The laptop chip war of 2026 is really starting to heat up, and out of all the options I’ve tested like Apple’s M5 and Intel Panther Lake, Snapdragon X2 Elite looks like it could be a real threat.

Qualcomm flew me out to their campus in San Diego and took me properly behind the scenes on how this new generation of notebook silicon has been designed, tested, and gave me a chance to benchmark it.

And I mean really benchmark it. Usually at these events, you get cherry picked demos with vague numbers to really shine a new chip in its best light. However, here, we got three reference design laptops: • 12-core Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop with 32GB RAM — running at 22W • 18-core Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop with 32GB RAM — running at 22W • 18-core Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme laptop with 48GB

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