Qualcomm is finally ready to start competing with Apple’s M-series of chips, nearly five years after the M1 made its debut in 2020. While the Snapdragon X series has been fairly successful in terms of bringing the ARM architecture to Windows, Qualcomm hasn’t yet quite offered a diversified lineup like Apple for a variety of potential consumers.
At its annual Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm took the wraps off of the new Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme -– chips designed to power the next generation of ARM-based Windows PCs. Based on the performance these chips bring to the table, they could actually compete with the likes of the Apple M4 Max when it comes to high-end laptop performance.
To learn about what the new chips have to offer, Qualcomm flew me out to its Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii to check out the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme in person.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite
The Snapdragon X2 Elite is designed to be closer to the base M4 when it comes to performance and battery life. That’s to say, it’ll offer easily good-enough performance for the vast majority of users who want a laptop for things like productivity, web-based apps, and so on.
There are actually two variants of the Snapdragon X2 Elite -– a 12-core version with six performance cores and six higher-speed “prime” cores, and an 18-core version which adds an additional six prime cores, each of which offer a clock speed of up to 4.7GHz. The chip also boasts an upgraded Adreno GPU, along with support for the Snapdragon X75 5G modem. That’s actually an area that Apple still has yet to enter into -– offering cellular support for its laptops.
In terms of real-world usage, the X2 Elite allows for up to three 5K monitors at 60Hz or three 4K monitors at 144Hz. That’s up from the three 4K monitors at 60Hz that the last-generation Snapdragon X Elite supported. It supports a maximum of 128GB of RAM, and delivers up to 80 TOPS through the Hexagon NPU.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme
The X2 Elite Extreme, as you might expect, offers even higher performance than the Snapdragon X2 Elite. The X2 Elite Extreme also has 18 cores, with 12 prime cores and six performance cores. However, it delivers a clock speed of up to 5.0GHz on the prime cores, and 3.6GHz on the performance cores (up from 3.4GHz on the Snapdragon X2 Elite).
It remains to be seen exactly how well the Snapdragon X2 Elite can perform against the likes of the Apple M4 Pro and M4 Max -– not to mention whatever M5 chips that Apple is rumored to be launching in coming months. The shift to ARM has been hugely successful for Apple, though much of that has to do with Apple’s full control over its entire lineup -– which means that in order to support new Macs, most developers have released ARM-compatible versions of their apps for the Mac.
Because of the more splintered Windows ecosystem, Qualcomm’s new chips haven’t had quite the same impact, even though they’re clearly excellent chips that boast huge battery life and solid performance. Hopefully, the X2 Elite series can indeed make an impact, and hopefully we’ll get better Windows and developer support for ARM as a result.
