Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme carries a 6th-generation Hexagon NPU (NPU6) rated at up to 80 TOPS — which Qualcomm bills as the fastest laptop NPU. It was announced in September 2025 and ships in 2026 Windows PCs. That is roughly double the on-device ceiling we had a year ago. For comparison, Apple's M4 and A18 Neural Engine sit near 38 TOPS and the previous-generation Snapdragon X Elite Hexagon near 45 TOPS, per public spec sheets. The software has caught up too. Qualcomm's developer blog describes LLMWare's Model HQ running multi-step agentic workflows powered by small language models entirely on-device, through a no-code drag-and-drop interface. But TOPS is a peak marketing number. Real agent throughput is gated by memory bandwidth and model size — not the…
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