Snapdragon X PCs may get even more enticing next year

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has announced that Snapdragon X chips will expand to PCs with price tags as low as $700 next year, as reported by The Verge. This would mean an almost $300 price drop since the current cheapest Snapdragon X PCs are the $999 Surface Laptop 7 and Dell Inspiron 14 Plus. Amon did not specify, however, whether these ultra-affordable PCs would be laptops or not. Tablet PCs and desktops are also possible, and Qualcomm has already started tapping into the mini-PC market with its $799 desktop developer kit. While this product is aimed at developers who want to experiment with Windows on Arm, if they make a consumer version for a similar price, it could compete with products like the Mac mini. The price announcement was made during the company’s third quarter earnings call, but if you were wondering how current Snapdragon laptop sales are going, no numbers have been shared yet. Since the quarter ended on June 23, just a couple of weeks after the first Copilot+ PCs launched, the company said it’s too early to tell. Amon did say, however, that some Snapdragon X PCs have already sold out. There are other telltale signs of success floating around too, like the fact that 6.5% of Geekbench 6 benchmarks in the past month have been run on Snapdragon X PCs. The CEO also confirmed that the company is “already working with [manufacturers] on the next wave of Copilot+ PCs,” though there’s no word on when that wave will be coming. There will also be new Qualcomm-powered PCs shared at IFA in September, and a Qualcomm custom CPU will be revealed at the Snapdragon Summit in October. The momentum has been strong for these first couple of months for the Snapdragon X PCs, but it’s not slowing down anytime soon. As part of Qualcomm’s latest Investor Day, the company confirmed that its next PC chip, the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2, will use the Oryon v3 CPU. This comes as a surprise to many, as the Oryon v2 was just announced last month alongside plans to use it with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset for smartphones. Since the current Snapdragon X Elite chip uses an Oryon v1 CPU, many assumed that the 2nd-gen chip would use the 2nd-gen CPU — but it seems the PC chips will be skipping over this generation entirely. A new era in Windows computing is here, built around Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative and a few new chipsets. While the most hype is around artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and performance thanks to faster Neural Processing Units (NPUs), the biggest changes today are in performance and battery life. And that’s a good thing for Windows, because the platform has been struggling against Apple’s Silicon MacBooks that have very good performance and much better efficiency. The new chipsets include Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X, AMD’s Ryzen AI 300, and Intel’s Lunar Lake. Each chipset has an NPU that exceeds Microsoft’s 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) requirement, but while AMD focuses on performance, both Qualcomm and Intel are focused on efficiency. So, how does each chipset rank?
Performance The first Copilot+ PCs hit the shelves a few days ago and the initial tests are showing interesting results. While some of the obvious performance and battery life claims are being tested, one early tester found that the Arm laptops are impressive in one area that hardly anyone is talking about, including Microsoft. According to the TechTablets YouTube channel, the Snapdragon X Elite chip on the Asus Vivobook S 15 can achieve almost identical performance running on battery as it can while plugged in.