Snapdragon X2 Laptops Arrive: Qualcomm Promises All-Day Power at a Lower Price

The Longest-Lasting Laptop Chip Yet

Qualcomm on Tuesday pulled back the curtain on its second-generation Snapdragon X2 laptop processors, betting that a cheaper price tag and a claimed 30% jump in battery life will finally lure mainstream buyers away from x86 machines.

The new line-up—headlined by a cut-down "X2-P" variant that slides into notebooks under $700—arrives just as back-to-school shelves begin to fill. Company executives said the chip is already in production and will ship in more than 30 designs by October, including models from Lenovo, HP and a revived Surface Laptop 6.

How Qualcomm Squeezed More Life Out of a Single Charge

Engineers doubled the number of efficiency cores to eight, allowing Windows to offload background tasks while keeping two high-performance cores asleep. The result, according to lab tests shared with reporters: 28 hours of local video playback on a 60 Wh battery, besting Apple’s M3 by roughly four hours.

“Battery anxiety is the last real friction point in mobile computing,” said Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s CEO. “We built the X2 to erase it.”

A Cheaper Ticket Into the ARM Ecosystem

The X2-P variant ships with six CPU cores instead of twelve and a scaled-back Adreno GPU, but retains the same 4-nanometer process and integrated 5G modem. Qualcomm will sell the part for 19% less than the premium X2-Elite, a move analysts say could accelerate ARM adoption in the mid-range.

• Starting price: $699 for a clamshell with 256 GB storage and 12 GB RAM.
• First models hit Amazon and Best Buy on August 18.
• Qualcomm is offering manufacturers a $50-per-unit rebate if they hit a 15-hour battery target in independent testing.

Skeptics Question App Compatibility

Despite Microsoft’s Prism translation layer, some creative apps still run slower on ARM. Adobe says a native Photoshop build will land this fall, while Autodesk is holding back a native AutoCAD until 2025. “We’re not declaring victory on compatibility,” admitted Qualcomm’s SVP of compute, Kedar Kondap, “but we’re 95% of the way there.”

Bottom Line

If Qualcomm’s battery claims hold in real-world use, the Snapdragon X2 could shift the conversation from raw horsepower to unplugged endurance—something every traveler, student and coffee-shop worker can appreciate. Whether developers finish the software story will decide if this is the year ARM breaks through in Windows land.