If you thought Snapdragon X was cool, Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme blows it away

Qualcomm is holding its annual Snapdragon Summit this week, which means refreshes of its premium chipsets. Specifically, that includes the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for phones and Snapdragon X2 Elite series for Windows 11 laptops. And if you're looking to pick up a Windows laptop next year, business is about to pick up.

The first generation's launch included the Snadragon X Plus and X Elite, but this time, there's a focus on premium. The three chips announced include two variants of the Snapdragon X2 Elite, and the all-new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (I know, the X used to stand for Extreme(.

"Snapdragon X2 Elite strengthens our leadership in the PC industry, providing legendary leaps in performance, AI processing and battery life to enable the experiences that consumers deserve," said Kedar Kondap, SVP and GM of compute and gaming, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "We continue to push the boundaries of technological innovation, introduce breakthrough products that set new industry standards and redefine what’s possible for PCs."

The Snapdragon X2 Elite is a legitimate beast

So many cores, so many GHz

Qualcomm is the first out of the gate to talk about next-gen laptop chips, with Intel and AMD coming later, and it came out big. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme has 18 cores, max 5GHz, integrated memory, and more, laying down the claim that it's the first "Arm-compatible" core to hit 5GHz.

As we reported on in 2023, the Snapdragon X Elite used the same cores across the board. The Snapdragon X2 Elite series has a mixture of prime cores and performance cores, with 12 prime cores in the Elite Extreme and the top-end Elite, and six in the bottom-tier Elite. All three SKUs have six performance cores. They're all using the new 3nm 3rd-gen Oryon cores, of course.

GPU performance has nearly doubled in those two top-end SKUs, and Qualcomm is promising 2.3x performance-per-watt. It's exciting to see, because graphics performance was one area where the Snapdragon X Elite fell behind Intel's Arc graphics in Lunar Lake platforms.

There are a couple big differences between the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and the top-end X2 Elite. For one thing, the Elite Extreme is the only one with cores that boost up to 5GHz. The X2 Elite maxes out at 4.7GHz.

The other big difference is integrated memory. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is the only one that has it, which means faster performance overall.

It has an 80 TOPS NPU

You should care about this

The full stack of Snapdragon X2 Elite chips comes with an 80 TOPS (INT8) NPU, something that you'll likely see maintained across lower-end SKUs as they're introduced, as was the case with Snapdragon X. Qualcomm isn't confirming that this time though.

This is something you should care about. Windows 11 already has a suite of Copilot+ features that are exclusive to 40+ TOPS NPUs, and not only will those run much better on an 80 TOPS NPU, but it's extremely likely that there will be Copilot+ features that require newer NPUs at some point. Of course, Intel is way behind in the NPU race, and it still holds a bulk of the market share, so we'll see how that plays out.

One of the most common questions I'm asked is, why should I bother buying a laptop with an NPU? While the focus is still mostly efficiency with these tasks, the answer is usually future-proofing. Assuming you want to keep a laptop three to five years, there will be features that arrive that are exclusive to this kind of hardware.

Products are coming at CES

Shipping in the first half of 2026

Qualcomm says that products will ship in the first half of next year, and we already know announcements will kick off at CES. In fact, CES 2026 is going to be a big bang sort of event for laptops. Laptops with Intel's next-gen chips are going to be announced then too. In fact, I originally thought that if Nvidia was going a Windows on Arm chip, that those products would be announced at CES, but I don't know what's going on with that product at this point.

If you follow CES announcements, then you know that those products tend to ship between March and June, so that H1 timeline tracks.

There's more info to come. Qualcomm's announcement today is pretty high-level; many questions were answered with, "We're not disclosing that at this time", so there's a deeper dive coming.

I've also seen benchmarks run on reference designs, which I'll be able to talk about later this week.