The market for laptop chips is getting extremely competitive, with Qualcomm essentially changing the game with Snapdragon X Elite and Intel firing right back with Core Ultra Series 2, also known as Lunar Lake. At Qualcomm Investor Day today, the company took some time to talk a bit about the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2.

It's going to be using new Oryon v3 cores. If you're wondering what happened to v2, those cores are in the recently-announced Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is for smartphones. In fact, when that announcement happened, many assumed that those cores were a preview of what we'd see for PCs next year. It's going to be even better.

Qualcomm's Alex Katouzian took the stage to talk about the advancements the company has made with Oryon, citing performance improvements made for Oryon v2 and saying that Oryon v3 would be even better. It's still in development, so there are no concrete claims, but it's the first time Qualcomm has talked about Oryon v3 in public.

Remember, the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2 isn't going to be announced until Snapdragon Summit next year, which is nearly a year away. Qualcomm did something similar when it launched the first X Elite, teasing its Oryon cores a year before, with some (very) loose ideas of what to expect from it. For example, all it really told us today is that Oryon v3 will have better performance per-watt than v2.

I've also heard that there will be a shorter runway between when the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2 is launched and when devices ship. The first one was announced at Snapdragon Summit, with devices launching over six months later. This won't be the case again, and in fact, it's my understanding that that only took so long because it was meant to launch alongside Microsoft's Copilot+.

To sum things up, Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2 will use new Oryon v3 cores, and it will be announced in October at Snapdragon Summit, assuming Qualcomm keeps the same dates for its event. I expect devices to be announced no later than CES the following January.