[Editors’ Note, April 17, 2026: This article and its charts were edited to add comparison results from our tests of two of Intel’s “Panther Lake” laptop CPUs.]
With its 18-core loadout, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is Qualcomm’s loudest laptop-CPU salvo to date. It’s a new CPU tier from Qualcomm (the first generation of its Snapdragon X processors topped out with the Snapdragon X “Elite,” no “Extreme”), and my tests position it favorably among the upper echelons of laptop silicon. Benchmarking this new flagship chip proves that Qualcomm’s best can challenge some of the better chips from AMD, Apple, and Intel.
I tested the X2 Elite Extreme in Asus’ new 16-inch Zenbook A16. That laptop, built around the chip and unveiled in January at CES 2026, wowed our team enough back then to designate it the best ultraportable of the conference. Now that this $1,699.99 clamshell laptop has arrived in PC Labs, I’ve put its promises of power to the test.
This isn’t the first time PCMag has encountered the X2 Elite Extreme. Last fall, my colleague got a peek at how the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme performs in a controlled environment at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, but that was a limited view. In my home lab, I ran PCMag’s curated gauntlet of benchmarks to see how the Zenbook and its top-end X2 chip perform in the real-world conditions you care about most.
Since the debut of its Snapdragon X line of laptop chips just a few years ago, Qualcomm has made some serious strides, showing up in everything from surprisingly potent budget systems to hyper-efficient flagship laptops and even some punchy mini PCs. What did I find with this latest round of tests? The X2 Elite Extreme truly lets the Snapdragon X family run with the big dogs.
Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme: Qualcomm’s Biggest Leap Yet
The X2 Elite Extreme is Qualcomm’s new flagship system on a chip (SoC), designed to compete head-on with high-end x86 silicon from Intel and AMD, as well as Apple’s M-series. Utilizing Qualcomm’s 3rd-gen “Oryon” CPU architecture, it represents a major shift from the original Snapdragon X1 chips. The broad strokes are impressive: a jump to 18 cores, an expanded cache, and an NPU that nearly doubles AI performance from 45 TOPS to 80 TOPS. The chip is also capable of boosting up to a 5GHz clock speed when necessary.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
This isn’t just a Version 2.0 of the X1; it’s a full reengineering. By moving from a uniform core design to a more sophisticated high-performance hybrid model, the X2 Elite Extreme is built to go toe-to-toe with high-wattage chips traditionally reserved for chunky workstations. For power users, creators, and professionals, that is very good news indeed.
Note: If you need a full refresher on the underlying tech, we have a complete deep dive into the architecture changes with the Snapdragon X2 family in our earlier look at the chip.
The Asus Zenbook A16: A 2.6-Pound Powerhouse
While my focus today is on the silicon, the hardware housing it is what makes this performance tier possible in a portable format. The Zenbook A16 is an ultralight 16-inch laptop built from magnesium-aluminum alloy, reinforced with Asus’ proprietary Ceraluminum finish, allowing it to fit a 16-inch, 120Hz 3K OLED screen into a frame that weighs just 2.65 pounds. That is nearly a pound lighter than a 15-inch MacBook Air.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
My test unit features the top-tier X2E-96-100 chip with 48GB of LPDDR5X memory and a full array of ports, including USB4 and a full-size SD card reader. For a deeper look at the A16’s aesthetics, keyboard feel, and design innovations, check out our Asus Zenbook A16 hands-on review from CES.
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Core Comparisons: AMD, Apple, and Intel in the Crosshairs
Test results don’t mean much on their own, so I’m comparing the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme against CPUs from AMD, Apple, and Intel, as well as the previous top-tier Qualcomm chips.
Here’s an overview of the systems and CPUs I looked at for this comparison. The processors are grouped by maker (Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple), in roughly descending power order…
For Apple and Apple M-Series, I’m comparing with the 2025 MacBook Pro 14-Inch, based on the vanilla M5. (We’d have liked to compare the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme to the M5 Pro, too, in a larger MacBook Pro, but we haven’t had the opportunity to test that CPU.) For Intel’s latest, I have two freshly minted Core Ultra 3 X-series “Panther Lake” chips, in the Asus ZenBook Duo (2026) and the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro (tested, but not yet reviewed).
Also for Intel, I’m tapping the HP EliteBook X G1i (Core Ultra 7 268V “Lunar Lake”) and the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 Aura Edition (Core Ultra 9 285H “Arrow Lake-H”). Note that the Lenovo Yoga machine has a discrete GeForce RTX 5050 GPU and thus will show some atypically amped-up graphics performance; the rest of the machines here rely on integrated graphics.
For AMD systems, I selected the HP EliteBook X G1a (Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375) and the HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14—a mobile workstation using the potent Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 SoC. And finally, I added the Asus Vivobook S 15 (S5507Q) and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 (Snapdragon X Elite) to the lineup, allowing for a comparison with the previous Snapdragon generation.
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CPU Performance: 18 Cores, Real Muscle
For Snapdragon processors, we run three CPU-centric or processor-intensive tests. Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the freeware video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
In single-core Cinebench tests, the Zenbook A16 offers solid performance, topping its Intel and AMD competitors. However, Apple’s lead in single-core performance remains intact; the X2 Elite Extreme falls just behind both the Apple M5 by a small margin.
It’s in the multi-core Cinebench results where the X2’s 18 cores truly shine. The results outclass nearly everything on our comparison list, pulling well ahead of the MacBook Pro and beating the Intel and AMD systems almost across the board. The only exception is the HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14, which uses a specialized AMD SoC that remains the “heavy iron” of the group, being used in gaming and workstation laptops.
We see a similar story in Geekbench 6, which focuses on daily productivity and a broader array of computing tasks. Again, the Snapdragon X2 outclasses Intel and AMD in single-core scores, while trailing Apple by a fair amount. In multi-core, it delivers the best score of the bunch, even topping AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395.
The generational leap here is dramatic. Look at the Galaxy Book4 Edge: Compared with last year’s Snapdragon X Elite, the X2 Elite Extreme offers an over-800-point jump in single-core performance and a staggering 6,000-point-plus increase in multi-core performance. This isn’t just an iteration; it’s a big shift in Qualcomm’s competitive positioning.
To gauge overall speed in a task you might actually perform in the real world, we use Handbrake to transcode a 4K video file to 1080p. The Asus Zenbook A16 delivered a very good result, coming in at under 5 minutes. This puts it in the same class of capability as the base M5 MacBook Pro, suggesting that Qualcomm can largely eliminate the Windows-on-Arm penalty for media creation with apps that run natively on Windows on Arm. (Handbrake is one of them.) Note, however, that the Intel Panther Lake and Arrow Lake-H chips, and the AMD chips, came in well ahead.
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Graphics: Adreno Steps Up
Qualcomm didn’t just overclock its existing graphics for this generation; the company completely re-architected the Adreno GPU. This new integrated graphics solution supports DirectX 12.2 Ultimate and Vulkan 1.4, delivering a claimed 2.3x performance-per-watt improvement over the previous generation. In early tests, this translated to nearly doubling the frame rates and synthetic scores of the X1. It’s not as drastic an improvement, in a big-picture sense, as the CPU performance boost is; the Elite Extreme was outpaced by Intel Panther Lake, the Ryzens, and the Apple M5 in many cases here, in our various synthetic tests. But the X2 Elite Extreme decisively dwarfs the Adreno in the original Snapdragon X Elite.
To see how this new architecture translates to real-world performance, I challenged each reviewed system’s graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next two, Steel Nomad’s regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests, focus on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, measures ray-tracing performance.
In the 3DMark Wild Life test, which measures high-frequency burst performance, the Zenbook A16 delivered a strong showing, securing the fourth-highest score in my comparison group and eclipsing the original X Elite’s Adreno scores. When I stepped up to Wild Life Extreme, which pushes the rendering resolution to 4K, the X2 Elite Extreme maintained momentum. It remains one of the top performers in this category, outpaced only by the Apple MacBook Pro (M5) and the workstation-class HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14, and roughly on par with the Arc B390 in the Intel Panther Lake systems. Given that the ZBook is a thick, high-wattage machine, the fact that an ultraportable like the A16 is in the same conversation is a testament to the new Adreno’s efficiency.
Moving to the more modern Steel Nomad and Steel Nomad Lite tests, the generational improvement becomes even more apparent. The X2 Elite Extreme showed a massive increase over the first-generation Snapdragon X Elite chips. This suggests that the Adreno overhaul isn’t just about higher clock speeds; it’s about a fundamental increase in shader throughput and memory bandwidth that makes the A16 a much more capable tool for light video editing and moderate gaming. Note, however, that the Arc B390 in the Intel Panther Lake chips asserted their dominance here, outpacing the Qualcomm Elite Extreme by roughly to 10% to 20% in various comparisons in the two Steel Nomad tests.
The most surprising result came in Solar Bay, 3DMark’s cross-platform ray tracing benchmark. In this test of advanced lighting and reflection techniques, the Zenbook A16 actually edged ahead of the Apple M5 MacBook Pro. The only systems to keep it at bay were, once again, the HP ZBook Ultra (by a lot) and the two Arc B390-based Intel Panther Lake systems (by roughly 20% each).
AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ (Strix Halo) remains the integrated graphics champion in this field thanks to its immense GPU core count, and the Intel Panther Lake systems based on Arc B390 are no slouches, but given its showing here in a mainstream 16-inch laptop, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is now a proper player in integrated graphics.
Early Verdict: The ‘Extreme’ Label Is Accurate
My first sessions with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme inside a retail-ready laptop confirm what the PCMag team suspected during its unveiling: Qualcomm has officially moved past the “alternative” phase and into a “serious challenger” position. By delivering multi-core performance that rivals workstation-class AMD silicon and graphics that can play ball with a base Apple M5 in ray tracing, the X2 Elite Extreme is expanding what we can expect from a 2.6-pound laptop.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The generational leap from the original Snapdragon X Elite to the X2 series is particularly striking. Qualcomm hasn’t just caught up to the industry—in some cases, it is now helping to set the pace.
Mind you, I haven’t tested the Asus Zenbook A16’s battery life yet, nor quite yet thoroughly evaluated the design, display, and other features, so stay tuned for my full review of the A16. For now, though, the takeaway is clear: As much of a mouthful as “Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme” is to say, it’s undeniably a beast of a chip.
About Our Expert
Brian Westover
Principal Writer, Hardware
Experience
From the laptops on your desk to satellites in space and AI that seems to be everywhere, I cover many topics at PCMag. I’ve covered PCs and technology products for over 15 years at PCMag and other publications, among them Tom’s Guide, Laptop Mag, and TWICE. As a hardware reviewer, I’ve handled dozens of MacBooks, 2-in-1 laptops, Chromebooks, and the latest AI PCs. As the resident Starlink expert, I’ve done years of hands-on testing with the satellite service. I also explore the most valuable ways to use the latest AI tools and features in our Try AI column.
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