is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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In September, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, the laptop chips that, it claimed, would be “the fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs.” They might finally give Intel and AMD a run for their money. Now, CES 2026 is bringing us the first actual laptops based on both that silicon and the Snapdragon X2 Plus — a pair of just-announced chips aimed at more budget machines.
PCs with the X2 Elite and ones with the X2 Plus should both arrive around the end of the first quarter, Qualcomm spokesperson Cassandra Garcia-Bacha tells The Verge.
Image: Qualcomm
Qualcomm isn’t promising particular price points like it did in 2024, when it proclaimed it’d bring the cost of a Snapdragon X laptop down to $700 — which makes sense, I suppose, as the global RAM shortage currently has PC prices in flux. You’ll have to watch this week as various PC makers do — and don’t — announce those prices themselves.
But Qualcomm senior director Mandar Deshpande tells me that Snapdragon X2 products are “trying to land in similar swim lanes” to the previous generation, whose “Elite” tier started at $1,000, “Plus” at $800, and “X” at $600 and up.
While the Plus chips won’t have quite the power of the X2 Elite, it sounds like they’re no slouch. Though the 10-core and 6-core variants have fewer CPU cores than the Elite (which boast 18 and 12, respectively), Qualcomm claims they can still wipe the floor with a competing low-power Intel Lunar Lake or Arrow Lake chip in both CPU performance and efficiency:
Image: Qualcomm
And for AI tasks, they still contain the same 80 TOPS NPU as Qualcomm’s higher-end chips. It claims they’re “the world’s fastest NPU for laptops in its class”:
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