Your next Windows PC may rival M4 MacBooks thanks to this chipset - here's how

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET

At its recent Summit 2025 event, Qualcomm took the stage to announce its next generation of laptop chipsets: the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme.

I've been closely following Qualcomm's journey through the laptop industry since the company launched the first generation of Snapdragon hardware back in 2024. These chipsets perfectly balance performance with energy efficiency, allowing host computers to last all day long. Judging from preliminary information, the second generation is bringing improvements across board.

Also: Qualcomm patches three exploited security flaws, but you could still be vulnerable

Much of the data we have only pertains to the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, so it'll be our main focus. According to Qualcomm, the platform will consist of the new third-generation 18-core Oryon processor, a revamped Adreno GPU, and an 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU providing an extra boost to performance.

All this is paired with LPDDR5 RAM to ensure lightning-fast processing speeds. To further emphasize how much of an upgrade the Elite Extreme is, Qualcomm also detailed benchmark results comparing its future hardware to competing chipsets. The results are interesting because they show the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is significantly better than Apple's M4 chipset.

Also: You can get the M4 MacBook Pro for $300 off - one of the lowest prices we've seen

For example, in the Geekbench 6.5 multi-core test, the Elite Extreme peaked at 23,491 points, whereas the M4 only hit 15,146 points. Similarly, GPU performance is better too as the Snapdragon model hit 90.06. Apple's hardware, on the other hand, went up to 65.12. It's the same story with the NPU results. The gap between the two platforms is pretty big.

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET

It's important to mention that Qualcomm states its Elite Extreme is specially "built for ultra-premium PCs, tackling… intense data analytics, professional media editing and scientific research". Essentially, it'll cover a lot of the same ground as an M4 MacBook model and do everything better… at least, in theory.

Laptops equipped with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme won't be released until the first half of 2026. We'll just have to wait until those devices come out and we can see the performance gap ourselves. 

As for the Snapdragon X2 Elite, not much is known. Qualcomm didn't provide a lot of information on the base chip. We do know that it'll be behind the Elite Extreme in terms of performance, but thanks to the 80 TOPS NPU, it won't be that big of a gap.