Qualcomm is moving toward the midrange PC market with a new system-on-chip.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Qualcomm announced Snapdragon X, the latest chip in the company's Snapdragon X series of PC processors. The company claims the chip is built on a 4nm manufacturing process and delivers up to “days” of battery life and robust performance at an affordable price.
There are still some software compatibility issues to resolve regarding Windows on Qualcomm's chip architecture. Still, the company is developing new processors to beat rivals AMD and Intel.
Qualcomm has a long way to go. According to one recent industry report, Qualcomm captured just 0.8% of the PC market in Q3 2024.
The company said Snapdragon It is said that Powered by Qualcomm's Oryon CPU with eight cores clocked at up to 3GHz, Snapdragon X also features a neural processing unit (NPU) that is said to accelerate AI workloads.
Image credit: Qualcomm
Other highlights include Bluetooth 5.4 compatibility, Wi-Fi 7 support, and the ability to power up to three external UHD (4K) monitors running at 60Hz. PC manufacturers adopting Qualcomm's Snapdragon X platform, a new hardware reference program, will also have access to additional technologies such as Qualcomm's A/V suite and proprietary image processing.
Snapdragon X will be coming to laptops from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo in the coming weeks.
“Currently, there are over 60 Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PC designs currently available or in development,” Peter Burns, Qualcomm's senior director of product marketing, said in a blog post provided to TechCrunch last week. I am. “[And in] In 2024, we saw an incredible 3x increase in native Windows apps for Snapdragon. ”
Snapdragon comes to the desktop
Qualcomm abruptly canceled its Windows-based mini PCs last year, but the company said during CES that it would help bring desktops powered by Snapdragon X-series processors to market in 2025.
“The all-new Mini and Small Desktop PCs mark an important milestone in our PC journey,” Burns wrote. “Developers building applications on Windows on Snapdragon desktops can now take advantage of new design options and unprecedented power efficiency, allowing them to create more efficient and powerful applications with NPU acceleration. It will be.”