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 finding their way into 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 potentially 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.
Performance and Battery Life
The X2 Elite will be inside next year's most exciting Windows laptops. Katie Collins/CNET
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.
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