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.

Here’s a quick rundown of Qually’s latest notebook chips – Click to enlarge

Depending on which SKU you opt for, Qualcomm’s X2 Elite processors will be available with between 12 and 18 CPU cores. Six of those cores are “performance” cores capable of clocking between 3.4 GHz and 3.6 GHz depending on the SKU. Intuitively, you might think that’d mean the six to 12 remaining cores would be of the “efficiency” sort, but that’s not the case.

Confusingly, Qualcomm’s performance cores are the less-big of the cores. Its “Prime” cores are really where most of the chip’s performance comes from. These prime cores are rated for an all-core clock of between 4-4.4 GHz and between 4.4 and 5 GHz on lightly threaded (1-2 cores) workloads.

That’s a sizable leap over last gen’s X Elite, which topped out at a 3.8 GHz all-core and a 4.3 GHz boost frequency. These cores are backed by a rather large quantity of cache, with between 34 and 53 MB of total cache depending on whether you opt for a 12 or 18 core chip.

The higher clocks and core count translate into a decent improvement over the original X Elite, with Qualcomm claiming 39 percent higher CPU performance and 43 percent lower power consumption.

By far the biggest gains, however, are for the chip’s Adreno GPU, which Qualcomm claims offers 2.3x performance per watt of last gen. And then there’s the 80 TOPS (INT8) Hexagon NPU, which delivers a little over 75 percent higher performance over last-gen, which should benefit workloads that can take advantage of machine learning accelerators.

Finally, the chip’s connectivity includes support for Qualcomm’s X75 5G modem, capable of up to 10Gbps downloads when the stars align, and Wi-Fi 7 via FastConnect 7800 for when they don’t.

Compared to the competition, Qualcomm boasts up to 75 percent higher performance per watt. But it’s worth remembering that these parts won’t hit the market until next year and will have to contend with Apple, AMD, Intel, and potentially Nvidia’s next-generation processors, many of which are due to launch later this year.

By announcing the chip months ahead of the first hardware, Qualcomm gets to avoid any potentially unflattering comparisons that might crop up between now and when it actually ships.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite turns 5

Announced alongside its latest X chips were Qually’s fifth-gen Snapdragon 8 Elite smartphone and tablet SoCs.

At least on paper, the chips bear a striking resemblance to their laptop-bound siblings, just cut down to fit within the thermal and power envelope of a modern smartphone. The eight-core processor features a pair of prime cores capable of boosting to 4.6 GHz as well as six performance cores clocked at a more sedate 3.6 GHz.

Compared to last gen, Qualcomm says the chip’s CPU cores and Adreno GPU are 20 percent and 27 percent faster respectively. And just like the X2, Qualcomm has also upgraded the chip’s Hexagon NPU, boosting performance by 37 percent.

In addition to higher performance, the chip features Qualcomm’s X85 5G modem, which it claims can achieve download speeds in ideal circumstances of up to 12.5 Gbps and upload speeds of 3.7 Gbps. If anyone manages to find a cell site capable of achieving either metric, do let us know in the comments section.

Unlike with its bigger siblings, customers may not have to wait quite as long for the first phones using the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to make their debut. According to Qualcomm, the chip will power smartphones from the likes of Samsung, Sony, Vivo, and OnePlus with additional devices to be launched in the “coming days.” ®