Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme überzeugt

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite is once again threatening to upend the PC CPU market.

About two years ago, Qualcomm debuted the Snapdragon X1 Elite, an Arm chip that replaced the company’s mediocre 8-series Snapdragon chips and performed impressively. Now it’s the Snapdragon Elite X2’s turn, and the 18-core X2 Elite Extreme is ready for the spotlight.

The performance is genuinely impressive. Intel’s Panther Lake and AMD’s successor to its Strix Point chips certainly will have to deliver to keep up with Qualcomm.

Qualcomm didn’t allow journalists to “review” the chip in the traditional sense. Like the “tests” that were run on the first Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm provided test laptops, loaded them up with benchmark software, and allowed reporters to monitor the results afterwards. Naturally, this setup assumed Qualcomm supplied valid silicon, benchmarks, power, and cooling. But comparing the Snapdragon X Elite’s Qualcomm-administered benchmarks and the final Snapdragon X Elite results in our review, we can safely assume that Qualcomm isn’t playing tricks.

Qualcomm provided access to one chip, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100), with 18 total cores, including 12 prime cores (4.4GHz all cores sustained/5.0GHz boost), and six performance cores (3.6GHz sustained, no boost).

The chip also includes 48GB of integrated DDR5x memory, which remains a bit of a wild card. Of the three Snapdragon X2 chips Qualcomm announced, the X2 Elite Extreme offers the option of placing memory on-package or off-chip like a normal notebook. Qualcomm isn’t necessarily specifying that 48GB will be the amount shipped; it’s simply what was used in the X2E-96-100 demonstration units.

The other two chips, according to Qualcomm senior vice president of compute and gaming Kedar Kondap, rely on an external DDR5 DRAM interface and can be configured with whatever amount of memory a PC maker chooses, up to a maximum of 128GB.

Journalists were invited to supervise the testing, even if Qualcomm expected results to fall within a certain range. All tests were performed on wall power, and journalists weren’t allowed to unplug the laptops. However, given Qualcomm’s statements that the Snapdragon X2 Elite should operate the same on wall power as it does on battery, it probably doesn’t make a difference.

Qualcomm selected a range of tests that covered the CPU, GPU, and NPU, using many of our standard benchmarks.

The results are very, very impressive. When compared against the last-generation mobile microprocessors from all three chipmakers, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme blows them all away.

We didn’t compile charts for all of the benchmark tests available to reviewers, but we took representative tests from the CPU, GPU, and NPU. The X2 Elite excels in all of them.

The Snapdragon fared well in CPU testing, really giving AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips a run for their money. In Cinebench 2024, it isn’t even close.

Geekbench also highlights the X2 Elite Extreme’s dominance. The only caveat I’d make here is that our tests were performed using Geekbench 6.1, while the comparison here used Geekbench 6.4. The scores should be comparable, though Geekbench advises against comparing results across major versions (for example, Geekbench 5 versus Geekbench 6).

In both of these benchmarks, the longer bars designate multi-core scores, while the shorter bars measure single-core performance.

Qualcomm didn’t provide actual benchmarks for gameplay, though executives did say that game performance would about double (2.2X) versus the first-generation Snapdragon X1 Elite. This will be a key point of interest, since most games like Control were playable at 1080p resolutions and Low settings, with frame rates of about 30 fps or so. Doubling that could get that up to 60 fps.

That’s still not great, but we won’t know for sure until we have a chance to test these products ourselves. The 3DMark scores, however, certainly continue the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme’s strong showing.

Finally, there’s the massive NPU inside the Snapdragon X2 Elite, and its 80 TOPS of AI performance. In this case, we’d expect the X2 Elite Extreme to blow everything else away and it does.

For testing, Qualcomm used UL’s Procyon Vision benchmark to test AI. I would have used an actual AI art generation or LLM test, both of which UL supplies, but we’ll have to wait for those scores.

Even so, that still represents well over a 2x advantage there.

Again, we didn’t test or compare everything. Qualcomm, however, supplied a list of expected scores. Yes, it felt orchestrated to us, too — but at least we could oversee the tests themselves and verify them.

Qualcomm didn’t say whether these chips were pre-production samples or not, or whether customers had already received shipments. We suspect the former, since the company expects Snapdragon X2 notebooks to debut in the first half of 2025.

Qualcomm is first out of the gate for this generation, so we’ll have to wait and see what AMD and Intel bring to the table. Nevertheless, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme performance is extremely impressive no matter how you slice it.