What you need to know
- Qualcomm recently announced Oryon and the Snapdragon X Elite PC platform, which is set to take on Apple and Intel for the most efficient mobile CPU.
- Qualcomm remarked last year that it has many “design wins,” which suggested many PC OEMs were on board with the Elite X.
- Qualcomm revealed the nine PC makers committed to making hardware featuring Snapdragon X Elite today.
Qualcomm is having quite the moment this week at its annual Snapdragon Summit, where, for the first time, PCs are the primary focus instead of mobile.
Besides announcing its new Snapdragon X Elite platform powered by the 12-core Oryon CPU, which Qualcomm claims can demolish Apple’s M2 and anything 13th gen from Intel, the company also announced that DaVinci Resolve is going ARM-native next year, too.
On the second day of the summit, Qualcomm went into more detail about Oryon and Snapdragon X Elite and even brought on stage HONOR to talk about new phones powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. But the end of HONOR’s presentation was the exciting part as the company announced it was making its first ARM laptop for next year (the company previously made Intel-based laptops).
But besides HONOR, Senior Director of Product Management for Snapdragon Chipset at Qualcomm, Nitin Kumar announced at the end of the entire presentation all the PC makers who are on board with Snapdragon X Elite, meaning we are very likely to see new laptops and 2-in-1s from these companies starting in mid-2024.
Those companies include:
- Acer
- ASUS
- Dell
- HP
- HONOR
- Lenovo
- Microsoft Surface
- Samsung
- Xiaomi
That’s a vast and notable list and backs up Qualcomm’s claim in 2022 that it had ” a significant number of design wins to date,” which led the company to predict that 2024 will be “an inflection point in Windows on Snapdragon PCs.”
Getting back to the list, Lenovo, the largest shipper of PCs on the planet, has supported ARM for a few years, so that’s not too surprising.
Acer and ASUS are important as they tend to represent the better value brands of the PC market and focus a lot on Asian markets.
Getting HP committed is also a big deal as its Spectre and EliteBook series of laptops have been some of the best leading ones in their categories, likewise for Samsung, which has been doubling down in the laptop space with its Galaxy Book series, which often sets the bar for OLED displays and premium designs.
Nearly all these companies have dabbled with Windows on ARM PCs in previous years, but never all at once.
Microsoft has been a proponent of ARM for years, especially optimizing Windows to leverage the architecture. It also released the Surface Pro X and the Surface Pro 9 with Qualcomm CPUs. Our senior Windows reporter Zac Bowden has been hearing that the Surface Laptop and a refreshed Surface Pro 10 will likely go with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite platform for fall 2024.
Overall, getting a Snapdragon X Elite-powered Windows PC next year will be easier than in previous years, where typically one OEM would release one ARM PC, giving not many choices to the market (or regional availability). That should all change in 2024, driving software makers to better cater to ARM64 software.
