Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and Elite chips for PCs stretch up to a record 5 GHz — 3nm Arm chips sport new Oryon Prime cores

Qualcomm is back for round two of its push into Windows PCs. At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the company revealed its Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. These chips will serve as the high-end offerings in Qualcomm’s second generation of Arm-based chips for laptops and other PC form factors.

The Elite Extreme is a new tier above the standard Elite, which was the top chip in the original X-series line. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme will offer up to 18 cores, and Qualcomm claims it’s the first Arm chip to hit 5 GHz (on up to two cores).

The company says its Elite chips will be made on a 3-nanometer process node. The Snapdragon X2 Elite uses a mix of Qualcomm Oryon Prime cores and what it calls Performance CPU cores. This is seemingly a standard Performance/Efficiency layout with different names. At normalized power, Qualcomm says it offers up to 75% more performance than its competitors. In multitasking, it claims the new chips will offer up to 31% faster performance at a normalized ISO power, while needing 43% less power than last-gen chips. We don’t yet have benchmarks to share, and Qualcomm didn’t note the exact TDPs for these chips.

The Elite Extreme has higher clock speeds in both single- and dual-core boost and multi-core max than the other two Snapdragon X2 Elite variants. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is model X2E-96-100, while the standard Elites are X2E-88-100 and X2E-80-100. The Extreme and the 88-100 each have 18 cores, while the 80-100 has 12 cores.