(Credit: John Burek)
LAHAINA, HAWAII—It was just about 2 years ago that we got our first peek at Qualcomm's biggest and best-to-date shot at Arm-based processors for laptops, the Snapdragon X Elite. With the unveiling last week of the Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, we may need to start calling the original Snapdragon X chips “X1” for clarity. And more than that, we might well have to call the new X2 chips something else entirely: “X-traordinary.”
That's a very early take. In a benchmark-performance preview Qualcomm Summit, the new top-end chip, the X2 Elite Extreme, put up numbers that may well give competitors like AMD and Intel night terrors. We'll detail all that, with the necessary context, below. But first, let's set the stage for how Qualcomm, and the larger laptop market, got to this point.
(Credit: John Burek)The Original Snapdragon X: Some Background
Pardon the corny "X-traordinary" pun above, but the original Snapdragon X chips are no slouch. (Technically, we should call all these Snapdragon chips “SoCs”—systems on a chip that incorporate CPU, graphics, AI-specific silicon, and much else on a single package, much like smartphone chips.) The first of them, the X Elites, debuted in laptops in mid-2024, and in that short time, the Snapdragon X line as a whole has carved off a decent little slice of the laptop market.
According to third-party stats provided by Qualcomm, Snapdragon X chips captured 9% of the market for laptops above $600 in retail in the second quarter of 2025 for the US and the top five European countries. There's definitely some shading there—and lots of laptops sold cost less than $600. But that seems reasonable for a chip maker that everyone knows from smartphones but seems to have crash-landed from another planet into the laptop market in just the past year.
(Credit: John Burek)Indeed, Snapdragon X has fared much better than earlier Qualcomm efforts at driving a wedge into the x86 market to create an opening for its Arm-based chips. SoCs like the SQ3 done with Microsoft (technically, a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, the last Qualcomm laptop-chip effort before Snapdragon X) saw very limited uptake. Qualcomm has made an unprecedented full-court press into laptop chips since the original Snapdragon X Elite rollout. It has pumped out a full stack of Snapdragon X chips since mid-2024, tiered as the Snapdragon X (lowest end, and the most recent addition to the line), the Snapdragon X Plus (a midrange solution), and the Snapdragon X Elite (the first to debut, and the current top Qualcomm mobile compute chips on the market in 2025).
The Snapdragon X is an eight-core chip, the X Plus comes in eight- and 10-core variants, and the various X Elites are 12-core. But the differences between those chips and the new X2 line are far more significant than mere core count.
Specs: How the Snapdragon X2 Shapes Up in the Stack
Let’s do a nutshell recap of the Snapdragon X2 lineup, based on what we know from presentations and conversations from Snapdragon Summit last week. Qualcomm teased the first three SoCs in its second generation of Snapdragon X-series Arm-based laptop processors, the Snapdragon X2 Elite family. X2 features some new segmentation versus the first-gen X Elites. A new top-tier X2 Elite Extreme (one chip) sits above two “standard” X2 Elite chips. All of them are built on the third iteration of Qualcomm’s “Oryon” CPU architecture and manufactured on 3nm process technology.
The X2 Elite Extreme (the specific model number is the X2E-96-100) is positioned as Qualcomm’s new flagship mobile-compute SoC for creators and power users. It will have 18 cores split into 12 high-speed “Prime” cores (up to 4.4GHz, with two cores able to boost to 5GHz) and six lower-power cores (now, confusingly, called “Performance” cores) at 3.6GHz.
The inclusion of low-power cores is new with this generation. On the flip side, that 5GHz milestone makes the X2 Elite Extreme the first Arm-based laptop CPU to reach that clock speed. It signals Qualcomm’s intent to compete head-on with high-end x86 laptop processors, even ones in the H, HS, or HX classes from AMD and Intel.
The two lesser X2 Elite SKUs offer either 18 cores at lower clocks (X2E-88-100) or 12 cores with an even split in core count for the Prime and Performance cores (X2E-80-100). This all sets up a more nuanced performance ladder within Qualcomm’s premium laptop chips. (We expect lesser X2 Plus and straight X2 chips to eventually follow, but Qualcomm didn’t detail any new chips further down the stack.)
Beyond raw CPU horsepower, Qualcomm is pushing hard on AI and GPU acceleration. All three of the new X2 chips feature a next-generation Adreno GPU, which the company claims delivers 2.3 times better performance-per-watt than the integrated GPU on the first-gen Snapdragon X Elite, plus support for Vulkan 1.4 and DirectX 12.2 Ultimate. According to Qualcomm’s compute chief, senior vice president and general manager Kedar Kondap, the Adreno in the X2 has been fully re-architected and is an all-new integrated GPU. "It's a completely new Adreno GPU, designed ground up for this stuff," he noted in a conversation with PCMag and Wired. "It has a new architecture, better shader pipelines."
Just as significant is the new version of Qualcomm’s Hexagon neural processor, or NPU, incorporated into X2. It is rated for 80 trillion operations per second, or TOPS—far above the TOPS ratings of the NPUs in AMD’s and Intel’s best current mobile silicon (as well as Qualcomm’s, for that matter). Last-gen Snapdragon X chips sported 45 TOPS across the board, and Microsoft’s CoPilot+ program calls for a minimum of 40 TOPS to rate that designation. The extra headroom is meant to enable locally-run large language models and multitasking AI agents, though how fully software will exploit the surplus is an open question. Kondap, in a conversation with us, maintained that some ISV’s AI workloads today are already topping out the 45 TOPS of the original X Elite.
Qualcomm is also layering in new platform capabilities, such as Snapdragon Guardian, a cloud- and hardware-assisted framework for device security and manageability. Qualcomm says it will be geared toward attracting enterprise interest in the Snapdragon X platform, but it’s meant to be handy for consumers, too, allowing them to, say, locate or remote-wipe a lost laptop.
Here’s a recap of the specs of the three newly announced X2 Elite chips, with the addition of the X1 family for comparison’s sake. (Note: We included the X1E-84-100 variant to represent the top-end X1 Elite processor. Yes, we’re aware that Qualcomm outlined a slightly higher-clocked X1E-00-1DE last year, but the X1E-84-100 is the top first-gen chip to actually appear in laptops.)
One thing conspicuously missing from the table above is any mention of thermal design power (TDP) ratings, or estimates of total system power—even a range. That’s intentional; Qualcomm pointedly would not share any specifics in that vein. But it noted that it gives OEMs the flexibility to incorporate its chips how they see fit to achieve their design and thermal goals, from lighter-hitting fanless designs to full-throated performance machines. Still, those numbers are a big omission.
Now, how might these new chips shape up in terms of performance? Let’s get into that with the X2 Elite Extreme.
How We ‘Tested’ the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme
Just like at Snapdragon Summit 2023 with the first tease of the Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm gave us an early look at the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme under very controlled circumstances at Summit 2025. The company once again staged its tests in a ballroom full of reference-design laptops (all using the Extreme), carefully configured and overseen by Qualcomm staff, using benchmarks chosen by the company. These weren’t shipping systems or prototypes we could take back to PC Labs, but carefully prepared demo units meant to give journalists a taste of how the new silicon performs. But we couldn’t go hands-on-keyboards ourselves.
The same caveats apply now as they did with the original X Elite test results we presented back in 2023: We could observe the tests being run in real time, examine the test settings, compare results across multiple reference machines, and verify that scores lined up with “expected” ranges Qualcomm supplied. But again, we could not select the benchmarks, install our own test suite, or rerun workloads independently. In other words, we were testing indirectly, through Qualcomm’s setup, rather than under the typical PC Labs methodology of direct control and extended evaluation.
There’s also the issue of the reference systems themselves and the lack of TDP data mentioned above. Qualcomm declined to divulge the TDP configuration of the test machines, or even an expected TDP range for the X2 Elite and Elite Extreme chips. We can safely assume, however, that these 16-inch reference laptops, all identical, were chosen and designed to show the X2 Elite Extreme’s potential under the most flattering power envelope, a higher-wattage “full-fat” implementation as opposed to a slimmer, lower-power config. That the test machines in the ballroom were 16-inch laptops (the largest mainstream size, allowing for more robust fan hardware and heatpipes/heatsinks), equipped with a generous 48GB of memory, naturally favors putting the chip’s best foot forward. And given that no X2 Elite- or Elite Extreme-based systems are shipping yet (and won’t until 2026), it’s a preview purely on Qualcomm’s terms.
So, while the numbers we saw around CPU, NPU, and GPU horsepower are very encouraging, this context matters—a lot. These were controlled demonstrations, not open-ended benchmarks we conducted ourselves. Just as in 2023, the real verdict on Snapdragon’s X2 laptop ambitions will come only when X2 Elite and Elite Extreme silicon arrives in retail devices, running on varied OEM designs and tested under our own, and others’, independent benchmarking regimens. Until then, these results offer a first glimpse of what Qualcomm hopes will be its biggest Arm-based breakthrough yet.
The Competition: AMD, Apple, and Intel
Now, as for our set of comparison laptops? For this project, we did some hasty backward-testing on a host of representative laptops using in-market processors from AMD, Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm. They represent a healthy sampling of the laptop-CPU market as it stands here in late 2025. Here's a quick summary of the models...
On the Intel side, Qualcomm posits that the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme will compete with the H-class Core Ultra 9 285H (an “Arrow Lake-H” CPU) and the top Intel “Lunar Lake” 200V chips. We were not able to source a laptop with a Core Ultra 9 Lunar Lake chip in time, but we are using the one-step-down Intel Core Ultra 7 268V in the HP EliteBook X G1i as the next best thing. We did have a Core Ultra 9 285H on hand, in the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 (not yet reviewed), and tested this unit with its dedicated GeForce RTX 5050 GPU disabled, instead relying on its integrated Intel Arc 140T graphics.
As for AMD, we rounded up two good samples. The Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375 chip in the HP EliteBook X G1a is the proper foil for the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, and we also included the HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 (soon to be reviewed) to push the issue. The ZBook is equipped with AMD’s rousing AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 SoC, which employs robust integrated graphics and uses a unique-for-AMD unified-memory scheme to access heaps of system memory to boost graphics performance. We expect it to be stiff competition on that front.
Apple’s M4 processor is represented here in 10-core flavor in the 2024 MacBook Pro 14-inch. And Qualcomm’s first-gen X Elite processors are in the Microsoft Surface Pro (2024) detacahable tablet (using the X1E-80-100 variant) and a Asus Vivobook S 15 clamshell (X1E-78-100). These use two differently clocked versions of the X Elite; we weren’t able to get our hands on an X1E-84-100-based unit this week.
Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme First Tests: CPU Acceleration
We started with Maxon’s Cinebench 2024, everyone’s go-to CPU “drag race” test that stresses raw processing power by rendering a complex 3D scene. It’s long been a favorite for isolating both single-core speed (how quickly one thread can chew through work) and multi-core muscle (how efficiently the chip can marshal all its cores in parallel). Running both variants provides a clear first look at how the new Oryon cores stack up against the x86 competition in pure CPU-crunching throughput.
(Credit: John Burek)Alongside Cinebench, we turned to Geekbench 6, another industry-standard benchmark. It takes a more varied approach; its CPU suite mixes tasks like image manipulation, text compression, and machine learning inference, then reports both single-threaded and multi-threaded results. Geekbench helps paint a broader picture of how the silicon might behave across a range of everyday CPU-heavy workloads.
Yikes! We might need to call the paramedics here, if these numbers hold up. We’re pretty floored by the Cinebench 2024 Multi-Core results, in which the X2 Elite Extreme mops the floor with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285H and AMD’s best mobile Ryzen, the AI Max+ 395.
Core count, of course, helps a lot here. But both the Intel and AMD chips are 16-core, with the Intel split between six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, and two very-low-power cores. The AMD 395 is all high-performance cores, but at just 3GHz base clock, versus the X2 Elite Extreme’s 3.6GHz base. Meanwhile, only the Apple M4 was able to touch the X2 Elite Extreme on single-core testing.
This is a very strong showing all around for the Qualcomm chip, especially given that the reference laptop is a 16-incher, the same rough size as the Lenovo Yoga 9i Pro with its Core Ultra 9 285H. You can’t blame the Yoga for not having a relative lack of space to cool its chip in; the Ryzen 395 system is a 14-incher.
Browser-Based Tests
Speedometer and Jetstream: These two browser-based tests don't tell you a whole lot in a larger, real-world-usage sense, when you're dealing with high-end processors. They gauge how the test system, as a whole, handles various under-the-surface machinations for browsing the web and performing related background tasks.
(Credit: John Burek)As a result, they're mainly useful as a comparative measure between systems. They don't tell you much about real world browsing; any of the machines here should excel for that kind of thing.
The X2 Elite Extreme topped the pack in both tests, though the Apple MacBook Pro came close in JetStream. Put aside the Apple, and in JetStream, the X2 beat the next-best systems by about 20 percent.
Graphics Tests
The Adreno graphics have had a full teardown and rebuild, Qualcomm says, so we’re keen to see how it does in these two synthetic tests from UL’s 3DMark. You won’t get real-world gaming frame rates here, and Qualcomm didn’t offer up any with popular games. But these two tests and their specific-to-3DMark scores are useful as a rare graphics metric that runs well and comparably across Arm-based OSs (the Windows on Arm and macOS platforms of the Qualcomm and Apple systems here) and the x86 Windows of the rest. The non-Qualcomm machines here use the respective integrated graphics shown in our spec summary chart; note again that we disabled the Lenovo machine’s RTX 5050.
(Credit: John Burek)Steel Nomad Light is a great cross-platform graphics trial that runs on almost anything, employing DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.1 or Metal as appropriate. It’s meant mainly for phones (it also works on Android and iOS) and “lightweight laptops,” according to UL. Solar Bay, meanwhile, has the same cross-platform appeal (and phone-OS compatibility), but is meant for systems that support ray tracing.
In Steel Nomad Light, the new Adreno GPU certainly smites the implementation of the old Adreno in the two Snapdragon X Elite systems here, delivering a bit more than double the score. The same applies to the Solar Bay test, with the X2 Elite Extreme coming in at a bit above double the X Elites. That's impressive.
The Intel chips here (Arrow Lake-H, Lunar Lake), the Apple M4, and the AMD Ryzen AI 375 were well behind the X2 Elite Extreme reference laptop, which also bodes well for the Qualcomm offering, but bear in mind a few possible caveats. The X2 Elite Extreme is a specialized chip that will likely appear in pricier laptops than the original X Elites have, geared more toward content creators than the mainstream. It has a much wider DDR memory bandwidth (12-channel versus eight-channel), which is certainly helping matters here. And bear in mind the 16-inch chassis, the 48GB of memory, and presumptively well-optimized cooling. This laptop, in retail form, would probably be a true premium machine.
That also describes the other AMD offering here, inside the HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14. That dynamic little mobile workstation has more memory than all the machines here, and is able to allocate plenty of it to graphics work due to the Ryzen AI Max 395’s support for unified memory in concert with its integrated graphics. That was the one chip in this lot that took the X2’s Adreno to task, and not by a small margin. (Mind you, that HP machine starts at $2,599 and came in at just over $4,000 in our test unit.) You won’t see the 395 in tons of machines, but where you do see it, it excels. (We’ve tested it in the Framework Desktop and the Asus ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet; our review of the HP ZBook is imminent.)
In short? Impressive showing by the X2 Elite Extreme, but more context, and real game numbers, are needed.
AI Tests
AI benchmarking is a complicated, so our insights here are going to be necessarily limited, especially as we didn’t get to select the terrain. We’re limiting our comparison for AI tasks to a head-to-head between the first-gen Snapdragon X1 Elite (45 TOPS NPU) and the new X2 Elite Extreme (80 TOPS NPU). We’ll see if the results are the foregone conclusion they sound like they should be, given the amped-up NPU. (Spoiler: Yep.)
(Credit: John Burek)The Geekbench AI benchmark, the wider ranging of the two, was run on the ONNX AI framework in both cases. It runs a series of machine-learning workloads across three data types (outlined in the results, as you can see) and presents scores for each. UL’s Procyon AI’s Computer Vision was run using the Qualcomm SNPE tab. AI benchmarking is also a very fast-developing space; we haven’t fully vetted our settings, results, and numbers with Procyon AI’s other settings to feel comfortable with 1:1 comparisons quite yet outside a single platform.
Short version: The tests scaled well given the more robust NPU, to be sure. How much the rest of the X2 Elite Extreme, and its optimized laptop surroundings, contributed to the much higher scores remains an open question. But clearly, the near-doubled TOPS on the new NPU make a big difference in these preview numbers, doubling the scores or more in all cases except the Single-Precision Geekbench AI test.
Some Final Thoughts on a Tightly Controlled Preview
We once again want to emphasize the scope of the preview results above. The tests were selected to show the X2 Elite Extreme in its best light; they were run on a well-optimized, relatively big chassis; and the laptops were likely configured in a favorable-to-testing power configuration, as Qualcomm shared no power-consumption or TDP numbers. In other words, they were probably a very best-case-scenario.
Still, the X2 Elite Extreme looks like a beastly chip, and it signals a widening of Qualcomm’s assault on the laptop-chip market. It’s gone from introducing chips for mainstream and semi-premium ultraportables in its first generation to taking on the big chip makers’ laptop silicon over the course of barely two years. That’s a special flavor of impressive all on its own.
(Credit: John Burek)If the X2 Elite Extreme silicon delivers on its early promise, all that might hold it back is software. By that, we mean the availability of a critical mass of Arm-native content-creation applications relied upon by the power users who are most likely to be in the market for an Elite Extreme-grade PC. But we suspect Qualcomm’s playing a long game here; you don’t get those applications optimized until the processors capable of running them exist first.
Also bear in mind that while these benchmark results above outline one optimal implementation of the X2 family, that won’t be the only guise that these chips show up in, by far. The company showed off (albeit, without testing numbers) a wide range of X2 Elite-family reference designs, from ultraportables to Snapdragon mini desktops. Many will be much thinner or smaller than the enumerated 16-inch reference laptop here, which means lesser performance. And many such systems won’t implement the Elite Extreme variant of the X2 Elite for pricing, target-market, and sheer thermal-practicality reasons.
What that means: Even if you slice some significant percentages off the above scores to estimate what an X2 Elite might look like versus the X2 Elite Extreme, or what an X2 Elite Extreme looks like in a more challenging chassis, it could end up looking just “pretty good,” not quite as dominant as it appears at the moment. Qualcomm may have made an excellent second-generation chip, but it still must obey the laws of physics.
The other thing to bear in mind is Qualcomm’s vague pronouncement around availability of the first X2 Elite-based PCs: first half of 2026. Because Qualcomm did not say "Q1 2026," you could read that as Spring 2026 at the soonest—six months out—and potentially as long as nine months away. That timing gives its rivals a release window—or at least a tease window, as Qualcomm has taken!—for their own new flagship mobile CPUs. Figures like 80 TOPS and 18 cores might seem insurmountable today, but ask us again in six months. And again when the systems actually hit the street.
Real-world testing of the X2 Elite Extreme (and the X2 Elite) in retail machines is what to wait for, as always. The X2 Elite Extreme looks like a monster under controlled circumstances, but independent tests will be the real proof point. That said, Qualcomm made good on a lot of its first-generation promises, and we have high hopes for the X2 line to be something of a disrupter, like the Snapdragon X has been.
(Note: PCMag attended Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit by invitation, but in keeping with our editorial ethics policy, we assumed the costs for travel and lodging for the conference. Matthew Buzzi, Francisco LaHoz, Joe Osborne, and Brian Westover contributed testing assistance for this story.)