'Fastest And Most Efficient Processors For Windows' — Qualcomm Launches Snapdragon X2 Elite Processors

Qualcomm on Thursday announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processors for Windows 11 personal computers via a press release from the firm. The processors are touted to be "the fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs."

The devices powered by these chips are expected to be available from the first half of 2026.

"Snapdragon X2 Elite strengthens our leadership in the PC industry, providing legendary leaps in performance, AI processing and battery life to enable the experiences that consumers deserve,” Kedar Kondap, senior vice president and general manager, compute and gaming, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. said.

The Snapdragon X2 Elite processor chip has a 3 nanometer process node and has 18 cores with 12 prime cores and six performance cores. These cores will help the processor engage in multi-tasking, with the additional cores, expanding the chip's capacity.

Its multi-core max frequency or its speed in executing instructions when all cores are heavily engaged is 4.0 GHz. The max frequency or the maximum processing speed of a single core is 1.70 GHz.

Its total cache (fast memory storage) is 53 megabytes. It also has a variant with 12 total cores and 34 mb total cache.

The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processor chip variant has a multi-core max frequency of 4.4 GHz. The max frequency is 1.85 GHz. It also has a configured memory capacity of 48 GB.

The release said that it can undertake CPU performance at 31% faster speeds that the previous generation of Snapdragon X Elite chips. It also needs 43% less power than its predecessors.

It also boasts of a "multi-day" battery life for the devices it powers saying that it runs a "truly mobile PC" which can be unplugged and used for multiple days. It also has "lightning-fast 5G" for up to 10 Gbps peak speeds and runs Wi-Fi 7 with peak speeds of 5.8 Gbps.

It also has AI acceleration for media editing, multimodal content generation, and agentic AI, according to the release, and can perform 80 trillions of operations per second.

The release said that the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is built for ultra-premium PCs, and has agentic AI features, computationally intense data analytics, professional media editing and scientific research.