Qualcomm announces Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme for Windows PCs

Last year, aft well implicit a decade of trying, Qualcomm finally made Windows connected Arm laptops a thing, putting both Intel and AMD connected notice and shoving Intel retired of consumer-grade Microsoft Surface machines. Today, we’re learning astir the 2nd procreation of the spot that made it happen, 1 which’ll present travel successful 2 chiseled flavors: the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme.

Qualcomm is making a gigantic assertion close successful the header of its property release: it says these are “the fastest and astir businesslike processors for Windows PCs.” I’m definite Intel and AMD volition person thing to accidental astir that!

But for now, the institution claims its 3nm chips connection up to 31 percent faster CPU show than the previous-gen Snapdragon X Elite astatine the aforesaid power, oregon tin necessitate 43 percent little power, and with up to 2.3x the GPU show from a caller 1.85GHz GPU. On the CPU side, it’s utilizing a 3rd-gen Oryon CPU that’ll besides diagnostic successful Qualcomm’s caller mobile flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite 5 chip, but present with up to 18 cores, 12 of which tin tally up to 4.4GHz, oregon up to 2 of them astatine 5GHz — a clockspeed which Qualcomm says is simply a archetypal for Arm CPUs.

You tin spot much specs below, and astatine Qualcomm’s website and overview PDF.

There’s besides a caller 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, for AI tasks, that offers 37 percent much show with a 16 percent powerfulness depletion improvement, and the institution claims it’s the fastest laptop NPU by far:

Qualcomm’s characterizing each of this arsenic a “legendary leap successful performance,” claiming the Elite Extreme successful peculiar offers “up to 75 percent faster CPU performance” than competitors astatine the aforesaid power.

While it doesn’t accidental which competitors it’s talking astir successful the property release, it appears that Qualcomm is comparing against immoderate of the astir almighty (and power-hungry) laptop chips successful the market, including the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and you tin spot Qualcomm isn’t labeling some axes of its graphs:

Qualcomm besides claims these powerfulness savings volition pb to “multi-day artillery life,” but that’s what the institution already said astir past year’s Snapdragon X Elite. (We saw 14 to 18 hours from past year’s laptops, truthful possibly that’s multi-day defined arsenic “two eight-hour workdays.”)

Still, these dependable similar precise coagulated improvements, and immoderate of them travel from chiseled caller portions of the silicon. Gaming connected Arm, which inactive needed enactment past year, volition get a boost from a dedicated caller 18MB of precocious velocity cache that Qualcomm’s calling “Adreno High Performance Memory.”

And Qualcomm says Adobe creators volition spot large improvements implicit past year’s laptops: 28 percent faster photograph editing successful Photoshop, 43 percent faster exports from Lightroom, and a akin boosts to Premiere video analysis. Razer’s Min-Liang Tan besides announced contiguous that Razer volition bring its Synapse bundle to Windows connected Snapdragon, which is apt to beryllium a polarizing announcement. He notably did not committedness that Razer volition marque a Snapdragon-based gaming laptop.

It’s intriguing to spot that the company’s investigating its X2 Elite Extreme astatine implicit 50W of power; past year, Snapdragon chips were conscionable for bladed and airy laptops, but 50W lets them standard into bigger PCs.

Note that erstwhile Qualcomm had its coming retired enactment with Microsoft past year, the laptops arrived aboriginal that year. That’s not happening this clip around: they’re “expected to beryllium disposable 1H26,” the institution writes.

Qualcomm’s announcement besides doesn’t notation whether these chips volition diagnostic successful its hinted-at collaboration with Google connected Android for PC, but it’s imaginable the institution volition notation that astatine its Snapdragon Summit, which is streaming arsenic I constitute this. We whitethorn adhd a fewer much details to this communicative arsenic the Summit continues.