Qualcomm unveiled its powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite processor at the Snapdragon Summit in September 2025. This new chip is set to power a wave of PCs launching in the first half of 2026. Excitingly, early benchmark results have already emerged, pitting it against Apple’s formidable M5 chipset. These initial leaks hint that the Snapdragon X2 Elite could significantly boost Windows-on-Arm devices, bringing their raw performance much closer to Apple Silicon.
Snapdragon X2 Elite vs. Apple M5: The Benchmark Showdown
A pre-production Asus Zenbook, equipped with the Snapdragon X2 Elite, was put through its paces by the YouTube channel Hardware Canucks. It’s important to remember that this laptop was running early firmware and drivers, and the chip itself isn’t in its final form, so these results offer a preliminary, but promising, look at its capabilities.
A video embedded within the original article provided a visual overview of these initial tests.
The comparison focused on popular benchmarking tools like Cinebench, Blender, and HandBrake. In the leaked Cinebench 2024 multi-core results, the Snapdragon X2 Elite achieved an impressive score of 1,432, comfortably surpassing the Apple M5’s 1,153. This suggests a notable improvement for tasks that heavily rely on multiple processing threads, such as intensive video editing and 3D rendering.
Despite this multi-core victory, the Apple M5 chip maintained its lead in single-core performance, scoring 200 points in Cinebench’s single-core test compared to the X2 Elite’s 146. This indicates that Apple still holds an edge in responsiveness for lighter, less-threaded applications.
Further testing solidified the X2 Elite’s strength in creative workloads. In Blender 5.01 rendering, Qualcomm’s chip finished the task in approximately 3 minutes and 31 seconds, significantly faster than the M5, which took around 5 minutes and 33 seconds. Similarly, for HandBrake video transcoding, the X2 Elite completed the job in 3 minutes and 29 seconds, while the M5 needed 5 minutes and 14 seconds.
These benchmarks collectively show that Qualcomm’s latest flagship PC chip has the potential to outperform the M5 in multi-core and content creation scenarios. However, Apple’s silicon continues to shine in single-core responsiveness, crucial for everyday tasks and less demanding software.
Qualcomm highlights that its new Snapdragon X2 Elite platform not only delivers up to 31 percent better performance at the same power levels but also consumes 43 percent less power than its predecessor, the Snapdragon X Elite. This versatile chipset is designed to integrate seamlessly across various form factors, from traditional laptops to innovative 2-in-1 PCs and other computing devices.
Another video embedded in the original content offered further details on these advancements.