Last week at Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm announced its next-gen line of PC chips, Snapdragon X2. The chips will come in two flavors: the X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. At a benchmarking session at the conference, held in Hawaii, I was given a closer look at just how the X2 Elite Extreme will perform across a variety of common tests, using reference laptops Qualcomm brought to the event.
Here’s what I learned in my short time with these devices and how they compare to their closest rivals, including MacBooks. (Qualcomm paid for a portion of my travel expenses to attend the Snapdragon Summit, but the company has no say in our reporting.)
Testing the Elite Extreme
Let’s start with Cinebench 2024, a popular benchmark based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D, an industry standard in the world of 3D modeling and animation. It’s a heavy application and is fully cross-platform, making it an excellent benchmark for measuring peak performance.
To my surprise, with 18 cores onboard, the multi-core performance of the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is through the roof. The test I ran earned a Cinebench multi-core score of 1,974, a whopping 62 percent faster than the base M4 on a 15-inch MacBook Air. It’s even 15 percent faster than the M4 Pro in a 16-inch MacBook Pro, only surpassed by Apple’s most powerful laptop chip, the M4 Max.
It’s hardly worth comparing to the current crop of Intel chips, as the initial Snapdragon X Elite was already leading against Intel in multi-core performance in its previous Lunar Lake chips, such as the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. Intel is expected to debut its next-gen Panther Lake chips this fall.
Some improvements should apply more broadly across the stack of new chips, such as in single-core CPU and GPU performance. Qualcomm says the X2 Elite chips will achieve 39 percent better single-core performance than its predecessor, and based on the Cinebench score of 161 I saw, that checks out. This is still behind Apple’s M4, though. Apple Silicon has been the de facto leader in single-core performance ever since its debut in 2020. And let’s not forget: The M4 has been out since late 2024; the M5 is rumored to launch as early as next month. Qualcomm is decidedly still trailing Apple here, even if it’s making some significant progress.
The integrated graphics front is where things are really promising for the X2 Elite and Elite Extreme. The original Snapdragon X chips offered the worst integrated graphics performance among the available laptop options from Intel, AMD, and Apple. Outside of initial software compatibility, graphics were its primary weakness. While we haven’t seen what its competitors will be launching in 2026 devices yet, the gen-on-gen improvement is a major leap forward—by as much as 80 percent on the Snapdragon X Elite Extreme, thanks to a completely new graphics architecture.
I ran 3DMark Steel Nomad Light, a commonly used gaming benchmark, and the results were impressive. The laptop scored 5,628, a 53 percent jump over Intel’s Lunar Lake chips (such as the Core Ultra 7 258V), the previous leader in integrated graphics. In 3DMark Solar Bay, a cross-platform benchmark, the Snapdragon X Elite Extreme was 30 percent faster than the Apple M4.
That’s not to say it makes laptops with the Snapdragon X2 gaming machines. To put things in perspective, that’s still about half the performance you’ll get from a discrete laptop GPU like the Nvidia RTX 5050 found in a proper gaming laptop. Also, while there’s continuing improvement to game compatibility, it remains a major sticking point for gamers to move away from x86 Windows laptops. It’s likely not going to hold up in a one-to-one GPU test with Apple’s high-end MacBook Pro hardware, such as the M4 Max. But in terms of integrated graphics in thin-and-light laptops, Qualcomm is finally a serious competitor. Gaming on an ARM-based Windows laptop isn’t sounding as far-fetched as it once did.
I wasn’t able to do any specific application testing, but these improved graphics are as important for creative workloads as they are for games. Qualcomm mentioned in its keynote presentation last week that, compared to the Snapdragon X Elite, the X2 Elite Extreme is 28 percent faster in Adobe Photoshop, 43 percent faster in Adobe Lightroom, and 47 percent faster in Premiere Pro. We’ll have to back that up with real-world testing later.
It’s important to note that this was all tested on the X2 Elite Extreme configuration, which comes with six additional CPU cores over the standard X2 Elite. There were no X2 Elite systems to test, so we don’t know what those multi-core scores will be. I’ve been told that GPU performance will also scale up on the X2 Elite, but we don’t yet know how much faster the X2 Elite Extreme is over its sibling.
The other caveats? The reference unit on which all of this was benchmarked is a bigger laptop than many current Snapdragon X Elite options—a 16-inch laptop with a 0.67-inch thick chassis. That’s not overly large, but performance in smaller laptops with less thermal headroom may perform differently. Qualcomm did have a few other reference designs on display, such as a 2-in-1 detachable, mini PC, and all-in-one desktop. These weren’t available for testing, but were a preview of what to expect next year when these chips launch in actual devices.
Finally, benchmarks are benchmarks. Take all of this with a grain of salt. How these chips will affect real-world performance in all the apps you use every day will be different. We’ll have to wait until these processors land in laptops to really stress test them, and we’ll have a better idea of how they perform against the competition.
Between the X2 Elite Extreme and the X2 Elite, there are technically three specific SKUs. The exact chip from the benchmarking session, the X2E-96-100, represents the top-tier performance in the lineup, with 18 cores and a dual-core 5-GHz boost. This is the chip that will be sold as the X2 Elite Extreme.
Confusingly, there are two Snapdragon X2 Elite chips, one that also has 18 cores and one with 12 cores. The difference between the two 18-core models is memory bandwidth. Although all three chips have a new neural processing unit capable of 80 TOPS, the X2 Elite chips are limited to 8-channel memory, whereas the X2 Elite Extreme has integrated 12-channel memory with a bandwidth of up to 228 GB per second.
That might sound like a subtle difference, and it will be for most people, but AI workloads are extremely memory-dependent—that lower bandwidth will be a bottleneck for anyone tapping out the NPU. With the X2 Elite Extreme configuration, the focus seems to be on speeding up AI workloads, rather than more conventional faster CPU or GPU performance.
Qualcomm seems to want to push the focus of AI in its top-tier configuration, but so far, the real jump in performance seems like it would be between the 12-core and 18-core versions of the X2 Elite. But we’ll have to wait until we can review these systems in new hardware.
Adding another top-tier chip with its own branding is an interesting move for Qualcomm, especially since the company seems to have the most success with its mid-tier chips that showed up in laptops around $1,000. But it’s a strategic move, especially if the company wants to achieve its goal of taking 50 percent of the Windows PC market share in 5 years.
