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Windows Central

Technology

Richard Devine

Qualcomm teases what performance we might expect from its 2nd Gen Snapdragon X Elite, and it looks like we're in for a treat

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What you need to know

At its annual Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii, Qualcomm has briefly teased some performance figures for its 2nd Gen Oryon CPU.
The (admittedly slightly vague) graph charts the CPU performance of the chip against the current version, as well as AMD and Intel's competition.
The TL;DR seems to be that we can expect significant performance gains, but at a much lower power, scoring more efficiency wins for users.

It's that time of year again where Qualcomm hosts a big shindig out in Hawaii and talks about its latest and greatest. While we haven't gone this year (Hawaii is pretty far away, after all), and much of the focus has been on mobile, PC fans aren't completely left out.

Among all the talk about the current generation Snapdragon X Elite and how it's fared against the old guard in AMD and Intel, is a nugget of exciting information on what's coming next.

On stage at the event, Qualcomm showed off a graph that, frankly, has my mouth watering. You can see it courtesy of my old pal Tomi, aka GadgetsBoy, who did make the long trek to Hawaii.

2nd Gen Qualcomm Oryon CPU #SnapdragonSummit pic.twitter.com/at0l38aCISOctober 21, 2024

So, what can we draw from this? Not much, but enough to get excited. The graphs only show one benchmark, Geekbench, and for single-core performance. But there are still some juicy tidbits to pull from it.

For one, the 2nd Gen Oryon (the CPU part of the Snapdragon X Elite) uses much less power than what's currently out there. Qualcomm says it requires 57% less power, which is remarkable for a single generation leap. But beyond that, the single-core performance being reported is not only higher than Intel and AMD's competing chips, but also at significantly lower power. The killer detail here is that the 2nd Gen Oryon benchmark was run on Android, not on Windows, since Oryon is now going into phones as well. But nevertheless, it paints quite the picture.

Comparing to the Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 256V (seriously, who comes up with these names?), Qualcomm is making bold claims. It's said to have 62% higher performance at the same power, which in this case looks to be about 6W. But it's also able to match the Intel chip's peak performance using a whopping 190% less power. And in this case, Qualcomm is talking about a phone, remember.

Of course, this is a Qualcomm graph, at a Qualcomm event, referencing a single benchmark on a chip that we have no information about with regard to laptops. So apply the regular caution. However, it does set an interesting tone before these things actually do appear. Battery life to performance is already fantastic on the first generation Snapdragon X Elite, and all the signs point towards Qualcomm taking this up a few notches with the successor. Batteries aren't getting any bigger, so the more life we can squeeze out of them, the better.

The big play here is that using a 2nd Gen Snapdragon X Elite would appear to be not only a leap forward in performance, but also in the type of battery life we can expect while still getting most, if not all, of that performance. Either way, I'm already looking at my watch, wondering when we're going to see these chips out in the wild.