We’ll be waiting until next year for the first round of PCs sporting Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, plus whatever Intel and AMD have in store for lightweight laptops. As a hint of what to expect, in stepped a company nobody had ever heard of, offering a laptop few people wanted. Humain (no, not that AI wearable company that bricked its wonky AI Pin and sold itself to HP for peanuts), a Saudi Arabian company, debuted a laptop at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Qualcomm, and Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip), that looks like every other clamshell notebook, save for one small detail. Instead of the Copilot key that’s become standardized on Windows machines, it features an “Humain” AI key.
Humain’s laptop is a Windows machine at its heart, powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite chip. But the AI key brings up an extra layer of UI called Humain One. Through the interface, you can call up an AI chatbot, an AI image generator, and a few more semi-interesting capabilities. There’s a special chatbot for homework help, document summaries, or a “Story Generator.” The AI will create a narrative using the average third-grade reading level.
It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, most obviously from Microsoft’s own Copilot AI, which is built into the company’s 365 apps and desktop. Humain usurped Copilot’s new laptop with the promise that at least some of the AI processes are being handled on-device. The notebook is otherwise packing solid-sounding specs, from an OLED display designed by Samsung, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. No, the company didn’t have any word about how much the machine will cost, or when, or where it will be available. There’s no word if it will come to the U.S., either. The only question remaining is, would you want it to?
Apps still don’t make use of new laptops’ AI capabilities
I spent all of Snapdragon Summit barely able to take in the epic sights of Maui through the haze of big tech AI hype. Qualcomm’s new slogan, “AI is the new UI,” ran like a river through every new announcement and demo. Qualcomm wanted to imply that on-device AI will be able to look into your fridge and suggest meals (Samsung’s fridges already do that). You can use an AI app called Collov AI to remodel rooms in your house with new furniture, though it currently doesn’t have any hookup to major furniture retailers to see how products you can actually buy might look in your abode. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before; only now these features are supposedly running on the device, versus in the cloud.
Qualcomm’s explanation for how this works suggests that the new Snapdragon X2 Elite chip for PCs has such strong AI processing capabilities, but if a laptop or mini-PC using it ever gets overwhelmed, it can bring in the big guns—the major datacenters with such massive cloud compute they could suck the power grid dry. On-device AI should be the goal for every company. AI models are getting better at being contained. The Snapdragon X2 Elite’s redesigned NPU—or neural processing engine built for low-key or background AI tasks—now sports 80 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) versus the 45 TOPS on the original Snapdragon X platform.
What that translates to is still vague. Collov AI, the home decoration app, was tasking the NPU at just 10%. The GPU, or graphics processing unit, was taking the brunt of the rest of the AI image generation. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, though I have yet to see a demo that can truly tax the NPU.
Better chips are getting more expensive
I ran multiple benchmark tests on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme platform, all done on non-commercial test machines with 48GB of RAM and 1TB SSD under the hood. I was standing in front of many Qualcomm reps ready to slap my hand if I tried jumping for any non-synthetic benchmark. From what I could see, the chip does have more power behind it than previous Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm chips. The problem is that when you try and benchmark for AI performance, even if the chip does well, it’s too difficult to determine what that translates to when you’re using the device as a daily driver.
The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme’s GPU was especially impressive. The laptops managed to hit a score of 5,648 and an average of 41 fps in 3DMark’s Steel Nomad Light test and 23,586 in the Solar Bay benchmark. It all suggests that laptops with the Snapdragon X2 Extreme chip will be great for graphics tasks, but the issue will be the number of apps and drivers that are compatible with Qualcomm’s ARM-based chip. Apps like Maxon’s ZBrush should have an ARM version by early 2026, but good luck trying to get any gaming done on these machines.
These tests can only offer a perspective of what users could potentially expect from actual products. I couldn’t possibly say how much the X2 Elite Extreme laptops will cost in this age of tariffs. Recent rumors suggested TSMC, which manufactures these chips, is going to pass tariff costs for 3nm process CPUs onto Qualcomm and fellow chipmaker MediaTek.
“It’s [TSMC’s] choice to try to figure out what to do with the pricing structure,” said Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm’s head of compute and mobile. “What we constantly think about is, ‘How do I get the most efficient design, meaning performance per millimeter square?’”
