If you watched Snapdragon’s “Mic’d up at CES” short this year and spotted a Frenchman talking a little too enthusiastically about laptop chips, yes, that was me. I was on the ground at CES 2026 in Las Vegas as a Snapdragon Insider, mic in hand, answering the one question Qualcomm kept putting to everyone on the floor: What does the 2nd-generation Snapdragon X Series actually mean to you?
It’s a good question, and one I’d been waiting to answer in person since the platform was first teased. So here’s the longer version I didn’t have time to give on camera.
What “2nd-gen Snapdragon X Series” really means
The 2nd generation is the Snapdragon X2 family. The headline members, the X2 Elite and the monster X2 Elite Extreme, were revealed back at Snapdragon Summit 2025 in Hawaii. What CES 2026 added was the piece that quietly matters most: the Snapdragon X2 Plus, the mainstream chip that brings this generation down into the laptops normal people actually buy.
In other words, the first generation proved ARM-on-Windows could be brilliant. This generation is about making that brilliance the default rather than the premium option.
Snapdragon X2 Plus: the one most people will live with
The X2 Plus is built around Qualcomm’s third-generation Oryon CPU and lands in two flavors, a 10-core and a 6-core variant, with clocks reaching up to 4 GHz. Qualcomm pegs single-core performance at roughly 35% above the previous generation, with around 43% better power efficiency. That efficiency number is the one I care about: it’s the difference between a laptop that lasts an afternoon and one that genuinely goes multiple days between chargers.
On the AI side, the integrated Hexagon NPU delivers 80 TOPS, comfortably in Copilot+ territory, alongside Wi-Fi 7, optional 5G, and Snapdragon Guardian for security. The first machines built on it are due in the first half of 2026, and partners like Lenovo were already showing X2-powered hardware on the show floor.
My answer, off the mic
What strikes me, two years into watching this platform, is how boring it’s becoming, in the best possible way. The “can it run my apps?” anxiety that shadowed the first Snapdragon X Elite laptops has faded. Now the conversation is just about performance, battery, and on-device AI, which is exactly where a mature platform should be.
The X Plus tier is where a platform stops being a flagship experiment and starts being an industry default.
That’s the story I find genuinely exciting, and it’s why being handed a microphone at CES felt less like a promo moment and more like being asked to vouch for something I already believe in. The 80 TOPS NPU isn’t a number on a slide to me, it’s the same on-device AI I’ve been putting to the test in far stranger settings (a kitchen in Mexico, but that’s another post).
Thanks again to the Snapdragon team for having me at CES 2026.