Qualcomm details X2 Elite Extreme, its most potent SoC yet

"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,"

"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,"

"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."

Qualcomm unveiled Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme laptop processors aimed at delivering Apple M-series–level battery life, performance, and local AI for Windows. The NPUs reach 80 TOPS (INT8), up from 45, to power Copilot+ features including Recall. The X2 Elite Extreme increases memory bandwidth to 228 GB/s versus 152 GB/s and raises GPU clocks about 150 MHz, benefiting gaming, rendering, and local LLM inference. The platform now supports up to 128 GB RAM. Qualcomm uses a big.LITTLE (big-less-big) CPU design across SKUs with 12–18 cores, including six performance cores.

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