Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme For Windows PCs

Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme chips, claiming they're the "fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs." Built on 3nm with up to 18 cores and a 5GHz Arm CPU boost, the chips promise 31% more CPU power, up to 2.3x GPU performance, stronger AI processing, and "multi-day battery life," with devices expected in the first half of 2026. The Verge reports: There's also a new 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, for AI tasks, that offers 37 percent more performance with a 16 percent power consumption improvement, the company claims. Qualcomm's characterizing all of this as a "legendary leap in performance," claiming the Elite Extreme in particular offers "up to 75 percent faster CPU performance" at the same power. But it doesn't say who the competition is, or which chip it was up against, at least not in the press release. And while Qualcomm claims these power savings will lead to "multi-day battery life," that's also what the company said about last year's Snapdragon X Elite.

Re:

[Angelwrath]

Because the CISC-based competition from AMD and Intel still can't offer the same thing.

Re:

[kurkosdr]

And yet, Apple had to ditch their fancy PowerPC for "CISC garbage" x86 back in the day, and all those fancy SPARC-based servers in the server rooms of most companies were replaced by x86-based servers (powered by AMD or Intel CPUs). Strange, huh?

You see, the particular kind of CISC that x86 uses is not the huge handicap you think it is, so how good a CPU is has more to do with nanometers and how much design effort you pour into the CPU, rather than RISC vs x86. The problem with current x86 laptops is tha

Re:

[kurkosdr]

(note: I know process node nanometers don't represent actual nanometers, I am using the term as a shorthand)

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[ctilsie242]

The ironic thing is that CISC does hamstring things. Intel's X86S project shows that it would greatly help a CPU to ditch everything... real mode, x86 instructions, have that virtualized somehow, as opposed to leaving it on the die. However, that project got killed, but it likely would have brought new life to the x86/amd64 architecture by reducing the amount of stuff needed on the CPU. No, you couldn't boot MS-DOS with an x86s, but with all the emulation and virtualization methods, why even bother? Eve

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[kurkosdr]

The ironic thing is that CISC does hamstring things. Intel's X86S project shows that it would greatly help a CPU to ditch everything... real mode, x86 instructions, have that virtualized somehow, as opposed to leaving it on the die.

Again, how much does all of this hamstrings things? It's not like ARM is so pure that it doesn't need a decoding stage either. You can make an x86 CPU on par with ARM (AMD is proof of that), so again, why should I lose x86 compatibility and buy a laptop that's even rarer than AM

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[NaCh0]

Batteries degrade over time. What might be two days of battery life out of the box could be one day 3 years from now.

Of course, I think most manufacturers will acknowledge the more energy efficient system and engineer their laptops with smaller batteries.

They do it today between ultra portables and more power hungry gaming laptops. There's no reason that laptop manufacturers won't do it with Snapdragon based laptops too.

Windows PCs?

[Uldis Segliņš]

Maybe what they mean here is just PCs? Cause hardware and software are two separate concepts. Hopefully same will be true for phones one beautiful morning.

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[Mononymous]

Will these run Linux at launch?
I think this kind of thing tends to be a not very standard or open SoC. Supporting the ARM cores themselves is not enough.
Look at all the work it's taking Asahi Linux to run on Apple Silicon Macs.

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[sg_oneill]

The arm stuff isnt whats making supporting the silicon macs hard, its the fact that all the other stuff just isnt documented at the level needed to write device drivers. Apple doesnt benefit from sharing that info, the market for apple lapops for running ARM is very very small. People buy macs because they like OSX. Quallcom on the other hand have a vested interest in making the SOC and supporting chipset datasheets available and accessible, because they need linux to come on board. If I wanted to write arm

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[ctilsie242]

I just wish ARM had a standard like BIOS or UEFI. Right now, most ARM devices are using unique SoCs where drivers for the various functions can be impossible to get, outdated, insecure, not available outside of OEM firmware... or all the above. It would be nice to have some bootloader process where we can separate the OS from the device, however for most ARM stuff outside of SBCs like Raspberry Pis, the hardware pretty much has only one choice of firmware.

This is one reason I miss HTC phones. Their Linux

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They do, sort of. ARM themselves provide the "ARM Base Boot Requirements"; along with the "ARM Base System Architecture Specification" and "Server Base System Architecture" supplement.

Those pretty much do say "use UEFI, look reasonably PC-like"(you don't need to reproduce the utter weirdness of historical x86 peripheral memory mapping under 16MB as though you had genuine parallel ports or anything; but UEFI, ACPI, SMBIOS, device tree); with the BSA and SBSA going into further detail about expected behavi

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[ctilsie242]

MS seems to be a double-edged sword. On one count, they are getting stuff under a standard... however the standard is Windows with Secure Boot, which, if not able to be disabled, or a shim key available, may lock out Linux from the platform. However, better that than nothing.

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I believe that this round of ARM-PCs is less hostile than the "windows RT" era ones; which were(albeit cracked after some time) basically intended to be NT iPads; but more or less the full UEFI Class 3 device with MS CAs burned in as primary treatment still counts as 'standardized'.

Honestly need to give it a look; thanks to the delightfully tepid reception that Glorious AI PC with Recall received; you can actually get interesting-looking Qualcomm based hardware at attractive prices; and, while the Apple

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[svx]

what's wrong with the software? my surface pro with snapdragon X plus is the best windows "laptop" that I've ever had

San Diego Rocks

[xevioso]

And Qualcomm, headquartered here, is another reason why California rocks. Have your AI, SF. We have the chips that run phones and lots of PCs.

The Osborne Effect incoming

[Gavino]

"Expected to be available 1H26" OK they just killed sales of existing Snapdragon X Elite laptops. The IT industry is littered with stories of companies announcing too early. It even has a name "The Osborne Effect". This part is blatantly stolen from an AI summary... "Although the new models weren’t ready for sale, the announcement caused dealers and customers to cancel orders for the Osborne 1, anticipating the better machines. Sales plummeted. Osborne slashed prices to stimulate demand, but it was too late. The company filed for bankruptcy later that year."

AAA Best-practice stories

[kurt_cordial]

Groovy liquid-cooled boomers charge their -0.0% APY mortgage... back to the grid. Oh it's a tronlike metaphor for social seniority. Researching the battery (on DuckDuckGo) loads 64-page (not 32, 16, or 8) AdTrackers... from a Swiss-registered Taiwanese breakaway island: Raccoon City. So Bloomberg promotes a contest for a better ad platform, to outsource a Google competitor. AFAIK if this open word cloud befuddles you, hunt ChatGPT and batter out some cognition.

\o/

[easyTree]

Maybe they need to work on product naming. They're a little backed into a corner. What's better than Elite Extreme? Perhaps Elite EXXtreme Merc Edition?

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[ctilsie242]

This. They need to go back to a simple naming structure. Apple's is good enough. Name a generation, then some suffix to show if it is a basic, enhanced, super, super-duper, or plaid model.