Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Qualcomm’s scintillating new Snapdragon X2 Elite chips have prompted a ton of conversations in the past few days. Can they make it? What do you like about them? And so on.

While I can’t say whether or not the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme will eventually succeed, I can offer you an inside look at what people are talking about–at least what I’ve heard and overheard–at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. If you want to catch up on all the news, the Snapdragon X2 and X2 Elite offer more cores at up to 5GHz speeds, includes optional embedded memory, and preserves the performance on battery from the first generation.

The good: eye-watering performance

If you want a general-purpose productivity laptop, the first-generation Snapdragon X Elite was nearly perfect. The new X2 Elite Extreme looks to be even better, with (controlled) benchmarks that simply blow away Intel’s Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips, from CPU to GPU to the AI-enabling NPU. Qualcomm is really doing almost everything consumers are asking of it in this space.

The CPU benchmarks look particularly juicy. Compared against rival chips in today’s laptops, the Snapdragon X2 Elite absolutely smokes all comers in the Cinebench benchmark beloved by reviewers, in both single- and multi-core tests.

And the Snapdragon X2 Elite’s NPU offers a whopping 80 TOPs, leaving the competition in the dust. Whether consumers are asking for more TOPS from an NPU, though, is a question mark.

Roughly doubling the TOPS from the first version looks great on paper, and certainly bigger numbers are better. But there’s a lot being bet on whether consumer applications will be able to take advantage of its prowess, including this concept of agentic AI everyone is talking about. No one is still quite sure whether that will happen.

It depends on how you see it: Is local AI still a selling point? Either way, the Snapdragon X2 Elite appears loaded with hardware capable of blasting through most of the tasks you throw at it, AI or not.

The bad: Lukewarm PC vendor support, games, and lack of battery life talk

I couldn’t help but notice that only Asus and HP endorsed the Snapdragon X2 architecture, and via video to boot — not in person at the Snapdragon Summit. The odd “agentic AI” Humain Horizon Pro laptop (which won’t use the X2, but the X1) was there, but not Qualcomm’s established customers. And where was longtime Qualcomm backer, Lenovo?

Sure, new partners could always be announced. But I had questions.

Another question: 3D graphics performance. Yes, supposedly the Snapdragon X2 Elite about doubles the performance of the first-gen X Elite platform, which played (some) games at roughly 30 frames per second at 1080p Low performance. Doubling that is, what, 60 fps at the same resolution and image quality? What about all the games that simply refuse to run well on the first-gen Snapdragon chips?

On the more enthusiast end of things, “there’s nothing preventing” the Snapdragon X2 from connecting to a discrete GPU like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX, according to Qualcomm’s senior vice president Kedar Kondap…but it doesn’t appear like it has, or will. This is a tough one: Gaming is often seen as a high-profile design win, and proof that a chip like the X2 Elite should be seen as a sexy, high-margin gaming CPU. But doing so would immediately cut into a key Snapdragon benefit: long battery life.

Qualcomm

And that was weird, too: Qualcomm really downplayed the battey life of a Snapdragon X2 laptop, referring it to “multi-day” on a couple of occasions. I’m not sure if that was because the competitive landscape had erased that advantage, or what. But it simply was not a big focus.

Again, Qualcomm does have a cross to bear in its Arm legacy, and how that affects application compatibility. This only really affects some weird, dusty old business utilities, the occasional printer, and games. But games are the one area where it can make inroads, though Snapdragon simply can’t offer the “it just works” assurance of its X86 rivals anytime soon.

The ugly: A grab bag

Naturally, any new launch offers opportunities for criticism.

Not only did people take issue with the Microsoft-esque naming scheme — the X2 Elite Extreme, really?! — critics made the very valid point that this was Qualcomm’s first major architecture launch in years. Reviewers got hands-on tests of the X1 Elite two long years ago, in October 2023, ahead of the Snapdragon’s launch alongside Copilot+ PCs in May 2024. Qualcomm followed it up with the cut-down X1 Plus and X in the interim.

As one attendee pointed out, “You can’t play on that timetable and expect to win against Intel and AMD,” which launch a new or updated mobile chip architecture on an annual cadence.

Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry

Qualcomm’s X1 Elite also signaled to Intel and AMD that those rivals needed to have their own chips in order. But tying Snapdragon X to Copilot+ and Microsoft’s beleaguered Recall didn’t do much for Qualcomm, if anything. Qualcomm was the flag-bearer for Windows on Arm, and its (now largely undeserved) reputational concerns about app compatibility. Then Intel’s Lunar Lake came along, and offered a very competitive — and maybe even better — chip without any of that baggage.

One laptop maker told me that they had bought into the original X1 Elite in part as a bargaining chip with Intel. People had a lot of questions about what that meant for Intel’s upcoming “Panther Lake” chip, which should be unveiled this fall.

In my personal opinion, one of the best things Qualcomm ever did was to simply offer a compelling third option to Intel and AMD. That means we all benefited from an competitive market for PC processors that only continues to heat up.

Disclosure: Qualcomm held its press briefings in Hawaii, and would not pre-brief reporters in other locations or over video meetings. They paid for my room, boarding, and travel expenses, but did not ask for or exert any editorial control over this story or other PCWorld content.