Plus the Snapdragon 8 Elite turns 5
Qualcomm revealed the second act in its bid to overtake Intel and AMD as the leading laptop CPU maker this week with the paper launch of its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme processors. The company seeks to bring the kind of battery life and performance Apple has gotten out of its Arm-based M-series silicon to the Windows market.
Due out sometime in the first half of next year, these chips promise everything we’ve come to expect from Windows on Arm devices: better battery life, faster multitasking, and faster local AI than x86 or Qualcomm’s prior-gen silicon. The NPU is now capable of 80 TOPS (INT8), up from 45 on the Snapdragon X Elite, to power Copilot+ features like Microsoft’s integrated spyware, or as they prefer to call it, Recall.
NPUs and AI PCs aside, Qually’s second-gen Snapdragon X-series processors do deliver some welcome improvements to the CPU and GPU performance over last gen.
At the top of the stack is a new variant called the X2 Elite Extreme, which boosts the CPU and GPU blocks by a few megahertz and offers roughly 50 percent higher memory bandwidth over its less extreme siblings.
Rather than the 152 GB/s of LPDDR5x on the standard X2 Elite, Qualcomm’s Extreme spin boosts that to 228 GB/s, which, along with a 150 MHz higher GPU clock, should benefit graphics heavy workloads like gaming, rendering, and local LLM inference. If you’re keen to run models like OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b on your notebook, you want all the memory bandwidth you can get.
This memory, 128 GB of which is now supported by the platform, feeds Qualcomm’s next-gen Oryon cores. And, unlike its first-gen X Elite processors, which used all performance cores, this time around Qually is sticking with a big.LITTLE architecture or, in this case, a big-less-big architecture.
