Qualcomm unveils X2 Elite and Extreme processors for next-gen PCs with Arm chips

The original Snapdragon X, the chips that power Microsoft"s latest Windows on Arm PCs, was announced over a year ago, and it kicked off what many consider the first successful attempt at moving Windows away from x86 into Arm and truly competing with the Apple Silicon processors. Now, at Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm announced the successor to the series, the Snapdragon X2, which consists of Elite and Extreme processors with some serious promises.

In the second generation, Qualcomm increased the core count from 12 to 18, offering a flagship processor with six more cores than the previous-gen models. Clocks were bumped significantly, with the X2E-96-100 model reaching all the way up to 5.0GHz (single and dual-core mode). Qualcomm also bumped the cache size and upgraded the Neural Processing Unit, which is the same across the lineup, with its 80 TOPS, which is 35 TOPS more than the original Snapdragon X series. Finally, memory bandwidth has been increased to 152 and 228GB/s, respectively.

Here is an overview of the Snapdragon X2 lineup:

Qualcomm says the new lineup is 75% faster than its predecessor at the same power draw, while the NPU is 37% faster and consumes less power. With these gains, Qualcomm promises "multi-day battery life," another improvement over the previous generation, which has already proved to be very good at getting you through a workday. Of course, only real-life tests will show how much better the new processors are at sipping power from your laptop"s battery.

The first computers with Snapdragon X2 processors inside them are expected in the first half of 2026, and with Microsoft peddling Windows on Arm like never before, thanks to support from third-party developers, you can expect plenty of devices to choose from.