The Zenbook A16 is the vehicle by which Qualcomm has worked with ASUS to bring its fastest SoC to market. The chip, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, represents the fastest of the fast for Qualcomm, with the highest clock speeds and most cores, on both the CPU and GPU. The X2 Elite series is Qualcomm’s second generation of Oryon CPU-based PC chips and a rebirth of Qualcomm’s PC business, which originally started with Windows 8 more than a dozen years ago.

The Zenbook A16 Is Packed with Serious Materials and Hardware

I first saw the Zenbook A16 at CES 2026 after Qualcomm announced the X2 Elite family in September 2025, and I was impressed by its weight. This latest generation of the ASUS Zenbook A series focuses on extreme lightweight design while leveraging powerful processors, fast memory, and great battery life. Its 2.62-pound weight is made possible by ASUS’s proprietary Ceraluminum material, a combination of aluminum and ceramic, and it comes in only one color: Zabriskie Beige.

The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip offers the highest memory bandwidth in the Snapdragon X2 family, thanks to on-package memory that runs faster and has lower latency than typical soldered or slotted RAM. (By the way, on-package memory is also one of the key ways that Apple achieves such high memory bandwidth and tight memory coupling on its M-Series silicon.) On-package memory also means that memory can’t be upgraded later and is effectively limited to pre-set configurations of 48GB, 96GB, or 128GB. ASUS is currently selling only the 48GB model on its site for $1,799 and $2,200, with the only difference being the top clock speed of the CPU. This configuration delivers 228 GB/s of memory bandwidth, among the highest for any Windows-based laptop SoC.

It’s true that AMD’s Ryzen AI 395+ Max and NVIDIA’s DGX Spark can both beat this bandwidth, but those are more desktop platforms than mobile SoCs. (The DGX Spark is also Linux-only, at least for now.) And although the RTX Spark does exist and delivers up to 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth, it won’t ship until this fall. (See more analysis on the RTX Spark here.) There are also tablets and workstations on the market with AMD’s Ryzen AI 395+ Max, but their battery life is abysmal, and they are more mobile workstations than lightweight laptops.

For connectivity, ASUS went with dual 40 Gbps USB-C ports, an HDMI port, a USB-A port, and an SDXC Card slot. Unfortunately, charging is possible on only one side of the laptop because there are only two USB-C ports — both on the same side. This is generally a cost-saving measure, because routing USB ports across the motherboard can be costly.

Performance Paves the Way for Mobile Windows SoCs

This laptop and the chip within it offer the most competitive performance against Apple. CPU benchmarks in Geekbench 6, Cinebench 26, and Blender revealed that the Zenbook A16 with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is the Windows laptop that comes the closest I’ve ever seen to beating Apple. As it happens, Apple sent me a MacBook Pro running an M5 Max processor for review, and the ASUS came within 10% of it on single-core performance and trailed it by only 20% on multi-core. The Zenbook’s Cinebench result was also within 10%, which is quite impressive again; most Windows laptops don’t even come close. That said, I think the correct comparison for the A16/X2 Elite Extreme combination is the MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip. I don’t have one of those for testing, but suffice it to say that Qualcomm’s X2 Elite is probably the most competitive Windows SoC against Apple’s CPUs. Note, however, that the M5 Max’s GPU is 3x as fast as Qualcomm’s chip, so it isn’t close at all.

Comparing the X2 line within itself, the X2 Elite Extreme is 10% faster than the X2 Elite on single-core tasks and a little more than 10% faster on multi-core. Cinebench results demonstrated a wider delta of about 30%, while Blender came in around 20%. In 3Dmark, the difference was about 20% against the X2 Elite. This means that most users would be justified targeting the X2 Elite for most applications, unless you absolutely need the fastest chip for AI or creative workloads. Overall, I am not sure the more powerful chip is worth the significantly higher power draw (107W) and worse battery life.

That power draw explains why most X2 Elite laptops come with 65W adapters, while the Zenbook A16 has a considerably bulkier 130W adapter. Still, the faster chip serves as a nice racecar to show what Qualcomm can achieve at the highest level, with things like 5 GHz clock speeds and super-high memory bandwidth. All of this makes the Zenbook A16 a great notebook for highly mobile productivity and AI workloads.

Interestingly, the X2 Elite Extreme in the Zenbook A16 doesn’t have the fastest NPU (80 TOPS), because that crown goes to the select X2 Elite chips reserved for HP (85 TOPS).

To create a broader basis of comparison, I also tested the X2 Elite Extreme against Intel’s Panther Lake X7 358H with the B390 GPU and found that it vastly outperformed on CPU benchmarks while trading blows with the GPU. I don’t think Qualcomm gets enough credit for how powerful this new GPU is, partially because the drivers still need work. But this performance level puts Qualcomm in a very competitive position against Intel and AMD. That said, AMD’s Ryzen AI 395+ Max still delivers 2x the GPU performance of both Qualcomm’s and Intel’s GPUs. One of Qualcomm’s biggest hurdles used to be Arm compatibility for certain games, anti-cheat software, and game engines. However, thanks to NVIDIA also entering the Windows PC market, most of the few remaining hurdles will likely go away, and it will be on Qualcomm to deliver competitive graphics drivers.

The X2 Elite Extreme is the best that Qualcomm has to offer. But like many of the fastest chips in a series, it requires considerably more power for a minimal performance gain. While it works in a laptop, it might be better suited to small-form-factor desktops like the ASUS QN10, where the higher power draw is less of an issue. What is great about this platform and laptop is that you get similar performance on-battery versus on-power, which many of Qualcomm’s competitors cannot say. But you probably won’t get full performance from the battery, and the processor will absolutely chew through it. If you are willing to compromise a bit on performance and run in balanced mode, you can get incredible battery life and still have a very high-performance laptop. On a 12-hour-long flight, for instance, I only used about half the battery.

The Zenbook A16 Makes Traveling a Pleasure

Most of the time I spent with this laptop was on the road. Its weight was negligible, and it was a genuine pleasure to have a 16-inch OLED notebook with a decent keyboard and touchpad that didn’t add an even bigger burden. The 130W adapter is a bit of a clunker and could probably have been a more compact GaN charger, but you can always buy one of those separately if you want a smaller charging brick. The highest-spec version I tested doesn’t have a touchscreen; while that does make it slightly lighter, I did miss having a touchscreen and consider it a premium feature that should be standard on a machine like this.

I have used every generation of Snapdragon laptop, and it is clear that Qualcomm and ASUS have made significant progress. Most of the apps that I use now support native ARM64 implementations; the work that NVIDIA is doing with Microsoft should make things even better on that front while also attracting more AI developers. ARM64-native apps will let you get the best performance and battery life out of the platform.

Standby power with the Zenbook A16 is as great as it’s ever been, with about three weeks of battery life. I rarely found myself charging the laptop or even carrying the charger. Performance with productivity and creative apps like Photoshop and Lightroom was great, but there’s still a lot to be gained from future AI apps. Qualcomm hasn’t really talked up its agentic AI story with the Snapdragon X2, but it does have native ARM64 apps for ChatGPT and Claude.

A Pretty Good Laptop from ASUS — but a Curious Value Proposition

The Zenbook A16 is an impressive laptop, and I think it does a much better job of showcasing Qualcomm’s best processor compared to Samsung’s effort a couple of years ago. I don’t love that ASUS still doesn’t have charging ports on both sides, and the touchpad feels a little cheap, lacking haptic feedback. Yet the weight of 2.6 pounds also makes it incredibly portable in ways that even most 14-inch laptops cannot achieve, even if the power adapter is a bit clunky. I do wish the top-end spec had a touchscreen option, and considering that the marginally slower version has a touchscreen for $1,700 on Best Buy, that’s a better value, too. This laptop will outperform most Windows laptops today, but it won’t be a good fit for many users given the touchscreen issue. But otherwise, the performance it delivers, paired with a nice 16-inch OLED screen, makes it a pretty good laptop.