X2 Elite is Qualcomm’s latest attempt to bring Apple’s M-series magic to the PC

Qualcomm revealed the second act in its bid to overtake Intel and AMD as the leading laptop CPU maker this week with the paper launch of its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme processors. The company seeks to bring the kind of battery life and performance Apple has gotten out of its Arm-based M-series silicon to the Windows market.

Due out sometime in the first half of next year, these chips promise everything we've come to expect from Windows on Arm devices: better battery life, faster multitasking, and faster local AI than x86 or Qualcomm's prior-gen silicon. The NPU is now capable of 80 TOPS (INT8), up from 45 on the Snapdragon X Elite, to power Copilot+ features like Microsoft's integrated spyware, or as they prefer to call it, Recall.

NPUs and AI PCs aside, Qually's second-gen Snapdragon X-series processors do deliver some welcome improvements to ...