Snapdragon X Arm chips are coming to the desktop PC market — Lenovo launches two new mini-PCs powered by Qualcomm
Lenovo is putting Qualcomm chips on desktop PCs in a bid to capture market share from its competitors.

We’ve been visiting the booths at CES 2025 and have encountered some of the first desktop PCs on the market with Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X processors. Lenovo also showcases two new mini-PCs using the Arm architecture: the ThinkCentre Neo 50q QC and the IdeaCentre Mini x, equipped with Qualcomm’s first-generation Snapdragon X chips.
Although compact, these mini-PCs deliver enough performance without a massive cooling solution. The ThinkCentre Neo 50q QC has a base Snapdragon X chip, but you can get the Snapdragon X Plus if you need more firepower. Its Hexagon NPU can deliver 45 TOPS, which is more than enough for your AI needs. It has up to 16GB of LPDDR5X memory and two M.2 SSD slots.
This mini-PC has numerous ports: one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A and another USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C in front, alongside a 3.5mm combo audio jack. Looking at the back, you’ll see two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, one HDMI 2.1 port, one DisplayPort 1.4a, and a 1G RJ45 Ethernet jack. You also get Wi-Fi 6E for wireless connectivity, ensuring that you won’t have any issues with this device regarding productivity.
Because of its Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor, the ThinkCentre only requires 90 watts of power. Unfortunately, though, it has a proprietary power plug. If you could power it via USB-C, you could likely use a 20,000 mAh power bank to run this mini-PC.
Lenovo also introduced the IdeaCentre Mini x, which is about the same size as the ThinkCentre but is built for professionals and creatives. Because of this, the company is limiting the processor for this mini-PC to the more powerful Snapdragon X Plus. We’re still hoping the company will release a more powerful Snapdragon X Elite variant, allowing us to get the best performance in such a small package.
Nevertheless, we want to see how these mini-PCs perform versus their laptop counterparts. After all, a Snapdragon X Elite chip pushed past 100 watts only delivered modest gains of 10% to 30% compared to four times more power consumption. So, we’d love to see what kind of optimizations Lenovo did on these Snapdragon chips.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
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bit_user
They expect you to use its iGPU. This isn't for gamers.redgarl said:What a catastrophe this is going to be with graphic drivers for discrete GPUs...
Maybe the point of confusion is the author's use of the term "desktop PC", in the headline. "mini-PC" probably would've been a better choice of words. -
Notton For some reason Snapdragon has decided the X Plus only gets at least x8 PCIe4 and 4x PCIe3 lanesReply
Even if you could plug in a GPU, it'd be choked for bandwidth.
I'm not even sure how many lanes the X gets. -
Mama Changa I feel sorry for people that buy 1st gen SD X, with 3rd gen coming this year and expecting 200%+ better iGPU performance alone.Reply -
bit_user
The sense I got was that parts would be shipping to partners this year, but next gen Snapdragon X laptops would actually launch in 2026. Do you know differently?Mama Changa said:I feel sorry for people that buy 1st gen SD X, with 3rd gen coming this year and expecting 200%+ better iGPU performance alone.