The new flagship chip, based on the Oryon architecture and largely destined for AI-forward, pro-grade laptops, will feature an 80 TOPS NPU. Also incoming in 2026: two new X2 Elite premium processors.
Don’t miss out on our latest stories. Add PCMag as a preferred source on Google.
MAUI—At Snapdragon Summit 2025, Qualcomm’s annual technology and silicon showcase, the chip maker unveiled a new family of Arm-based processors for laptops, in three initial flavors. Qualcomm is garnishing these chips liberally with claims of laptop-CPU firsts, bests, and tops—literally TOPS, in the last case.
The new chips, the Snapdragon X2 Elite line, are built on a third generation of the “Oryon” CPU architecture first seen in the company’s Snapdragon X Elite chips that debuted at the company’s parallel Summit event in 2023. The Snapdragon X2 Elite family follows on from those chips with a new designation for the top-end chip in its stack, the X2 Elite Extreme. (In the first generation of Snapdragon X chips for laptops, the max-configured flagship X Elite chip was differentiated from other X Elites only by a series of sub-numbers.)
The X2 Elite Extreme will be an 18-core flagship chip with an 80 TOPS neural processing unit (NPU). The company is also making some strong efficiency and performance-per-watt claims around a new, complementary version of the Adreno GPU that’s been part of the Snapdragon X from its inception. The 80 TOPS NPU and the new graphics will feature in all three of the new chips announced at the Summit.
The company exhibited the X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme in a host of reference-design PCs, including large-screen laptops, ultraportables, tablets, and even a couple of innovative mini-desktop designs. More to come on early performance numbers for these processors (that’s for a later date), but the company shared a host of intriguing specs on the new X2 and unveiled the initial line of chip SKUs.Snapdragon X2 Chip Basics: Meet the New Elites
The three Snapdragon X2 chips detailed at Snapdragon Summit will be split into Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (one chip) and “plain” Snapdragon X2 Elite chips (two chips). Qualcomm describes the Elite Extreme as suited for “complex, expert-level workloads” and the straight-up Elites for “powerful and efficient multitasking across resource-intensive workloads.” If those descriptions sound largely overlapping, you’re right; both are slated for upper-shelf portables, and Qualcomm in its initial press release notes that they are its latest “premium-tier platforms,” which implies that lower-end X2 chips may come later.
