The Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme chips were officially launched a short while ago in three variants and continue Qualcomm's efforts to produce chips specifically for ARM-based PCs. They are equipped with up to 18 Qualcomm Oryon Gen 3 CPU cores clocked at up to 4.4 GHz with up to 12 of them being high-power main cores. These cores can then be overclocked to 5.0 GHz when needed for more intensive tasks.
The X Elite is manufactured using 3nm technology and the Oryon CPU is paired with a new generation Adreno GPU that allows various new PC drivers to run at high settings. This year's X2 Elite series offers a single-core CPU increase of up to 39%, a multi-core CPU increase of up to 50%, a GPU increase of up to 2.3X and an NPU increase of up to 78% compared to last year's X Elite series.
Qualcomm is focusing on the ability to process artificial intelligence (AI) directly on the device with the X Elite. Therefore, the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU with 80 TOPS capability is almost twice as powerful as the 45 TOPS in last year's model. According to Qualcomm, this makes the X2 Elite series the most powerful AI-capable processor chip for laptops.
On the CPU stage, the CPU performance is up to 44% higher than competitors with comparable power consumption. At peak power, the competitor requires 144% more power. Meanwhile, the X2 Elite's NPU power is almost 2 times that of the Apple M4 in the Procyon AI test and up to 5.7 times that of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H.
As a chip for laptops, it supports 4K 120FPS screens with HDR10 or connection of up to three 5K 60FPS monitors. The USB-4 system is also supported along with LPDDR5x memory, UFS 4.0 storage, Bluetooth 5.4, WiFi 7, and a 36MP camera. Through the Snapdragon X75 5G modem, connectivity to 5G Sub-6GHz and mmWave networks is also possible with built-in download speeds of up to 10 Gbps.
There is still no information on when the first Snapdragon Elite X2 laptop will be marketed, but if last year's schedule is followed, it will definitely arrive around early 2026.