While the term “AI PC” may have first been used in 2023 by Intel when marketing its Meteor Lake CPU, it wasn’t until a year later that the AI PC started to break through to the mainstream.
Qualcomm helped define the AI PC market in June 2024 with the release of its Snapdragon X Elite processors, and leaders at the San Diego company hope to continue surfing this wave well into 2025 and beyond.
“We expect AI will become ubiquitous as consumers and businesses continue upgrading to the latest PCs over the next decade,” Kedar Kondap, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Compute and Gaming unit at Qualcomm, tells Laptop Mag.
Kondap believes the AI trend will continue: “As the AI PC user base grows, we expect developers to bring AI into every level of the user experience, from the operating system and apps to cloud services.”
While Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chipset has been the subject of excitement due to its fast performance and long battery life, the X Elite chipset is also a new entrant to the laptop and mini-PC market, arriving just last June. Will the company be able to carry that momentum forward?
Naturally, Kondap is confident about the future of Qualcomm, noting the company’s early performance leads over rival chip makers like Intel and AMD, alongside the growing potential of AI. From Kondap’s point of view and from the outside, Qualcomm seems well-positioned to compete for dominance in Windows laptops for years to come.
“We were early to see the value of dedicated AI processing cores for mobile devices and introduced dedicated NPU cores before our competitors,” he says. “Looking forward, we will continue to push the boundaries of the entire Snapdragon X Series to deliver the best combination of power, performance, and innovation in the PC industry.”
Snapdragon successes
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite CPUs set new records for performance and power efficiency on Windows systems. But how exactly did Qualcomm launch with a chipset that outperformed the competition from Intel and AMD?
Citing Moore’s Law, Kondap explains it this way: “Chip manufacturing technology is improving at a fairly steady rate, enabling processors to physically shrink in size every two or three years.
“Every size reduction enables us to improve power efficiency and add more transistors. Then we refine the manufacturing process annually to achieve further efficiency and performance improvements.”
However, Qualcomm’s success isn’t just down to smaller and smaller transistor designs. The Snapdragon X Series also features custom Oryon CPU cores built from tech startup Nuvia’s IP and Arm’s v8.7 micro-architecture.
We refine the manufacturing process annually to achieve further efficiency and performance improvements.
Kedar Kondap, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compute and Gaming, Qualcomm
While Qualcomm and Arm are in a legal standoff over Nuvia’s CPU core designs, the initial court case ruled in favor of Qualcomm that the Oryon CPU cores are appropriately licensed, meaning Qualcomm can continue building the Snapdragon X Series into the second generation.
Qualcomm’s custom Oryon cores are a “ground-up redesign, focusing on PC-specific computational demands,” enabling the Snapdragon X Series to outperform its other Arm rivals, Kondap says.
“The performance advantage of Snapdragon X Series stems from both its unique architecture and custom-designed Oryon cores, which mark a significant leap forward in processing power,” Kondap explains.
Qualcomm considers the Snapdragon X Oryon CPU cores to be an “industry-leading” design that “integrates power-optimized, new custom microarchitecture, including a new address translation unit.”
As Kondap explains, “This improves multi-tasking application performance, virtualization, and hypervisor situations common for demanding modern PC workloads. A sophisticated branch predictor and advanced power management design have been meticulously engineered to provide superior power efficiency.”
Building an ecosystem
Qualcomm’s biggest challenge with the Snapdragon X Series processors isn’t performance, power efficiency, or even the size of semiconductors. Instead, the struggle for Snapdragon has been the comparatively small Windows on Arm ecosystem.
To Qualcomm’s credit, many major applications are available on Windows on Arm natively, if not through emulation, including Adobe Photoshop and a number of music and content creation applications like DJayPro and Moises.
In addition to building out a robust ecosystem that can meet the needs of most users, Qualcomm has also heavily invested in AI features and applications.
The struggle for Snapdragon has been the comparatively small Windows on Arm ecosystem.
After all, as Microsoft’s chosen Copilot+ flagship processor, the Snapdragon X Series has become practically synonymous with the terms NPU (neural processing unit) and artificial intelligence.
But where does Qualcomm see AI going in the future? So far, we’ve seen AI text, video, audio, and image generation, plus AI summaries for emails and PDFs. However, the exciting aspects of AI are not what it is doing right now but where it will be in the next few years.
Kondap believes the future of AI in computing is multi-faceted. “I’m most interested in advancing the capabilities of on-device AI to enhance productivity, creativity, and overall efficiency for both professional and personal use” — an opinion Kondap shares with Qualcomm as a whole.
Instead of manually editing every photo by hand, you’ll be able to ask your PC to act as your agent, applying the choices you made in earlier examples to stylize new images.
Kedar Kondap, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compute and Gaming, Qualcomm
“Qualcomm’s long-term vision for AI PCs includes a powerful roadmap for improving PC productivity, creativity, and entertainment,” he said.
“We expect AI PCs will be able to tackle larger and more complex AI tasks for users, as well as anticipate their intent and needs by drawing on context and past interactions.”
Offering a clearer picture of how these concepts could look in action, Kondap says agentic AI is the future of artificial intelligence.
“Instead of manually editing every photo by hand, you’ll be able to ask your PC to act as your agent, applying the choices you made in earlier examples to stylize new images,” Kondap says.
AI’s impact on everyday computing could be revolutionary, with the same agents Kondap mentions also taking on roles that help with everything from squeezing out additional performance to improving user accessibility, stating:
“We can expect improvements in sustained thermal performance, real-time translations, and interactive control through hand and facial expressions.”
All of this is in service to a clear future where “AI tasks will happen automatically and seamlessly: Your PC will be able to make the most of larger screens and windows, so even old videos and games look smoother and more detailed than before.”
Qualcomm’s 2025 roadmap and what’s ahead
Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon X Elite flagship silicon in June 2024 alongside the Snapdragon X Plus and has since rounded out its laptop and mini-PC processor lineup with the budget-friendly Snapdragon X Plus 8-core and Snapdragon X.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips were the first to be part of Microsoft’s new Copilot+ ecosystem, helping bridge the gap between Windows and macOS systems in performance and power efficiency.
With new budget systems arriving with the same NPU as the higher-powered flagship, Qualcomm’s strategy appears clear as the company gears up for its second generation of Snapdragon X silicon.
With the Snapdragon X chipset launch during CES 2025, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Series portfolio is officially complete. If you want to snag one of the best AI PCs, now’s a good time to buy. Particularly with the proposed White House silicon tariffs, laptops and gaming hardware prices could spike up to 40%. Of course, the US tariff tactics are subject to change, so these figures are not set in stone.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips helped push Windows to close the performance and efficiency gap against Apple in 2024. However, subsequent launches from AMD, Intel, and Apple have caught up and overtaken the Snapdragon X Elite.
So, Qualcomm will need to keep pushing innovation to pull ahead in 2025.
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