The Snapdragon X2 Elite series was officially launched last week as the flagship chip for Arm-based Windows laptops. Three models are offered with the X2 Elite Extreme being the flagship version equipped with a 3rd Gen Oryon CPU. Qualcomm says the X2 Elite series is the most powerful laptop chip on the market with a processing capability of up to 80 TOPS. To prove this claim, a benchmark test session was conducted during the Snapdragon Summit. Here are some of the test scores that were successfully recorded.
The test was conducted using a laptop equipped with a 16″ screen, powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, 48GB of LPDDR5x RAM, and 1TB SSD storage. Based on my observations, it is a standard laptop with a built-in active cooling system. At the same time, several tablet and compact laptop designs were also shown without a cooling system. The test was not conducted on this unique prototype in the form of a plate and a thin box.
In the Geekbench single and multi-core tests, the X2 Elite Extreme's CPU performance outperformed competing chips such as the Ryxen AI 9HZ 379, Core Ultra 9 288V, Core Ultra 9 285H and Apple M4. When compared to the Snapdragon X1 Elite, the performance in the same test is up to 50% faster, especially in the multi-core score.
Qualcomm's focus this year can be seen on improving the performance of the NPU, which has AI processing power of up to 80 TOPS. This is to enable laptops using the X2 Elite series to run AI models directly from the device faster. This is also seen as preparation for the AI needs of various software that are expected to continue to increase next year.
In the Geekbench AI and Procyon AI tests, the X2 Elite Extreme leaves all competing chips behind. For example, it is almost 6 times faster than the Core Ultra 9 285H. For Copilot+ PC owners, the increased NPU power of the X 2 Elite Extreme is worrisome because new features in Windows 11 will not be able to run on computers with less powerful NPUs.
This already happened last year when AI PCs became obsolete and were replaced by Copilot+ PCs less than two months after launch. This year we see some of the AI features in Windows 11 being given to Copilot+ PCs with Qualcomm chips first, with Intel and AMD users having to wait a little longer.
In the 3D Mark Solar Bay test, the X2 Elite Extreme scores were again ahead with GPU performance up to 61% better than the competition. While the improvement is clearly visible on the GPU, the gaming issue on Snapdragon computers still lies in the inconsistent software support on the Arm platform. Epic Games promises better Unreal Engine 5 support on the X2 Elite series. The extent of this support will only be known once laptops with this chip are on the market.
Conclusion
Like the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 test published last week, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme test scores are no less impressive, giving an indication of how it will perform in the real world. It's still unknown when the first laptops with the X2 Elite Extreme will hit the market, but if real-world performance is on par (or even better) with lab tests, we can't wait to try it out for ourselves soon.