Is the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme the future of Windows PCs? Breaking down its game-changing performance
www.windowscentral.com
From single-core speed to AI acceleration, Qualcomm’s new flagship outpaces Apple, Intel, and AMD — without sacrificing all-day battery life.

…In Geekbench 6.5 single-core, the X2 Elite Extreme posts a score of 4,080, edging out Apple’s M4 (3,872) and leaving AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (2,881) and Intel’s Core Ultra 9 288V (2,919) far behind…

…The multi-core story is even more dramatic. With a Geekbench 6.5 multi-core score of 23,491, the X2 Elite Extreme nearly doubles the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H (11,386) and comfortably outpaces Apple’s M4 (15,146) and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 370 (15,443)…

…This isn’t just a speed play — Qualcomm is betting that its ARM-based design can deliver desktop-class performance at mobile-class power draw, enabling thin, fanless designs or ultra-light laptops with battery life measured in days, not hours.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is its memory‑in‑package design, a departure from the off‑package RAM used in other X2 Elite variants. Qualcomm is using a System‑in‑Package (SiP) approach here, integrating the RAM directly alongside the CPU, GPU, and NPU on the same substrate.

This proximity slashes latency and boosts bandwidth — up to 228 GB/s compared to 152 GB/s on the off‑package models — while also enabling a unified memory architecture similar in concept to Apple’s M‑series chips, where CPU and GPU share the same pool for faster, more efficient data access…

… the company notes the “first half” of 2026 for the new Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme…

  • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    The question was about GPU drivers, and GPU drivers for ARM-based SoCs aren’t even mature on Android. They are going to suck on Linux.

    Compared to the drivers for Mali, Adreno and consorts, Nvidia is a bunch of saints, and we know how much Nvidia drivers suck under Linux.

    • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Asahi linux is perhaps only distro that is trying to support “desktop arm”. Not just gpu, but it does not post for M3/M4 arm chips. Qualcom does not have an OS protection racket, and so could be more helpful to the project, but phone support (limited/tailored to each chip generation it seems) doesn’t seem to mean all future arm automagically supported.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        There are quite a few more. For example Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Fedora, Alpine and Kali also have ARM ports (and probably many others too). Raspberry OS is purpose-built for ARM Desktop. There’s others too.

        Asahi isn’t specifically an ARM Linux, but an Apple Silicon Linux.

        Apple Silicon is ARM, but it’s also its own semi-custom thing that’s not directly compatible with other ARM stuff.

        That’s the main issue with supporting ARM: You don’t have one platform like x86/x64.

        On x86/x64 there’s an abstraction between the machine code language and the microcode that’s actually executed in the CPU. There’s a microcode translation layer in the CPU that translates one to the other, so x86/x64 chip designers have a lot of freedom when designing their actual CPU. The downside being that the translation layer consumes a little bit of performance.

        There’s also the UEFI system and a ton of other things that keep the platform stable and standardized, so that you can run essentially the same software on a 15yo Intel CPU and a modern AMD.

        ARM is much more diverse. Some run Devicetree, some don’t. There are also multiple different ARM architectures, and since they are customizable, there’s just so much variety.