Qualcomm has officially announced the evolution of its PC chip endeavors with the Snapdragon X2 Elite, a chip that is comprised of a whopping 18 cores and promises to pump out some serious performance.
When it comes to PCs, there are really only two major companies that you’ll see chips from in laptops and desktops—Intel and AMD. In 2024, Qualcomm came along with its Snapdragon X Elite chip, giving consumers an alternative to the two biggest options. The first Lenovo laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite launched last May, and Dell put out a laptop a month later.
While there were several benefits to Qualcomm’s chip inside a laptop, one of the most important ones was battery life. Qualcomm was boasting long battery life on a single charge. This isn’t something you get often with laptops. The good news is that Qualcomm is back and promising even better battery life for laptops powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite. So, if long battery life is what you’re looking for, then you’ll want to keep your eye on these laptops.
Qualcomm says the just-announced Snapdragon X2 Elite can offer multi-day battery life to laptops
If a laptop lasting for multiple days on battery doesn’t entice you, then you must love the tedious nature of having to plug your devices in every single day. That being said, if you hate charging your stuff all the time, then Snapdragon X2 Elite-powered laptops are likely to be your new best friend.
Qualcomm says this new chip can offer multi-day battery life. That could mean two days, or it could mean three or more. What’s really important, however, is that it’s more than one. Qualcomm doesn’t mention specifics, but it says users won’t have to compromise on performance to get more hours out of their machine. The firm also claims that the chip rivals the Apple M4 , beating it out in benchmarks. Qualcomm made a similar claim with the first version of this chip when compared to the Apple M3 . It outperformed Intel’s Core Ultra , too. So it’s not too hard to imagine the new model continuing this trend.
There will be three different models of the chip
Qualcomm says it’s launching three different models of the Snapdragon X2 Elite, so there should be a varying range of laptops at different price points. First, there’s the X2E-80-100. This is the least powerful version, coming with 12 cores instead of 18. It also has a smaller cache of 34MB. Despite these tweaks, it still offers the same frequencies. Its boost frequency is up to 4.7GHz for the single core and up to 4.4GHz for the dual-core. This is similar to the second variant, which is impressive.
Next up there’s the X2E-88-100, which comes with a total of 18 cores. While its frequencies are similar to the lower-tier model, it does come with some key benefits. It has a 53MB total cache, and it supports up to 12 PCIe Gen 5 lanes as opposed to 8. It also has a slightly higher boost frequency with dual-core of 4.7GHz. Lastly, there’s the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, or the X2E-96-100. This bumps the max boost frequency up to 5.0GHz for both single-core and dual-core. Other benefits consumers can expect from this chip are support for Bluetooth 5.4, Bluetooth LE, and up to Wi-Fi 7 speeds, just to name a few.
