We never seem to stop asking more and more of computers — and the advent of AI is doing nothing to slow the trend. Keeping up with our demands requires ever-more powerful chips, and Qualcomm has just unveiled its latest computing platform, which will do just that.
On Wednesday, the company announced the X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme chips, which will be found in some of the top laptops and other PCs over the next year.
At the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, where it unveiled the chips, Qualcomm gave us a glimpse of how PC makers could use them in a series of concept devices. They ranged from ultra-thin laptops that offer the level of performance and battery life of a much bulkier machine, to a circular mini computer, which was a disc about the size of my palm that can be plugged into any screen. An all-in-one prototype included a slide-out computer module not much bigger than two CD boxes stacked together.
These devices show what can be achieved with hardware using the X2 Elite chip. But you might also be wondering what the features this powerful new slice of silicon might bring to your next laptop. Here are five that stand out.
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Performance and battery life
The X2 Elite will be inside next year’s most exciting Windows laptops.
Technology evolves constantly, but battery life doesn’t quite keep up. According to Qualcomm, the X2 Elite will bless your laptop with multi-day battery life, while sustaining a high level of performance.
Performance-wise, the X2 Elite will offer expanded memory cache and improved graphics performance per watt, allowing you to multitask across up to three 5K 60Hz monitors. With workloads spread across the CPU, GPU and NPU, power consumption will be optimized to avoid any drops in performance.
AI
If there’s one thing that the X2 Elite has been designed to do above all else, it’s to enable AI experiences, including media editing, multimodal content generation and agentic AI.
Microsoft requires Copilot Plus PCs to have an NPU capable of more than 40 trillion operations per second. The X2 Elite far exceeds this with up to 80 TOPS of AI processing, meaning it will easily be able to power the most intelligent Copilot Plus PCs. This will enable some of our favorite features, such as the Copilot Chatbox and live captions with live translation.
Creative experiences
Adobe apps have been optimized for Snapdragon.
Qualcomm’s partnership with Adobe means that Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere Pro have all been optimized for Snapdragon, delivering up to 47% faster performance. This means you can edit and render your photos, images and videos at blazing fast speeds.
For creators working in 3D modeling, image editing and drawing, Snapdragon X2 Elite also promises a 64% faster performance.
Connectivity
Other than battery life, you want your laptop to guarantee a reliable and speedy connection when you’re working on the go. The X2 Elite offers lightning-fast 5G for up to 10Gbps speeds, along with Wi-Fi 7 for peak speeds of 5.8Gbps. FastConnect 7800 allows you to quickly connect to the internet and browse, call and stream at lightning speeds.
Gaming
Qualcomm promises that the X2 Elite Extreme is Snapdragon’s biggest ever advance in PC gaming. Extreme delivers up to 2.2x faster performance across some of the most popular and demanding games. The company is working with Razer to bring the Razer Synapse — a platform used by millions of gamers every day — to Windows on Snapdragon. It’s one of a number of partnerships Qualcomm has with gaming companies that will see major titles and new experiences run smoothly and immersively on your laptop.
