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At last month's Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2025 event, the company took the stage to announce its next generation of laptop chipsets: the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme.
I've been closely following Qualcomm's journey through the laptop industry since the company launched the first generation of Snapdragon hardware back in 2024. These chipsets perfectly balance performance with energy efficiency, allowing host computers to last all day long. Judging from preliminary information, the second generation is bringing improvements across the board.
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Much of the indo we have only pertains to the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, so it'll be our main focus. According to Qualcomm, the platform will consist of the new third-generation 18-core Oryon processor, a revamped Adreno GPU, and an 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU providing an extra boost to performance.
All this is paired with LPDDR5 RAM to ensure lightning-fast processing speeds. To further emphasize how much of an upgrade the Elite Extreme is, Qualcomm also detailed benchmark results comparing its future hardware to competing chipsets. The results are interesting because they show the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is significantly better than Apple's M4 chipset. (Update: Apple launched the M5 chipset last week, and we'll be testing the numbers shortly.)
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For example, in the Geekbench 6.5 multi-core test, the Elite Extreme peaked at 23,491 points, whereas the M4 only hit 15,146 points. Similarly, GPU performance is better too as the Snapdragon model hit 90.06. Apple's hardware, on the other hand, went up to 65.12. It's the same story with the NPU results. The gap between the two platforms is pretty big.
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