For years, Windows on Arm has lived in an awkward space. It was promising enough to be interesting, but never quite convincing enough to replace an Intel or AMD laptop as our main workhorse. That started to change when Qualcomm’s first Snapdragon X Elite chip launched in 2024, giving us Arm-based Windows laptops that were slim, quiet, and genuinely impressive when it came to battery life and productivity performance. But performance expectations for laptops in 2025 and beyond are no longer modest. Creators want to edit videos on the go. Students want machines that last a full day and still run games. Professionals want thin machines that don’t feel thin on power.
This is where the Snapdragon X2 Elite really starts to make sense. Earlier this month, I was invited by Qualcomm to its headquarters in San Diego to have a first look at it, and it became clear why the company sees this as a second wave rather than a simple refresh.
Oryon cores, aggressive clocks and a beefed-up GPU
Image: Qualcomm
At the heart of the Snapdragon X2 Elite is Qualcomm’s third-generation Oryon CPU architecture. According to Qualcomm, the top-tier variants scale up to 18 CPU cores, split into clusters designed to juggle heavy workloads and background tasks with more efficiency than the first X Elite processors. Clock speeds are now pushing into territory that, a couple of years ago, would have sounded unrealistic for an Arm laptop chip, with peak boost clocks that can touch the 5GHz mark in short, single-core bursts.
There’s a very practical reason why this matters, beyond bragging rights. Windows, even in its more modern Arm-friendly form, still leans heavily on strong single-core performance for day-to-day stuff. App launches, browser tabs, UI responsiveness and even little background system behaviours tend to fall back to single-threaded performance. Earlier Arm chips handled this in a “good enough” kind of way. The X2 Elite, at least on paper and in demos that I’ve seen, feels more like it’s properly stepping into Intel and AMD territory. Cache has also been pushed further, with Qualcomm bumping the L2 cache up to 44MB.
Image: Qualcomm
The GPU side has seen an even more dramatic uplift. The new Adreno X2 graphics architecture comes in multiple configurations depending on the SKU, scaling compute units and clock speeds. On paper, Qualcomm’s performance claims are ambitious, but what stood out more was actually seeing it in action.
