Snapdragon X2 Plus announced with big performance and battery life gains

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme at the Snapdragon Summit in October, and it’ll power a host of Arm-based Windows PCs. Now, the company has announced the Snapdragon X2 Plus processor.

The 3nm Snapdragon X2 Plus succeeds 2024’s Snapdragon X Plus, which was available in a variety of cheaper Windows on Arm PCs. The processor uses Qualcomm’s third-generation custom Kryo cores and has peak speeds of 4GHz.

The chipset is available in both 10-core and six-core flavors, with the former also offering 34MB of cache compared to the latter’s 22MB. Both chips have a GPU with a sliced architecture, but the decacore chip has a 1.7GHz GPU while the hexacore processor has a 900MHz GPU.

Qualcomm says both Snapdragon X2 Plus variants offer up to 35% better single-core performance than the Snapdragon X Plus, as well as an 80 TOPs NPU that’s up to 78% faster. Meanwhile, the 10-core model offers 29% faster graphics while the six-core variant delivers 39% better graphics. The company adds that the new processor uses 43% less power than its predecessor. That’s good news if you want to leave your charger at home, although Windows on Arm laptops are already pretty frugal.

As for multimedia capabilities, the new Snapdragon chip supports a 4K display at 144Hz, up to three external 4K displays at 144Hz (or 5K at 60Hz), AV1 encode/decode, single or dual 36MP cameras, up to 4K/30fps video capture, and aptX support. The Snapdragon X2 Plus also features support for agentic and multimodal AI, Bluetooth 5.4, LPDDR5X RAM, Wi-Fi 7, and an optional Snapdragon X75 5G modem.

You won’t have to wait too long to see the first PCs powered by this chipset. Qualcomm says PCs with this processor will launch at CES 2026. However, we’ll likely need to wait for manufacturers to announce availability for these machines.