New Snapdragon Mobile And PC Platforms Set To Fuel A New Breed Of Agentic AI

Each fall, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui, HI has become a tech industry bellwether for where mobile and now PC silicon is headed. This year’s event was no exception, and if there was a single theme that permeated the keynotes and demos, it was that the age of agentic AI has arrived, and Qualcomm aims to be its silicon backbone. The company unveiled two flagship processors, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for smartphones and the Snapdragon X2 Elite for PCs—that not only push performance and efficiency forward but will also hopefully serve as the foundation for a new class of AI-fueled personal agents.

The end goal is a lofty one but the company’s efforts are firmly rooted in context-aware, multimodal, and proactive platforms, designed to anticipate user needs and react in real time. This is certainly a similar theme to what other tech titans like Google and Samsung have portrayed recently, though Qualcomm’s silicon execution backs-up a clear vision in this effort, and it underscores where the company is currently heavily invested.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5: The World’s Fastest Mobile SoC?

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is built on a 3nm process and powered by the company’s third-generation Oryon CPU architecture. Qualcomm claims a 20% CPU performance uplift and 35% better efficiency over its predecessor, with clock speeds reaching up to 4.6GHz on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s two prime cores. The chip’s new Adreno GPU architecture delivers a 23% graphics boost and 25% improved ray tracing, while the SoC’s Hexagon NPU is now 37% faster, enabling more robust on-device AI workload processing. I put some of these claims to the test in my own hands-on benchmarking at Snapdragon Summit, and there’s no question, this new Qualcomm mobile platform puts up numbers that handily best anything on the market currently, whether Android or Apple iOS.

But the real story isn’t just raw horsepower, it’s what that horsepower could soon enable. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is also the first mobile platform to support Advanced Professional Video (APV) recording, which is a new, royalty-free video compression standard developed by Samsung, designed to provide professional-grade, near-lossless video capture on mobile devices. For gamers, the new GPU’s memory optimizations, like its shared HPM cache, should deliver not only higher frame rates but more efficient rendering for lower power consumption and longer gaming sessions as well.

Most importantly, Qualcomm claims Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is designed from the ground up for agentic AI.

At the event, demos on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 showcased AI agents that can “see what you see, hear what you hear, and think with you in real time.” These agents don’t just respond to prompts; they proactively surface recommendations, summarize conversations, and even adjust camera settings on the fly—all while keeping data on-device for privacy. For example, agents like the Snapdragon Seamless Agent were positioned as a cross‑device orchestrators, handling context and continuity between phone, PC, earbuds, and wearables, with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon underscoring the company’s vision in his keynote as the “ecosystem of you.” Again, though some of these functionalities are still in development and will require partner OEM and developer support, the vision put forth was clear and on-point, demonstrating how AI can actually be useful in our day-to-day lives.

Snapdragon X2 Elite: Raising The Bar Again For The Efficient AI PC

On the PC side, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon X2 Elite, the successor to last year’s Snapdragon X Elite platform. Built on an enhanced Oryon CPU architecture, the X2 Elite delivers desktop-class performance with laptop-class efficiency. In fact, the company showed some early benchmark numbers from prototype reference laptops, and I dare say those results were exceptional. Here we saw multi-threaded throughput that took platforms from Intel, AMD and even Apple to task for a solid beating, with single-threaded performance ahead of even Apple’s M4.

In terms of graphics, Qualcomm only showed 3DMark numbers but those were well ahead of integrated graphics solutions from Intel Core Ultra 200 series Lunar Lake and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 series as well, in 3DMark Solar Bay, for example. These are early, Qualcomm-provided numbers, with a bit of chest-thumping of course. However, it will be very interesting to see how the platform plays out in the real world, when occasional emulation is required in some areas like gaming, especially.

Beyond The Hardware: Hybrid, Agentic AI Evolves

The ability to run models seamlessly across local hardware and the cloud was a key underpinning of Qualcomm’s vision as well. In practice, this means AI agents that can handle lightweight tasks instantly on-device, while tapping into larger cloud models for more complex reasoning. This hybrid approach not only reduces latency but also optimizes power consumption and enhances privacy. It also positions Qualcomm as a central player in the AI ecosystem, since its chips are targeted as the connective tissue across smartphones, PCs, cars, wearables, and IoT devices.

The demos were compelling: a PC that could summarize a day’s worth of emails into a digest, generate Excel spreadsheet graphs real time, and even act as a research assistant that pulls context from both local files and online sources. The key here is latency—by running much of the inference workload locally, Snapdragon X2 Elite makes these experiences feel more seamless and responsive, which something cloud-only solutions can’t match.

If there was one phrase that echoed throughout the Summit, it was “agentic AI.” Qualcomm’s vision is that AI agents will evolve from passive assistants into active partners. These agents are multimodal, meaning they can process text, voice, images, and even environmental context simultaneously. The demos I saw at Snapdragon Summit weren’t just about convenience but also about personalization. By continuously learning on-device, eventually these agents will adapt to individual users while keeping sensitive data private. Qualcomm calls this “AI that knows you but doesn’t own you,” but the proof will be delivered when laptops and smartphones built on this new technology take shape with software and app ecosystem support in retail consumer and commercial devices.

Take-Aways And Qualcomm’s Bet On The Agentic AI Future

Snapdragon Summit 2025 showcased Qualcomm’s lofty vision for the future of computing—one powered by intelligent, personalized AI agents running on-device. The company’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 redefines mobile performance, not just with faster CPU, GPU and NPU performance, but with hooks built-in for a new class of agentic AI that sees, hears, and responds in real time. On the PC side, the Snapdragon X2 Elite helps to bring hybrid AI to life, blending local inference with cloud models to deliver proactive, context-aware experiences and critical task automation. I’m genuinely excited to see the first wave of Snapdragon X2 Elite series PCs arrive in market in the first half of 2026. The platform could once again redefine performance-per-watt metrics for Windows PCs, and turn up the heat once again on Intel and AMD.

Regardless, Qualcomm is betting that the future of computing isn’t just faster chips, it’s smarter chips. Future silicon solutions need to not only execute instructions but understand context, anticipate needs, and act on behalf of the user. And Snapdragon Summit made it clear: the personal AI era isn’t just incoming. It’s already here, and Qualcomm wants to be the silicon superpower behind it.

Dave Altavilla co-founded and is principal analyst at HotTech Vision And Analysis, a tech industry analyst firm specializing in consulting, test validation and go-to-market strategies for major chip and system OEMs. Like all analyst firms, HTVA provides paid services, research and consulting to many chip manufacturers and system OEMs, including companies mentioned in this article. However, this does not influence his unbiased, objective coverage.