Early tests have revealed that the upcoming wave of Windows laptops powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite are up to the challenge of competing with the latest MacBooks, and even beating them in a lot of cases.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip changed the game for Windows laptops in 2024, finally delivering an ARM-based chipset that was not only battery efficient, but powerful enough to bridge the gap between native and emulated apps without ruining the experience as had been the case for years on prior attempts. For many, this was enough to finally deliver a Windows laptop that could compete with MacBooks running on Apple Silicon, which were objectively just better than most Windows machines of the time.
Now, Snapdragon X2 Elite just looks to be a major step forward.
Benchmarking results from YouTube channel Hardware Canucks, as spotted by WCCFTech, show that Snapdragon X2 Elite is matching or even beating Apple’s latest M5 chip in many tests. These tests were performed on a new Zenbook A14 model from Asus which is powered by Snapdragon X2E-88-100, a variant of the X2 Elite.
In a single-core Cinebench test, Qualcomm’s latest showed a 46-point improvement over the prior generation, while falling short of Apple’s chip by around 50 points. But, when performing a multi-core version of the same test, Qualcomm beat Apple by over 300 points while nearing a 500-point improvement over the original Snapdragon X Elite. The latest Windows chip also saw a massive improvement in Blender rendering times, as well as a huge leap in video transcoding times through Handbrake. Exporting from a video editing program, one of the weak links of Snapdragon X Elite, also saw some major improvements. Where a test in DaVinci Resolve saw a 10-min 4K export take over 33 minutes on Qualcomm’s last-gen chip, Snapdragon X2 Elite shaved off a little over 10 minutes from the export time – though it still took around twice as long as the MacBook.
So, while there are still some obvious gaps, Qualcomm has clearly delivered a big leap in performance.
The first Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops were announced at CES 2026, with releases coming in the next few months.
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