We tried pushing Snapdragon X2 Elite to its extreme, and it's twice as fast as the first gen

Qualcomm’s second generation of laptop CPUs, the Snapdragon X2 series, launched earlier this year with the Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme chipsets.

After all the testing we’ve done on the X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme since launch day, we’ve come to some pretty intense conclusions about the overall performance gains gen over gen. While we already know that Snapdragon X2 Elite crushes its competition from AMD, Apple, and Intel, it’s also twice as fast as the previous generation on single-threaded workloads and has a massive boost on multicore performance as well.

But don’t just take our word for it. We’ve got the numbers to back those claims.

Nearly 2x faster single-core performance

The Snapdragon X2 Elite comes in a 12-core and 16-core model, while the X2 Elite Extreme boasts 18 cores. But overall core count doesn’t matter much when it comes to single-core, single-thread workloads and app-open speeds.

However, the X2 series features the latest iteration of the Oryon core architecture, which leads to single-core performance that doubles what we saw in the first generation.

While Geekbench 6 scores may not be a direct comparison to real-life use case, they do provide a stable, repeatable performance benchmark. While the first generation Snapdragon X Elite chip averaged a single-core performance score of 2,487 across multiple systems, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme hit a high of 4,070 on single-core performance.

That makes the X2 nearly twice as fast as the previous generation. So your apps will open near-instantaneously, and you’ll get more responsive performance with certain Adobe apps that are heavily single-threaded like Photoshop.

Multitasking-proof multi-core performance

The first generation Snapdragon X Elite featured just 12-cores. So it’s not much of a surprise that the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (with an extra 6 cores) outpaces the original X Elite CPU. But the base X2 Elite is a similar 12-core configuration. It just has the third generation Oryon cores compared to the second gen cores in the first generation CPU. And that gen-to-gen increase in multicore performance is also staggering.

Naturally, the X2 Elite Extreme’s multicore score of 23,407 is significantly higher than the X Elite’s 13,590 average across its four launch devices. The X2 Elite 12-core also saw a significant performance boost with the third generation Oryon cores for a multicore score of 16,253 while the X2 Elite 16-core leaves Apple, Intel, and AMD in the dust with a multicore score of 20,301. That’s a 19% increase gen-over-gen with the 12-core model, 49% increase with the 16-core variant, and 72% increase with the 18-core iteration of the X2 Elite.

While the X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme on the Asus Zenbook A14 and A16 performed a little under what we saw on the first laptops, they’re still significantly more powerful than the first generation. Which means you’ll have a more responsive computer or tablet, especially when it comes to those ultra-busy multitasking workdays that require multiple apps with multiple tabs running simultaneously.

Don’t worry about the app support — it's no longer a problem

Early in the Windows on Arm lifecycle, app support was a major detriment to arm-based devices. You just couldn’t run much on them other than a default browser and maybe a handful of mildly useful applications.

Things have changed.

Snapdragon laptops, in both generations, run about 90% of the most common apps natively, with Microsoft’s Prism x86 emulation layer handling the remaining 10%. And Prism is faster than ever, so you won’t notice much of a slow down between arm native and emulated applications.

The Whole Package

While it’s difficult to get a comprehensive look at laptop CPU performance as it can vary by manufacturer, we’ve tested enough Snapdragon X2 Elite systems at this point to be pretty confident that most X2 Elite laptops will get about twice the amount of single-core performance as the previous generation and a massive upgrade in multi-core performance for a machine that’s fast, reactive, and can handle a multi-app workload without throttling or leaving you hanging when switching tabs and programs.

So whether your Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop is manufactured by Acer, Asus, Dell, or Lenovo, you’re getting the performance you paid for and an experience you’ll enjoy.

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