#snapdragon-x2

#snapdragon-x2

At CES, I did what you're not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It's a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster.

It's important to note that this was all tested on the X2 Elite Extreme configuration, which comes with six additional CPU cores over the standard X2 Elite. There were no X2 Elite systems to test, so we don't know what those multi-core scores will be. I've been told that GPU performance will also scale up on the X2 Elite, but we don't yet know how much faster the X2 Elite Extreme is over its sibling.

Qualcomm is making a gigantic claim right in the headline of its press release: it says these are "the fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs." I'm sure Intel and AMD will have something to say about that! But for now, the company claims its 3nm chips offer up to 50 percent faster CPU performance than the previous-gen Snapdragon X Elite, while using 43 percent less power, and with up to 2.3x the GPU performance from a new 1.85GHz GPU.