Lenovo ThinkCentre neo 50q Tiny QC Review a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Based 1L PC

Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo 50q QC Performance and Compatibility

One of the key aspirations for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform was to provide performance as good as (if not better than) similar low-power x86 processors. In practice, the bottom-tier X1-26-100 SKU is not going to show the Snapdragon X platform at its highest point, but it provides a solid baseline for comparison to similar 1L mini-PCs, all of which have to operate within the same thermal constraints as the Snapdragon X SoC in the Neo 50q QC.

The X1-26-100 provides for 8 of Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU cores, arranged in two clusters of 4. These are all performance (P) cores, so each core is quite capable. But the maximum clockspeed of 3.0GHz means that the chip is never in a big hurry, even in lightly-threaded workloads.

As this is the first Snapdragon X machine to hit our labs, this is also our first real chance to evaluate its utility – and its compatibility – within the ServeTheHome world. This is one area where Patrick has been a bit hesitant to break away from his tried-and-true x86 boxes, which can run everything under the sun. And while the Snapdragon X-based 50q QC came pretty close to running everything – an important mark, especially as we are over a year past the initial launch of the Snapdragon X platform – there were still some growing pains in putting the 50q QC box through its paces.

Within the Windows ecosystem, the combination of the Snapdragon X hardware, Oryon CPU cores, and Prism x86 emulator works well for most things. Even when an ARM64 binary is not available (and this limitation is slowly decreasing), the 50q QC could run more x86/x64 programs we threw at it.

Though unfortunately for our benchmarking, we ran into a limitation with MLPerf Client. While MLPerf Client offers full support for the Snapdragon X platform, including Qualcomm’s NPU and their APIs, for non-obvious reasons the Snapdragon X platform is just a bit more of a memory hog. As a result, while most MLPerf Client workloads can run on systems with 16GB of DRAM, MLPerf’s developers require 32GB for Snapdragon X platforms. A limitation we did not notice until well after we had ordered the 16GB-equipped 50q QC box. This ultimately was not a binary compatibility issue, but it underscores some of the little differences even to this day between running Windows on ARM devices and on x86 devices.

Speaking of Windows, the ThinkCentre neo 50q QC is strictly a Windows box. Lenovo does not offer a factory install option with any Linux flavors (e.g. Ubuntu), and as we found out in testing, it is not possible to manually install Ubuntu on this box either. Without going too far into the technical nitty gritty, the current approach to supporting Linux on Snapdragon X platforms is for contributors to build a device tree for each and every device SKU. But as there is not a device tree available for the 50q QC, it is not possible to successfully install a Linux distribution on the box. While that may not always be the case, for now it means the 50q QC cannot be repurposed as a Linux box – it will always be running Windows.

In lieu of that, however, Arm devices get the same access to Windows’ excellent Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) virtualization environment, which allows for running Linux on top of Windows. So for anyone who needs access to Linux tools on the 50q QC, there are well-supported ways to reach that goal.

Outside of these issues, the compatibility of the Snapdragon X platform was unremarkable in our testing. Which may sound like a bland description, but it is exactly the kind of (nearly) frictionless experience that Qualcomm and Microsoft are getting closer to delivering.

Geekbench Results

For our head-to-head comparisons, we have a few different systems on-hand. For a look at how things compare to an Intel system, we have Dell’s Precision 3260, a fellow mini-PC equipped with an Intel Core i5 12500 CPU. It is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison – the Dell is both bigger and more power-hungry of a system – but it is roughly the right competition for the low-end Snapdragon X SKU in terms of performance.

For a more iso-power Intel comparison, we also have iKOOLCORE’s R2 Max, a Core i3-N305 based system that’s all E cores.

Starting with Geekbench 6, we find that the ThinkCentre neo 50q QC places in between the two Intel systems. The 50q QC has little trouble trouncing the very low power N305-based R2 Max, eclipsing it by between 50% and 100%.

But against the more performant and power-hungry Core i5-based Dell, the Lenovo/Qualcomm system comes up short. The multi-core scores are within 5%, while the 50q QC falls behind a bit further in single-threaded workloads, showing the limits of a 3.0GHz peak CPU clockspeed for even lightly-threaded workloads.

Meanwhile, in the older Geekbench 5, we see a similar situation play out. The scores are not as favorable to the 50q QC overall, but it holds its relative position. Meaning that it does quite well versus the N305 system, but falls a bit further behind the more powerful Intel Core i5 system.

And while we don’t have Geekbench 6 data for it, here’s how the 50q QC and its Snapdragon X SoC compare to an AMD-based system: Lenovo’s own ThinkCentre M75q Gen 5 Tiny (AMD), a similar mini-PC featuring an 8 core Ryzen 7 Pro 8700GE chip inside.

Like the Intel Core i5 system, this isn’t particularly apples-to-apples since the default TDP on the 8700GE alone is higher than the entire measured power consumption of the 50q QC. But it goes to show the same trends with regards to a larger gap in single-threaded performance.

Finally, as noted earlier, we could not get our usual MLPerf Client benchmark running on the 50q QC due to a lack of DRAM – the client needs 32GB on Snapdragon X systems – so we cannot provide MLPerf comparisons here. But we did get the Geekbench AI benchmark up and running, showing what the Snapdragon X’s NPU can do.

Ultimately, while the top-line performance of the 50q QC is nothing to write home about, it does show up and get the job done.

Now let us take a look at the flip side of the coin, with Next, with a look at power and noise.