Qualcomm has showcased the current line up of Snapdragon X-powered devices at Snapdragon Summit SEA. The Snapdragon X series which consists of Snapdragon X, Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite now covers wider price points including the lower USD 600 segment.
First announced in October 2023 with the range-topping Snapdragon X Elite, the ARM-based chips boast long lasting battery life while delivering 45 TOPS NPU for the best AI experience.
SEA is the fastest market to adopt latest technologies including AI
During the first-ever SEA summit held in Singapore, they showcased the latest Snapdragon X powered Copilot+ laptops from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Microsoft. Southeast Asia is said to be the fastest market to adopt the latest technologies with over 8 million PCs shipped in 2024. They have also shared that 92% of APAC employers plan to implement AI tools by 2028. It is shared that over 11 billion hours per week were saved by Generative AI tools across APAC.
Entry-level Snapdragon X boasts flagship-class 45 TOPS NPU
To cover consumers in the affordable segment, Qualcomm recently announced its “base-level” Snapdragon X during CES 2025. It gets an 8-core Oryon CPU clocked at 3.0GHz and a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU that also boasts the same class-leading 45 TOPS NPU performance as its higher tier Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite options.
Compared to an Intel Core 5 120U, Qualcomm claims its mainstream Snapdragon X chip offers higher performance with greater power efficiency, and up to 2x longer battery life.
Southeast Asia is a key market for Snapdragon X
In a roundtable session, Qualcomm’s Vice President and President for SEA, Taiwan and NZ, ST Liew, expressed confidence that consumers in the region including Malaysia will be making the switch to Snapdragon X platforms. He shared that Qualcomm has built a strong foundation in Malaysia and they have done a lot of work together with Microsoft along with its distributors and retailers.
With dozens of new models being developed by OEMs, the Snapdragon X platform will be able to cover many different segments of the marketplace. Liew said the response they have gotten so far has been “very very positive” especially for those who have touched and used a Snapdragon X powered product.
Qualcomm believes energy consumption, connectivity, AI on the edge and AI on device are important and Southeast Asia is going to lead in evangelising use cases and what’s possible on their platforms.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm’s Vice President of Product Management, Nitin Kumar elaborated that there are currently 80 global designs and growing based on the Snapdragon X platform and more than 50 designs are already on the market. With over 80 designs that’s growing globally across their partners, they will be able address a large user base across multiple device price points, all form factors and all screen sizes.
Gaming and native app support
On gaming capabilities, Nitin said the Snapdragon X Platform for now is focused on casual gamers. He added that the fundamental advantage is in the architecture which provides a compelling and leading graphics performance.
He said even if competitive ecosystems are able to drive a good casual gaming experience, but you could only play a game for 1 or 2 hours as the battery drains, and you’ll have to look for a charger.
Qualcomm emphasised that their goal is to drive a good casual gaming experience at a very good total system capability. As a result, users will be able to play for a much longer time because of its frugal power draw.
Another point they highlighted is unplugged performance where the Snapdragon X platform is able to sustain high performance on battery power. Meanwhile, its competitors throttles down on performance to extend battery life when unplugged.
Touching on the native app ecosystem, Nitin said more and more developers are working their applications natively for their architecture. For example, when Snapdragon X Elite was announced in 2023, Google Chrome was not native. However, a few months later, Google Chrome as the popular browser becomes natively available and this is followed by some Adobe applications.
Quoting stats from Microsoft, Qualcomm says normal users currently spend over 93% of the time on native apps which are natively supported on the Snapdragon X platform. He said this is an incredible number and they have worked closely with partners and app developers to bring those apps natively to the platform.
For apps that are not native and are currently being emulated, he said the number is declining as they make progress. Nitin said the Prism x86 Emulation engine is very efficient on the Snapdragon X platform. Based on their internal tests, emulated apps outperform native apps on x86 architecture and consumers will get a seamless experience.
He added that the interest from the developer community has grown as they understand the advantage they bring to the Windows ecosystem with the Snapdragon X architecture. The developer community wants to leverage the architecture to drive a differentiated experience through a native application.
Qualcomm says they provide full support to the developer community and make it extremely easy for them to write native applications in particular AI applications through its AI Hub. AI Hub is a portal which provides over 100 AI models, enabling anyone to build an AI app running on Snapdragon X.
