On March 19, ASUS recently announced promotional materials for the Zenbook A16 notebook equipped with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip on its official website, and directly compared its multiple performance indicators with Apple's M5 MacBook Pro. Data shows that Asus has a leading edge in terms of multi-core workloads, office efficiency and AI performance. However, the objectivity of some test standards has aroused attention and discussion in the industry. The technology media wccftech, which reported the incident, even used the harsh expression "shameless".
In terms of game performance, ASUS official data shows that the frame rate of Zenbook A16 when running "Diablo 4" is 1.31 times that of the M5 MacBook Pro. However, since the game has not yet launched a native macOS version, Apple devices must rely on translation software such as CrossOver to run. The existence of this compatibility layer will bring inevitable performance losses, resulting in this comparison not being conducted in the same native environment.
In terms of data transmission capabilities, ASUS promotional materials show that the Zenbook A16 has an "ultra-high-speed transmission" of 228 GB/s, compared to the M5's 153 GB/s. This statement confuses the theoretical peak memory bandwidth of the shared memory pool within the system-on-chip (SoC) with the actual external data transfer rate. The industry points out that it is extremely difficult for daily program operations to reach this theoretical bandwidth limit, and there are significant differences in the technical nature of the two concepts.
In addition, the promotional image also shows the device's leading multiples in the Geekbench 6.5 multi-core test (1.26x), Excel processing (1.55x), Cinebench R24 code compilation (1.45x), Blender 3D rendering (1.7x), and AI performance benchmark (1.85x), noting that it has 18 cores compared to Apple's 10 cores.
It is understood that devices equipped with this Snapdragon chip have not yet been officially launched for sale. At the same time, the M5 MacBook Pro equipped with 16GB unified memory and 512GB solid-state drive has currently seen a $200 price cut on Amazon, with the starting price dropping to $1,399.99.