Qualcomm has announced its next generation of PC processors: the Snapdragon X2. It might not sound very exciting, but these chips continue to bring Windows laptops up to par with Apple Silicon–powered MacBooks.

The company took the PC world by storm last year with its Snapdragon X chips, breaking the long-held duopoly of Intel and AMD powering most Windows laptops. Nearly every major laptop manufacturer was on board, launching a bevy of Qualcomm-powered laptops. It was a shake-up that the Windows ecosystem needed to better compete with Apple, which began designing its own chips in 2020 with the M1 MacBook Air—a move that helped cement MacBooks as some of the best laptops around.

Qualcomm rode out its surprising success throughout 2025, and finally it’s time for a sequel. The first two chips in the lineup, announced at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, are the X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, the latter of which is a new configuration in the Snapdragon X series, with the clock speed cranked up to 5 GHz. (The company paid for a portion of my travel expenses to attend the Snapdragon Summit.)

Continued Momentum

The new processors employ the third-gen Oryon CPU with up to 18 cores onboard, six more than their predecessors. Qualcomm claims that the X2 Elite Extreme gets up to 39 percent faster peak single-core performance and 50 percent multicore performance over the previous generation.

Emphasizing efficiency, Qualcomm also says the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme has “up to 75 percent faster CPU performance than competition at ISO power,” referring to comparing two chips when they’re consuming the same amount of power. As Qualcomm later specified, this comparison was with the beefy Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, requiring 144 percent more power to reach its peak performance than the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. Other impressive-sounding performance claims the company made include up to 49 percent faster Microsoft 365 performance (as tested in Procyon Office) and up to twice as fast file compression against the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V.

Energy efficiency was the primary advantage the initial Snapdragon X-powered laptops had over laptops that used Intel or AMD. ARM-powered processors, like those in smartphones and MacBooks, tend to be highly efficient, leading to longer battery life and better performance at lower power levels. Qualcomm says it’s continuing this lead, with its new CPU requiring up to 43 percent less power versus the previous generation, across both the X2 Elite and Elite Extreme.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the chip is the graphics performance: The Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme both use a new Adreno GPU architecture. Qualcomm says power efficiency has improved by 2.3X, so hopefully that means these laptops can scale up performance when it’s needed, in games or creative applications. Qualcomm says gaming will take a big step forward in this next generation. Qualcomm showed a chart with 2.2X faster frame rates in Hitman World of Assassination and 2.1X faster in Black Myth Wukong. Of course, these Qualcomm laptops continue to rely exclusively on integrated graphics, meaning the discrete GPUs in dedicated gaming laptops are still on another level of performance. Snapdragon X2 chips will also support higher refresh rate screens, now up to 144 Hz and up to three external 5K monitors.

Lastly, the company claims there’s a much more powerful neural processing unit (NPU) with 80 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of on-device AI processing performance. The Snapdragon X set the initial bar with 50 TOPS, which Apple, Intel, and AMD then had to match in their next chips. We’ve yet to see the explosion of on-device AI processing be relevant for the average person, but hopefully, more performance will provide an incentive for developers to build more unique AI experiences that can utilize the NPU.

Qualcomm still boasts “multi-day” battery life on these new chips, though performance was the priority in the company’s product presentation. This is a change from the original marketing around the first-generation Snapdragon X chips, which centered battery life as its primary selling point. At a later meeting, Kedar Kondap, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Qualcomm Compute and Gaming, told me that Snapdragon X2 laptops would maintain its position of leadership in battery life. Although exact estimates or figures weren’t given, Kondap stated that the greater efficiency of the third-gen Oryon CPU would lead to even longer battery life than its predecessor.

As always, it helps to go first. These second-generation PC chips have been announced months ahead of devices from competitors, which may not arrive until the first quarter of 2026, making it easier to compare with previous-gen chips. Intel is expected to launch its highly anticipated A18 chips (also known as Panther Lake) later this year, and Nvidia’s $5 billion investment in Intel could change everything in the world of PCs. Apple is also expected to debut an M5 chip next month.

A New Smartphone Chip

Alongside new PC chips, Qualcomm also detailed its recently announced mobile chips, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. These were officially unveiled last week, but at the company’s Snapdragon Summit conference, it shared new details on how these chips will perform.

Barely a week has gone by since Apple’s A19-powered iPhones hit the market, but Qualcomm is already claiming that its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the “fastest mobile CPU in the world,” with a record clock speed of 4.6 GHz (Apple’s A19 Pro has a clock speed of 4.26 GHz). Like the PC chips, graphics and AI processing have the largest leaps in performance, with a purported 23 percent faster GPU and 37 percent faster NPU. Some slightly faster single-core performance in your next phone might not be noticeable, but the significantly faster GPU could have a bigger impact on mobile gaming.

The other significant new feature on these mobile chips is the embrace of a new video codec called Advanced Professional Video, or APV. This is a “near-lossless” codec, created in partnership with Samsung, that’s meant to compete with Apple’s ProRes format and use less storage than current options.

Qualcomm says new phones powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will launch “in the coming days,” with entries from Xiaomi, OnePlus, Samsung, Honor, and Xiaomi. Qualcomm also briefly announced the base Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 but didn’t offer many details about it.

AI, 6G, and the Future of Android

During the Snapdragon Summit keynote, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon drew the biggest applause with the mention of 6G as the future connectivity standard, replacing 5G, enabling a more pervasive AI future. “6G is designed to be the connection between the cloud and edge devices,” he said.

What is 6G? In addition to increasing network speeds, Amon says, it will be a “network that is intelligent to have perception in sensor data.” Amon implies that another level of connectivity is needed for a world where AI needs to process sensor data at the edge, whether that’s from your phone or a pair of smart glasses, and then be trained on that data from the real world around you. Amon says 6G will be all about “connecting the edge and the cloud, that will merge not only the physical and the digital, but also create all new experiences.”

Amon went on to predict when this change will start happening. “We are ready to have pre-commercial devices as early as 2028. And when we get that, we’re going to have context-aware intelligence at scale—and it’s going to happen everywhere.” It’s early days for 6G—we’ll likely hear more at CES and MWC 2026—but it’s worth noting that 5G was similarly hyped up years before it became the standard it is today, and it has largely failed to live up to the grand claims.

At the end of the keynote, we also got another tease on the merger between Chrome OS and Android, which Google briefly mentioned earlier this year. Google senior vice president of Devices and Services, Rick Osterloh, got up on stage to chat shop with Amon.

“In the past, we’ve always had very different systems between what we’re building on PCs and what we’re building on smartphones,” Osterloh said. “We’ve embarked on a project to combine that. We’re building together a common technical foundation on PCs and desktop computing systems.”

Osterloh mentioned Android by name, though he didn’t mention Chrome OS, implying this new unified platform will still be Android at heart. “We’re really excited about this, and I think this is another way Android is going to be able to serve everyone in every computing category.” Amon chimed in: “I’ve seen it. It’s incredible. I think it delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC.”