Qualcomm announces Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme for Windows PCs

Last year, after well over a decade of trying, Qualcomm finally made Windows on Arm laptops a thing, putting both Intel and AMD on notice and shoving Intel out of consumer-grade Microsoft Surface machines. Today, we’re learning about the second generation of the chip that made it happen, one which’ll now come in two distinct flavors: the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme.

Qualcomm is making a gigantic claim right in the headline of its press release: it says these are “the fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs.” I’m sure Intel and AMD will have something to say about that!

But for now, the company claims its 3nm chips offer up to 31 percent faster CPU performance than the previous-gen Snapdragon X Elite at the same power, or can require 43 percent less power, and with up to 2.3x the GPU performance per watt (not a pure performance boost) from a new 1.85GHz GPU. On the CPU side, it’s using a 3rd-gen Oryon CPU that’ll also feature in Qualcomm’s new mobile flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite 5 chip, but here with up to 18 cores, 12 of which can run up to 4.4GHz, or up to two of them at 5GHz — a clockspeed which Qualcomm says is a first for Arm CPUs.

You can see more specs below, and at Qualcomm’s website and overview PDF.

There’s also a new 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, for AI tasks, that offers 37 percent more performance with a 16 percent power consumption improvement, and the company claims it’s the fastest laptop NPU by far:

Qualcomm’s characterizing all of this as a “legendary leap in performance,” claiming the Elite Extreme in particular offers “up to 75 percent faster CPU performance” than competitors at the same power.

While it doesn’t say which competitors it’s talking about in the press release, it appears that Qualcomm is comparing against some of the most powerful (and power-hungry) laptop chips in the market, including the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and you can see Qualcomm isn’t labeling both axes of its graphs:

Qualcomm also claims these power savings will lead to “multi-day battery life,” but that’s what the company already said about last year’s Snapdragon X Elite. (We saw 14 to 18 hours from last year’s laptops, so perhaps that’s multi-day defined as “two eight-hour workdays.”)

Still, these sound like very solid improvements, and some of them come from distinct new portions of the silicon. Gaming on Arm, which still needed work last year, will get a boost from a dedicated new 18MB of high speed cache that Qualcomm’s calling “Adreno High Performance Memory.”

And Qualcomm says Adobe creators will see big improvements over last year’s laptops: 28 percent faster photo editing in Photoshop, 43 percent faster exports from Lightroom, and a similar boosts to Premiere video analysis. Razer’s Min-Liang Tan also announced today that Razer will bring its Synapse software to Windows on Snapdragon, which is likely to be a polarizing announcement. He notably did not promise that Razer will make a Snapdragon-based gaming laptop.

It’s intriguing to see that the company’s testing its X2 Elite Extreme at over 50W of power; last year, Snapdragon chips were just for thin and light laptops, but 50W lets them scale into bigger PCs.

Note that when Qualcomm had its coming out party with Microsoft last year, the laptops arrived later that year. That’s not happening this time around: they’re “expected to be available 1H26,” the company writes.

Qualcomm’s announcement also doesn’t mention whether these chips will feature in its hinted-at collaboration with Google on Android for PC, but Sameer Samat, Google’s president of Android Ecosystem, suggested that the merger ChromeOS and Android might be on a similar schedule. “That combination is something we’re super excited about for next year,” he says.

Correction, September 24th: The new GPU boasts 2.3x performance per watt than the previous generation, not 2.3x the performance overall.