Qualcomm officially pulled back the veil from the X2 Elite Series for laptops, here at its annual Qualcomm Summit 2025 in Maui, Hawaii. The lineup serves as the successor to last year’s X Elite laptop processors.
It’s also evident that Qualcomm is trimming the fat on the number of models it’s releasing this year. With this series, it’s offering just two variants, the X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. The non-Extreme will reportedly get two SKUs.
@lowyatnet #PaidTravel_Snapdragon Snapdragon flew us out to Hawaii for the annual Snapdragon 2025 Summit, where it announced the new 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile SoC and X2 Elite Series for laptops.Thanks Snapdragon, for flying us out here! #SnapdragonSummit2025 #Snapdragon8EliteGen5 #X2EliteSeries #Qualcomm
Specs-wise, the X2 Elite Extreme houses a total of 18-cores, 12 of which are what Qualcomm is designating as “Prime” cores, running at 4.4GHz for all 12, with up to two cores able to run at 5GHz. The other six are labelled as Performance Cores, and run at speeds up to 3.6GHz.
The top-tier CPu has a total cache of 53MB. The onboard Adreno GPU, dubbed X2-90, has a maximum clock of 1.85GHz, while the new and improved Hexagon NPU delivers 80 TOPS, nearly double the performance of its predecessor. Moving on, it also supports LPDDR5x RAM, but this time at a faster frequency of 9,523MT/s, with the standard capacity set at 48GB, but with room to go beyond 128GB.
Going down the ladder, and as mentioned, the non-Extreme X2 Elite comes in two flavours: 18-cores and 12-cores. The first has a Prime multi-core max speed of 4GHz, while its single and dual-core mode boosts two of those cores up to 4.7GHz.
As for its Performance cores, all six cores top out at 3.4GHz. It has the same total cache pool as the X2 Elite Extreme at 53MB, while its Adreno GPU runs at speeds of up to 1.7GHz. The Hexagon NPU on both X2 Elite SKUs are the same at 80 TOPS.
On the subject of the baseline X2 Elite model, it share most of the specs, except that it has 12 total cores instead of 18, has a dual-core boost of 4.4GHz, and a total cache size of 34MB.
Regardless of SKU, all X2 Elite models will support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity.
As with the mobile benchmarking session, there was a benchmark session with the laptop processor, but only for the Elite Extreme model. Unfortunately, I cannot share any numbers on that at the moment, as Qualcomm is only allowing those details to be shared at a later date.
Qualcomm says that we can expect laptops powered by its second generation laptop processors to be available in devices within the first half of 2026.
