Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 Elite chips are a big deal

Huge news for anyone who likes fast, long-lasting computers (which should be most people): Qualcomm announced new Snapdragon X2 Elite chips on Wednesday at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii. The upgraded Snapdragon X2 Elite and the all-new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme are set to supercharge next-generation Windows laptops starting next year.

What's the big deal? You may recall that Qualcomm made a splash in mid-2024 when it released its first-gen Snapdragon X series chips, the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus. They were all-new ARM-based alternatives to Intel and AMD's well-established x86 options that wound up delivering impressive processing power and power efficiency. (The Snapdragon X chip, a third variant for budget-friendly laptops, arrived in early 2025.)

The original X Elite chip, in particular, fuels some of the best Windows laptops we've tested over the past year, offering all-day battery life without sacrificing zippy performance in thin-and-light machines. It's even managed to compete with the M-series silicon in Apple's MacBooks, which had been leaving Windows laptops in the dust for some years.

For reference, Mashable's current favorite Windows laptop, the 13.8-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 with an X Elite chip under its hood, is just as fast as the overachieving M4 MacBook Air. What's more, the Surface Laptop 7 lasted almost 23 hours on a single charge in our battery life benchmark — that's two hours longer than the 16-inch, M4 Pro-powered MacBook Pro, our reigning battery life champ among Apple laptops.

Two newer Intel-based Windows laptops have scored higher than the Surface Laptop 7 in our performance benchmark, but neither lasted more than 12 hours at a time.

Succinctly put, the first-gen Snapdragon X chips have set a massive precedent for their successors — and Qualcomm claims they'll live up to the hype.

"With superior performance, multi-day battery life and groundbreaking AI, these new processors are the fastest, most powerful and efficient processors for Windows PCs," a company press release reads.

To quickly cover some more granular spec details, Qualcomm says its X2 Elite series chips will pack up to 18 CPU cores, or six more than the standard X Elite and up to 10 more than the X Plus. The beefy X2 Elite Extreme, which is geared toward intensive workloads involving agentic AI experiences, huge datasets, and multimedia editing, supposedly offers "up to 75% faster CPU performance than competition at ISO power" (i.e., when compared to another chip with the same amount of juice).

When stacked up against the previous-gen X series chips, the X2 Elite Extreme is said to boast up to 50 percent faster CPU performance at ISO power, while the X2 Elite will be up to 31 percent faster. Both new chips will consume 43 percent less power than their predecessors, Qualcomm says.

The X2 Elite series chips will also have new Adreno GPU architecture with 2.3 times better power efficiency compared to the OG chips, plus a neural processing unit (NPU) with 80 TOPS (trillions of operations per second, an AI performance metric). That should make for some of the most capable Copilot+ PCs ever.

Qualcomm said laptops featuring the X2 Elite chips are slated to arrive in the first half of 2026, so keep an eye out if you're due for an upgrade soon.