Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and Elite chips for PCs stretch up to a record 5 GHz — 3nm Arm chips sport new Oryon Prime cores

Qualcomm is back for round two of its push into Windows PCs. At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the company revealed its Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. These chips will serve as the high-end offerings in Qualcomm's second generation of Arm-based chips for laptops and other PC form factors.

The Elite Extreme is a new tier above the standard Elite, which was the top chip in the original X-series line. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme will offer up to 18 cores, and Qualcomm claims it's the first Arm chip to hit 5 GHz (on up to two cores).

The company says its Elite chips will be made on a 3-nanometer process node. The Snapdragon X2 Elite uses a mix of Qualcomm Oryon Prime cores and what it calls Performance CPU cores. This is seemingly a standard Performance/Efficiency layout with different names. At normalized power, Qualcomm says it offers up to 75% more performance than its competitors. In multitasking, it claims the new chips will offer up to 31% faster performance at a normalized ISO power, while needing 43% less power than last-gen chips. We don't yet have benchmarks to share, and Qualcomm didn't note the exact TDPs for these chips.

The Elite Extreme has higher clock speeds in both single- and dual-core boost and multi-core max than the other two Snapdragon X2 Elite variants. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is model X2E-96-100, while the standard Elites are X2E-88-100 and X2E-80-100. The Extreme and the 88-100 each have 18 cores, while the 80-100 has 12 cores.

There's also a new Qualcomm Adreno GPU, which the company says brings a 2.3x increase in performance per watt and power efficiency compared to the last generation. The new 80 TOPS NPU looks to be the fastest in a laptop (with INT8 math), with 78% more TOPS than the previous generation, 45 TOPS NPU. In its press release, Qualcomm writes that this NPU "is designed to handle Copilot+ and concurrent AI experiences." (Copilot+ doesn't include actual Copilot, the assistant that runs largely in the cloud.)

The X2 Elite chip supports Qualcomm's x75 5G modem-RG system, with up to 10 Gbps peak downloads. It also works with Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 for Wi-FI 7/6/6E and Bluetooth 5.4 LE. Qualcomm's new Guardian is an out-of-band management feature for business-focused remote oversight, akin to Intel’s vPro.

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Qualcomm says that it expects systems with the X2 Elite to ship in the first half of 2026. That may mean we’ll see a device or two at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, before launch. Notably, Qualcomm's images and a sizzle reel both suggest that the X2 Elite will appear in both laptops and mini PCs.

It's been over a year since the initial batch of Snapdragon X Elite chips were announced. Subsequently, a full lineup including the X Plus (in both 10-core and 8-core variants) and a standard Snapdragon X chip were released. The top-end chips appeared in designs from major manufacturers, including Microsoft, Samsung, Dell, HP, Asus, Lenovo, and Acer.

The initial chips showed off their efficiency through long battery life, and we hope to see the X2 SoCs build on that. They didn't, however, work with some applications (namely games) and we want to see better emulation support there. Windows on Arm, however, didn't exactly take over the market, so we'll see what the new chips bring to the table.

Qualcomm is announcing these chips pretty early. The Snapdragon Summit comes ahead of Apple's next major release (Apple is Qualcomm's biggest rival in Arm-based systems), which is rumored to be early next year. And of course, by the time many X2 devices make it to market in the first half of 2026, AMD and Intel may also have next-gen x86 chips ready to compete.

Next year is shaping up to be an eventful one for those looking to buy a new laptop, which should be good for consumers and the industry as a whole. After a fairly quiet 2025 on the mobile front, it’ll also be nice to have some fresh silicon to test.

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