Last week at Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm announced its next-gen line of PC chips, Snapdragon X2. The chips will come in two flavors: the X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. At a benchmarking session at the conference, held in Hawaii, I was given a closer look at just how the X2 Elite Extreme will perform across a variety of common tests, using reference laptops Qualcomm brought to the event.
Here's what I learned in my short time with these devices and how they compare to their closest rivals, including MacBooks. (Qualcomm paid for a portion of my travel expenses to attend the Snapdragon Summit, but the company has no say in our reporting.)
Testing the Elite Extreme
Let's start with Cinebench 2024, a popular benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D, an industry standard in the world of 3D modeling and animation. It's a heavy application and is fully cross-platform, making it an excellent benchmark for measuring peak performance.
To my surprise, with 18 cores onboard, the multi-core performance of the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is through the roof. The test I ran earned a Cinebench multi-core score of 1,974, a whopping 62 percent faster than the base M4 on a 15-inch MacBook Air. It's even 15 percent faster than the M4 Pro in a 16-inch MacBook Pro, only surpassed by Apple's most powerful laptop chip, the M4 Max.
It's hardly worth comparing to the current crop of Intel chips, as the initial Snapdragon X Elite was already leading against Intel in multi-core performance in its previous Lunar Lake chips, such as the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. Intel is expected to debut its next-gen Panther Lake chips this fall.
Some improvements should apply more broadly across the stack of new chips, such as in single-core CPU and GPU performance. Qualcomm says the X2 Elite chips will achieve 39 percent better single-core performance than its predecessor, and based on the Cinebench score of 161 I saw, that checks out. This is still behind Apple's M4, though. Apple Silicon has been the de facto leader in single-core performance ever since its debut in 2020. And let's not forget: The M4 has been out since late 2024; the M5 is rumored to launch as early as next month. Qualcomm is decidedly still trailing Apple here, even if it's making some significant progress.