Qualcomm and its Snapdragon chips are officially back inside the PC. Today, Qualcomm formally launched the Snapdragon X Elite, the flagship platform of its Snapdragon X family that leverages its Oryon CPU core, and promises to double the performance of some of the most popular 13th-gen Core chips from AMD and Intel.
Sound familiar? It should. Qualcomm promised the same with its earlier Snapdragon 8-series chips, and really didn’t deliver. But after buying chip designer Nuvia in 2021, Qualcomm is trying again, hoping that its superpowered Arm chips can once again make Windows on Arm PCs a competitor to conventional X86 PCs when they launch in mid-2024. And it’s talking up some big numbers to prove it.
Qualcomm sees Oryon first going into PCs (as the engine of the Snapdragon X Elite platform) but then moving into smartphones, cars, “extended reality” devices, and more. Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon said that Qualcomm is becoming a “connected processing” company, a theme he’s mentioned before.
POWERING UP THE PC WITH PROCESSING, AI
If there’s one trend Qualcomm is clearly among the leaders in, though, it’s AI. Qualcomm has offered intelligent processing from camera smartphone mode up through more sophisticated audio and video filtering, and is well positioned if and when generative AI or
