Qualcomm has unveiled its flagship Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme chipsets for powerful Windows laptops

In addition to the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset for mobile gadgets, Qualcomm introduced new chips for notebooks - Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, designed to strengthen the position of Windows on ARM.

Here's What We Know

The Snapdragon X2 Elite is built on a 4nm process and includes 12 Oryon cores clocked up to 4.3GHz. The Extreme model features an increased frequency up to 5.2 GHz and a larger heat package, and is aimed at powerful laptops. Qualcomm claims the X2 Elite Extreme beats the Apple M4 in single-threaded performance and outperforms the M3 Max in multi-threaded workloads.

Both chips feature a next-generation Adreno GPU with DirectX 12 Ultimate support, hardware ray tracing and AV1 decoding. The Hexagon NPU delivers up to 75 TOPS of AI computation, allowing LLM and multimodal models to be run locally on the device - including ChatGPT, Meta Llama 3 and Google Gemini Nano.

Qualcomm promises up to 22 hours of battery life in notebooks with the X2 Elite and up to 18 hours in Extreme models. The ARM architecture and Windows on Snapdragon optimisation allow for high power efficiency without sacrificing performance.

The platforms support Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, 5G Sub-6 and mmWave, and up to three 4K displays simultaneously. The inbuilt ISP allows for up to 64MP cameras and AI-enhanced video calling.

Snapdragon X2 Elite will appear in laptops from Lenovo, ASUS, HP and Microsoft Surface as early as October 2025. The Extreme version is expected in premium models from Samsung and Dell closer to December.

Source: Qualcomm