Qualcomm is making a gigantic claim right in the headline of its press release: it says these are “the fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs.” I’m sure Intel and AMD will have something to say about that!

But for now, the company claims its 3nm chips offer up to 31 percent faster CPU performance than the previous-gen Snapdragon X Elite at the same power, or can require 43 percent less power, and with up to 2.3x the GPU performance from a new 1.85GHz GPU. On the CPU side, it’s using a 3rd-gen Oryon CPU that’ll also feature in Qualcomm’s new mobile flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite 5 chip, but here with up to 18 cores, 12 of which can run up to 4.4GHz, or up to two of them at 5GHz — a clockspeed which Qualcomm says is a first for Arm CPUs.

There’s also a new 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, for AI tasks, that offers 37 percent more performance with a 16 percent power consumption improvement, the company claims.

Qualcomm’s characterizing all of this as a “legendary leap in performance,” claiming the Elite Extreme in particular offers “up to 75 percent faster CPU performance” than competitors at the same power. While it doesn’t say which competitors it’s talking about in the press release, it appears that Qualcomm is comparing against some of the most powerful (and power-hungry) laptop chips in the market:

Qualcomm also claims these power savings will lead to “multi-day battery life,” but that’s what the company already said about last year’s Snapdragon X Elite. (We saw 14 to 18 hours from last year’s laptops, so perhaps that’s multi-day defined as “two eight-hour workdays.”)

Still, these sound like very solid improvements, and some of them come from distinct new portions of the silicon. Gaming on Arm, which still needed work last year, will get a boost from a dedicated new 18MB of high speed cache that Qualcomm’s calling “Adreno High Performance Memory.”

When Qualcomm had its coming out party with Microsoft last year, though, the laptops arrived later that year. That’s not happening this time around: they’re “expected to be available 1H26,” the company writes.