Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme has battered rival laptop chips while running on battery, which is faintly embarrassing for Intel and AMD.
Signal65 tested the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 against Intel’s Core Ultra X9 388H and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 465. The results were not the sort of thing Chipzilla will want framed in the lobby.
The Qualcomm chip has 18 CPU cores, comprising 12 Oryon Prime cores and 6 Oryon Performance cores, with boost clocks reaching 5.0 GHz. It comes with an Adreno X2-90 GPU, an 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU and 48GB of LPDDR5X.
Chipzilla’s Core Ultra X9 388H brings 16 CPU cores, split across four P cores, eight E cores and four low-power E cores. It has a 5.1GHz maximum boost clock, Arc B390 graphics, a 50 TOPS NPU and 32GB of LPDDR5X.
AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 465 has 10 CPU cores, with four Zen 5 cores and six Zen 5c cores. It runs at up to 5.0GHz, uses XDNA 2 for 50 TOPS of NPU grunt and carries 32GB of LPDDR5X.
Signal65 said the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme was up to 53 per cent faster than the Core Ultra X9 388H and up to 83 per cent faster than the Ryzen AI 9 465 in Geekbench 7. It was up to 87 per cent faster than both in Cinebench 2026 multi-threaded rendering.
The NPU result was even nastier for the x86 crowd. In Procyon AI Computer Vision, the Snapdragon system delivered nearly twice the AI performance of the Chipzilla machine and roughly 2.4 times the AMD system.
“Running on battery in Balanced mode, the Snapdragon system outperformed the Intel system plugged in at Best Performance in every CPU and AI benchmark,” Signal65 said.
The price comparison makes the bruising worse. Signal65 said a $1,699 Snapdragon system delivered roughly twice the performance per dollar of a $2,299 Chipzilla system, and up to 2.6 times in AI workloads.
There are caveats, since Signal65 compared retail systems rather than identical chassis, so thermals and vendor tuning are part of the story. Still, this is an ugly set of numbers for Chipzilla and AMD, and it gives Qualcomm’s Windows-on-Arm push a much sharper set of teeth.
