Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series of processors are designed for PCs — well, Windows on Arm, Copilot Plus laptops, to be precise. They take some of the Snapdragon sauce we are familiar with from high-end smartphones and blends it with the high-performance requirements of the PC space. The aim is to provide a chip with performance that rivals Intel and Apple, with the energy efficiency we’ve become accustomed to in smartphones.
The core ingredients common to all Snapdragon X series chips are Qualcomm’s custom Arm- rather than x86-based Oryon CPU (no Intel or AMD here), a bigger version of its Adreno GPU taken from mobile, Hexagon NPU smarts for AI, and top-tier networking that enables the latest Wi-Fi and 5G standards. Microsoft chips in, providing the emulation layer in Windows on Arm to run x64 applications that haven’t yet been ported to run natively on Arm processors.