Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite series delivers massive performance boosts to PCs

Alongside the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 headed to your next Android phone, Qualcomm has also unveiled the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and X2 Elite SoCs for Windows PCs, and it sounds like like the multi-year wait for second-gen products was well worth it.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme that’s the star of the show. It’s a 3nm chip powered by the third-gen Oryon CPU also found in this year’s Snapdragon 8-series chip, with the X-series having skipped out entirely on last year’s mobile-focused Oryon release. With up to 18-cores clocked as high as 5.0GHz — the first of its kind to do so, according to Qualcomm — this should be a pretty massive leap forward. The end result is some seriously impressive stats: up to 75% faster CPU performance at equivalent power levels while still delivering multi-day battery life.

On the graphics side, Qualcomm’s new Adreno GPU architecture more than doubles the expected performance-per-watt compared to the Snapdragon X Elite. Gaming on ARM isn’t quite up to par with what some users probably want it to be, but if you’re up for more casual titles — or you don’t mind digging into your backlog for older supported games — the hardware behind it should be able to handle whatever receives proper support.

Unsurprisingly, AI is a big focus for the Snapdragon X2 Elite series, with an upgraded Hexagon NPU that delivers 80 TOPS of AI processing power. Qualcomm says that’s good enough to make it the fastest NPU for laptops yet, though that power is relatively limited by what Copilot+ PCs are currently capable of. If you’re invested in the world of on-device and agentic AI, this is undoubtedly a good thing, though for anyone waiting for a game-changing AI application to actually make it to market, well, you’ll need to keep waiting. Finally, Snapdragon X2 Elite supports both Wi-Fi 7 and 5G — connectivity is, after all, Qualcomm’s bread and butter.

These new Snapdragon chips might be making their official debut today, but like the first generation in 2023, you’ll need to wait a while longer to seem them appear in actual hardware. Qualcomm says laptops will ship to consumers in the first half of 2026.