkPad line-up—which have historically proven to be some of the best laptop keyboards in the market—though Lenovo has the Snapdragon-powered ThinkPad T14s to scratch that itch as well.

The quest for the “perfect” laptop is always a bit elusive for me, but the Snapdragon X-powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is a machine that gets close and delivers extremely well in a lot of key areas. Moving forward, I expect Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform and the ecosystem to continue to evolve, such that native versus emulation performance becomes a non-issue, and virtually all compatibility issues are mitigated. The inertia behind the platform is prominent and building, with machines like the Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7x showcasing the full potential of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform.


Source: www.forbes.com…