2026 Chip WARS: Apple vs Intel vs Qualcomm vs AMD

Intel versus Snapdragon versus AMD, which new laptop chip is the winner of CES 2026? We're here at the Asus booth, where in my opinion, they have some of the highest quality, most premium laptops, but this video is gonna be all about those chips and the new performance. We have leaked benchmarks already, and I do wanna compare them to Apple's M5 and some of their higher end M4 Pro and M4 Max chips to see kind of where they all land. First off, I wanna start with AMD. This is Asus' ZenBook S16. This comes with a new 400 series AMD Ryzen chips, which is Gorgon point. Now, in terms of the performance gains, they have about 15% faster single core and 20% faster multi-core. That's with the new HX470. The only downside is that they did not improve the graphics. They're still running that 890M as the best, which is a little bit disappointing. So I'm kind of disappointed at AMD because the other brands improved everything all around. So let's jump to Snapdragon. Right here, we have the Asus ZenBook A14 and the brand new larger A16. These come with the new X2 Elite chips. This one actually comes with the X2 Elite Extreme, the highest level, which of course uses the most power, but the performance is absolutely insane. Over 4,000 single core, which actually somehow beats out Apple's M4 Pro and Max, and the multi-core, also extremely good. It actually beats out the M4 Pro, which I seriously did not think could happen with them going from the X2 Elite straight to this one. And then on the graphics side, unfortunately we don't really have much leaks or info about that, but based on Qualcomm's charts, it looks like the performance should be better than Apple's new M5 chip, which yes, that is their base chip. It's not the M4 Pro or the M4 Max, which Snapdragon's trying to compete with on the CPU side. So Snapdragon, very good improvements this year with their chips. And then finally, we gotta talk about Intel and their new Panther Lake chips. This right here is the new Asus ExpertBook Ultra, which is redesigned from the ground up from scratch. We talked to an engineer, part of the design team. This thing is absolutely amazing. It's ultra-thin, not sponsored, guys. I'm just really impressed by this laptop. It has the best of the best Panther Lake. That's the Core Ultra X9 chip. That's basically the 388H skew, so best of the best in here. Now, in terms of the CPU performance, it's not quite as good as what you get in the Snapdragon, because that's just on a whole new level, but they have great improvements for both the single-core, they have improvements for the multi-core, and also the graphics saw a really good improvement. Their graphics is now on par with the M4 chip, which, yes, the M5 is faster, but based on what they had before, it's still a pretty good improvement. But their biggest advantage is that they're still focusing on the battery life, keeping the battery really, really good while getting improvements on all scales, basically on all sides, the single-core, multi-core, and the graphics. Now, before I move on to the next one, this video's sponsored by SmallRig and their new wireless microphone, S70. This thing is awesome because the mic itself is the industry's smallest mic. You just clip it on like this. You can see I have it on right here. I've been wearing it all day. Now, the cool thing is they have a bunch of different attachments with different colors. This one's the white, so it blends in very well. Ben was wearing the green one. It blended in really nicely, so it's kind of low-key, doesn't get in the way. It has great battery life, 40 hours on the mics itself. You get three-day battery life with the case. You can see I have a receiver for USB-C. You can plug it into an iPhone. We have the one for the professional camera on right now, so you get all options. There's also a lightning one in the box. It's got best-in-class specs for the price point. It's got a lot of different features, different levels of noise cancellation. You can control everything within the app. It's also got nine different EQ settings, which you can adjust based on if you're a male, female, or different environments that you're in. But overall, the reason it's so good is because it's nice and discreet, and it works very well. It sounds great as well. So if you guys wanna check it out, you can find it using the links down in the description below. And their biggest advantage is they also have x86, so they have the best software support. So for gaming, you now have good graphics performance. You can play games. You don't have as many issues with ARM-based laptops like the Snapdragon for gaming. And the key highlight here is that you get a lot of improvements and battery life, while AMD, you had no GPU improvements, and you have pretty terrible battery life, I would say. Right here, I have all three of them in front of me. We got the Intel, we got the AMD, and the Snapdragon. And let's finish off with how these compare with Apple's options with the M5, the M4 Pro, the M4 Max. Well, first of all, the cool thing about the Intel, that new X9 chip, the 388H, that actually performs on par with the new M5 in terms of multi-core performance, which is actually pretty impressive, especially since they've been focusing on battery life. So overall, it's really good. The graphics performance is not as high as the M5, but still, I'd say it's very impressive with what Intel is doing, especially with that x86 for the Windows laptop market with the great support and everything else. Now, moving on to AMD, I'd say this is the least impressive upgrade overall, just looking at it compared to the M5 and compared to Apple's other chips. They are lacking, especially with battery life, which we have tested some of these chips in the past, and the battery life is by far the worst. And the graphics is now way behind their other competitors. So I think AMD has some work to do. And moving over to Snapdragon, I'd say this is also extremely impressive, both for the CPU and the GPU, which they are on top. This is the most competitive laptop chip compared to Apple. Extremely impressive performance from Snapdragon. So in terms of the winners this year for Windows laptops, if you're looking for battery life and overall performance gains, the Intel is a great choice, especially if you want x86 for gaming support or anything else. But if you want raw performance with battery life that's still pretty good, Snapdragon is the way to go this year. And we're gonna be testing all of these chips in various laptops very soon. So definitely subscribe above so you don't miss out on those videos. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next one.