So Qualcomm just dropped details on their new Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme chips and I think this is going to shake things up a bit. There are some pretty impressive specs that are rolled into these new processors. They are built on a 3nm process and scale up to 18 cores. The Extreme variant has:
- 12 “prime” cores hitting 5 GHz boost
- 6 performance cores at 3.6 GHz
They’re combining the specs above with Adreno X2-90 graphics, 80 TOPS NPU for Copilot+ and AI workloads, and support for up to 128 GB of LPDDR5x with massive bandwidth. Connectivity is pretty stacked too. It has WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a Snapdragon X75 5G modem. You also get USB4 and PCIe Gen5 which is pretty wild for an ARM laptop chip.
What Qualcomm is really hyping is performance per watt. They’re claiming up to 75% faster CPU perf at the same power vs competitors and over 2x perf/watt gains for the GPU compared to the last X Elite. In AI tests they’re saying it’s like 5.7x faster than Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285H. Whether that holds up in the real world we’ll see, but on paper this is looking like ARM is getting seriously competitive in high-end Windows laptops.
For the home lab side of things, this has me wondering if we’re going to see these chips filter down into mini PCs and maybe even server-style boards? They’ve already submitted Linux patches, so it’s not just Windows. If you could run Proxmox or even container-heavy workloads on something like this with crazy efficiency, it could be huge and really a paradigm shift in hardware configurations. Imagine an 18-core ARM box sipping power but handling AI inference, VMs, and containers with USB4 and PCIe Gen5 expansion.
It feels like we’re seeing the same kind of momentum Apple brought with M1/M2/M3, but now in the Windows/ARM world. If Qualcomm and Microsoft can keep software compatibility as a priority, this could finally push ARM as a real alternative. I am thinking it could be a game changer for both enterprise laptops and maybe even small lab servers. I’m pretty excited to see how the ecosystem reacts when first devices land in 2026.
Snapdragon X2 Elite | Qualcomm
Anyone else looking at these and thinking ARM is finally about to have its moment?