Qualcomm’s Next PC Chip Promises Even Better Battery Life Than Before

Qualcomm was so excited to talk about its most powerful ARM-based PC CPUs in 2025, it left off its lower-end, humdrum processor for the big reveal of all its partnered products. Alongside the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Elite Extreme (cue the guitar riff), Qualcomm is coming to CES 2026 with an X2 Plus chip.

Qualcomm’s sequel to its initial batch of ARM-based chips that brought us Copilot+ PCs all boast a similar strong battery life and large 80 TOPS NPU (neural processing unit) built for background and low-scale AI tasks. Compared to the previous-gen Snapdragon X Plus, the higher-end X2 Plus promises 2.3 times better GPU performance and upwards of 50% better CPU multi-core performance. All told, the chip could be better for multitasking, light photo editing tasks, and—potentially—some light gaming.

The X2 Plus comes in two flavors, one with six Oryon CPU cores and one with 10 cores. The higher-end version, specifically the X2P-64-100, sports a max multithread frequency of 4GHz with a 34MB cache. The lower-end version sports the same frequency but a lower total cache. The integrated Adreno graphics also hit a higher 1.7GHz frequency compared to the six-core variant. All that is to say, if you’re looking at an X2 Plus laptop for any photo editing or any other graphics, you want the higher-end version.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Control Panel did a lot to offer easier driver support, though you’ll occasionally run into some problems with unsupported apps from x86 to ARM. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

Devices with this chip will support up to three 4K external monitors as well as Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. The mid-range ARM chip is supposed to compete against Intel and AMD’s latest lightweight laptop CPUs. These chips won’t just have to perform well in battery life as well. Qualcomm claims its new chip demands 43% less power for the same performance as its first-gen Snapdragon X Plus.

One of Qualcomm’s big bugbears for ARM on PC has been compatibility. Late last year, the chipmaker launched its Snapdragon Control Panel, a kind of game and app launcher that was supposed to help users update access to Microsoft’s refined Prism x86 emulator and keep on top of drivers. Working on an ARM-based Windows machine is far better than it was at the Copilot+ launch in 2024. Support for Windows AVX and AVX2 extensions in the Prism emulator means it’s much easier to run previously unsupported programs and even some games on Qualcomm’s latest chips.

Still, for the sake of a PC that can keep up with the Joneses of Intel and AMD’s top-end laptop CPUs, the X2 Elite Extreme with its 18 Oryon cores (12 “prime” CPU cores and another six “performance” cores) will still offer the best overall performance. At least, there will be an interesting three-way competition for laptop supremacy in 2026.

Gizmodo is on the ground in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the tech unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow our CES live blog here and find all our coverage here.