Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme—debuting in the new Asus Zenbook A16—is giving the company's Snapdragon X laptop chips a much-needed kick in the pants, with a big focus on further boosting performance in both general applications and graphics. Qualcomm has also been hard at work improving compatibility across applications, with more and more apps now running natively on the platform instead of via emulation. To achieve all this, however, battery life had to take a hit. The upshot is that Qualcomm is no longer positioning Snapdragon X as a budget alternative to Intel and AMD but rather as a superior chip all around, calling the X2 Elite Extreme series “the fastest, most powerful and efficient processors for Windows PCs,” like the Zenbook A16—faster than most Apple machines, too. The first-generation Snapdragon X has been the little chip that could since its release in 2024. The selling point is its unique ARM design, delivering performance that exceeds expectations relative to the price. Not only that, but Snapdragon systems were the first to be certified by Microsoft to provide sufficient horsepower to complete AI tasks effectively. And battery life is stellar, too. So, what's not to like? Well, early compatibility problems slowed the initial uptake of Snapdragon X, and the CPU’s integrated graphics performance turned out to be pretty terrible. And to date, powerful onboard AI features just haven’t proven important, as most AI workloads are still being done in the cloud. With the second-generation X2, Qualcomm set out to deliver on the original promise of faster performance. But what exactly does “faster” mean? As with most claims in the PC computing space, it’s all about the benchmarks. On the Zenbook A16, the tests I ran indeed showcased exemplary performance from the X2 Elite Extreme, in some of the most widely used benchmarking tools, namely Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024. (I don’t have enough competitive Cinebench 2026 results to make wide comparison