Qualcomm has announced that it will bring all four of its Dragonfly data center product lines to China, including custom AI accelerators engineered to stay below U.S. export thresholds, CEO Cristiano Amon told Nikkei Asia on the sidelines of the company's investor day in New York on Wednesday. China supplied 46% of Qualcomm's revenue in 2025, almost all of it from smartphone silicon, and Amon’s data center plan could revive the same export-compliant strategy that cut Nvidia's China accelerator sales to almost zero.

Dragonfly covers AI accelerators, data center CPUs, custom silicon, and connectivity chips, and Amon said versions of every line will ship into China within the export rules. “We have versions of all of our products that comply with those guidelines,” he told Nikkei Asia, adding that Qualcomm is “engaged in conversations,” presumably with Chinese customers. The first accelerator, the AI250, is due next year and uses the company's HBC near-memory design instead of the HBM stacks that Nvidia and AMD racks rely on, a packaging choice that could pay off in a market where HBM is and will remain tight for the foreseeable future.

Qualcomm told investors that the data center unit is expected to generate $300 million this fiscal year and $5 billion in fiscal year 2027, figures the company designates as the early ramp of a total addressable market it projects will exceed $1 trillion by 2029. The push into China relies on Amon's argument that Qualcomm's existing relationships with Chinese phone makers and automakers extend to the data center, the same customer base behind its AI200 and AI250 inference accelerators announced last October.

China, however, isn’t a neutral buyer for Qualcomm at the moment: The country’s market regulator opened an antitrust investigation into its Autotalks acquisition in October, and has pressed domestic data center operators to source at least 50% of their chips locally while steering Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent toward Huawei and Cambricon parts.

Those dynamics have already gutted the export-compliant model that Qualcomm is looking to emulate. Nvidia’s H20, for example — the part it built specifically for China — had generated only about $50 million by late last year, and CEO Jensen Huang has said Nvidia has “zero” China market share left. Qualcomm is entering that lane voluntarily with hardware that won’t reach customers until at least fiscal year 2027, by which point Huawei's Ascend line and Cambricon's accelerators are scheduled to scale production well past current volumes.

Qualcomm has at least one confirmed buyer outside China, with Saudi Arabia's Humain already taking delivery of AI100 systems and committing to 200MW of Qualcomm racks. Inside China, the company still has to convince customers that Beijing is pushing away from foreign silicon.

The so-called memory wall is a major performance limiter for many AI workloads, and high bandwidth memory (HBM) is not always a panacea since compute capability is growing faster than memory bandwidth. Qualcomm on Wednesday introduced its HBC near-memory compute architecture called high-bandwidth compute (HBC) that is designed to break the memory wall and enable the performance of certain AI workloads to scale linearly.

Qualcomm's approach to near-memory compute is pretty much straightforward: the company disaggregates the AI accelerator from the system-on-chip (SoC) and puts it under the LPDDR DRAM stack. The HBC accelerator connects to the LPDDR stack using through-silicon vias to provide maximum bandwidth and capacity without using expensive HBM memory and advanced packaging. Qualcomm does not disclose the actual bandwidth HBC provides, though the company claims that it offers 6X higher bandwidth-per-watt compared to HBM and over 200X capacity compared to on-chip SRAM.

"We have separated the AI accelerator from the XPU and placed the XPU directly beneath a DRAM stack," said Tony Pialis, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Business at Qualcomm. "This is very important because it gives us the performance advantages of SRAM with the density and capacity of stacked memory. In effect, the congestion associated with HBM is gone. The value to the industry is lower power consumption, less heat, and the elimination of the costly silicon interposer used by HBM solutions. We can also deploy multiple HBC stacks within a single compute device using standard packaging, which delivers a significant performance-per-cost advantage."

Putting DRAM on logic or next to logic is nothing new. All DRAM makers have experimented with near-memory compute architectures, but have failed to make them popular. More recently, GUC, a fabless ASIC design service company, proposed its DRAM-on-Logic (DoL) technology that places one to four DRAM layers on top of logic to get around 5 TB/s of memory bandwidth and offer higher performance than some HBM3E memory subsystems without using expensive advanced packaging and HBM3E stacks.

Since Qualcomm does not disclose actual performance numbers, it is hard to compare its HBC to GUC's offering. However, the biggest caveat about HBC is that Qualcomm does not tell us what the HBC accelerator actually does. In theory, it could be everything: a transformer-specific near-memory engine, a more general array of tensor cores, or some kind of preprocessing logic for AI inference or training.

Along with its HBC technology, Qualcomm also disclosed its HBC roadmap. While the company's AI200 accelerator, due later this year, will rely on LPDDR5X and offer 43 TB of RAM per rack, its successor AI250 will rely on the 1^st Generation HBC that will offer 18X bandwidth of AI200. The AI300 will use 2^nd Generation HBC that will provide 54X bandwidth of AI300.

Qualcomm is evaluating an acquisition of Jim Keller-led AI processor developer Tenstorrent in a transaction that could value the company at between $8 billion and $10 billion, reports The Information. The discussions are ongoing, and there is no guarantee that a deal will be reached, but if the takeover proceeds, it will not only value Tenstorrent at a premium but will be one of the most expensive transactions in Qualcomm's history.

The report claims that Qualcomm is particularly interested in Tenstorrent's RISC-V-based AI accelerators and data center-grade CPU IP, though it does not specify how the company plans to integrate Tenstorrent and its products into its lineup. For AI, Qualcomm already has its Qualcomm AI200 and AI250 accelerators based on its Hexagon neural processing units (NPUs) customized for data center AI workloads that are due to ship in 2026. For general-purpose computing, Qualcomm is developing its own server CPUs, presumably based on the Arm instruction set architecture, and recently acquired Ventana Micro, which has a data center-grade RISC-V-powered CPU design.

Qualcomm is known for having a multi-faceted strategy, but having two different types of AI accelerators and three types of data center CPUs (one Arm-based, two RISC-V-based) may not be the most optimal strategy for the company.

Qualcomm is one of the companies that acquires other entities, both to get new IP and competencies as well as actual development teams. While the company's acquisition of Atheros in 2011 transformed Qualcomm from primarily an application processor and cellular modem supplier into a company with a broad portfolio of communication products that includes Ethernet and Wi-Fi, the takeover of Nuvia brought the company fresh blood and put it on the map as a client CPU supplier. The same applies to more recent acquisitions of Alphawave Semi (optical connectivity, chiplets, SerDes, IP, new engineers) and Ventana Micro (RISC-V CPU IP, a CPU developers team).

The potential valuation is another point of concern. Last year, the company was seeking approximately $800 million from investors at a valuation of around $3.2 billion, although it remains unclear whether that financing round was completed, according to The Information. Meanwhile, right now Qualcomm and Tenstorrent are reportedly discussing a valuation between $8 billion and $10 billion, and it is unclear whether this valuation is performance milestones-based.

Yet, given that Qualcomm already has AI acceleration and CPU IP, paying $8 billion – $10 billion for Tenstorrent would be difficult to justify. Such sums represent a massive premium for a company whose hardware business remains relatively small compared to established AI accelerator vendors. That said, the more compelling explanation is people.

Tenstorrent has assembled one of the industry's strongest collections of CPU, AI, interconnect, compiler, and systems architects. The obvious name is Jim Keller, but the company has spent years hiring engineers from AMD, Apple, Intel, Tesla, and others, and this team knows how to build chips. Qualcomm has consistently demonstrated that it is willing to spend billions to acquire elite engineering teams rather than build them from scratch.

The Nuvia acquisition is the best precedent: Qualcomm did not buy Nuvia because it lacked Arm licenses or CPU design capability. It bought Nuvia because it wanted the team led by Gerard Williams III and the ability to accelerate its CPU roadmap by years with the Oryon IP.

That said, Tenstorrent looks less like an AI accelerator acquisition and more like a talent and future-architecture acquisition, as in addition to the talented team, Qualcomm would also get plenty of RISC-V expertise, which will make it the leading developer of RISC-V-based solutions in general.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon C is making a major play for the hottest laptop market in 2026: The ultra budget segment. But competition is stiff, with Apple's MacBook Neo and Intel Wildcat Lake Windows laptops offering strong performance and battery life in affordable packages - even with sky-high global memory prices.

We sat down with Qualcomm's SVP of compute and gaming, Kedar Kondap, and other Qualcomm representatives at Computex 2026 to hear how Snapdragon C fits into its existing product lineup, and how Qualcomm considers itself uniquely positioned to offer a comprehensive ecosystem of agentic AI devices and software.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm SVP of Compute and Gaming: Our journey was not about solving what has happened in the past 30 years of PC innovation, but solving what's coming next in PCs. A lot of the innovation that has happened, we've obviously proved to the market that we're exceeding performance. We focused on three big metrics all along the way. One was leading with performance and making sure that we have leading performance in all of our silicon. We want to make sure we lead with power. Obviously, that used to be something super critical across the board, even as we start looking at newer generation of devices, and third, as you look at AI as a key metric.

When you think about the keynote today, and what we talked, what I shall talk about, as we enter this agentic world, it is more and more important. Each of these things play a very important role, whether it's performance, whether it's power, or whether it's AI, and the ability to run these intelligently. Right from whether it is a very small device, all the way to the data center. You saw how we're innovating, and the PC is no different. So we launched our X series processors, we extended that to the X Elite, the X Plus, and the X family. We launched the X2 Plus, we launched the X2 Elite, and the X2 Elite Extreme, and we wanted to make sure our intent was very simple: we wanted to make sure that the experiences we offer are available to all the consumers at every price point that we could address. What we introduced yesterday is a new class of platforms, the Snapdragon C. Our intent with that is to address platforms in lower price points that we can go and make sure that we can deliver the same performance pillar, the same battery life pillar, as well as provide AI functionality to all the consumers at price points that were never heard of.

So with that, we wanted to make sure that we have a full stack of products, we are addressing the needs of what consumers want. Consumers want the best performance, the best battery life, and as we enter this world of agentic beta, we want to make sure that across different devices, we're addressing all of these price points. So, we’re excited to be here, and I know there's a little bit of a longer introduction, but I want to make sure you have the perspective of where we come from.

Journalist 1: Thanks, Kadar. Nicole. You were just on stage with Advantech. Can you get us a little background on your announcements and what was said on stage?

Qualcomm Representative: Advantech has been a great partner of ours. I've done more recently the industrial business for Qualcomm, and so, you know, for us to get into this new area, and industrial is actually changing very rapidly. We are starting to see AI enter into the operation, advantage has been here in this space for a number of years, and so we announced a variety of different products to them over the last couple of years. Great to actually be at their keynote. We also announced yesterday [unintelligible] robotics reference design, which is something that is a new area for us. We've been partnered with Advantech for a number of years in this space, but the robotic session design will be a humanoid focus session.

Journalist 2: I'm wondering, Nvidia, a few hours ago, announced they were entering PC market. You guys have had it yourselves for the last two years. How are you thinking about how others come into [unintelligible].

Kedar: Welcome to the family [laughs]. We are, you know, we're excited when you think about the investments that we've made over the last several years, it's a good endorsement to the fact that there is an ecosystem that's growing outside of x86. We invested early on, we invested many years ago, with right from whether it is driving the ecosystem, driving the entire platform story. Whether it is getting the printers to work, whether it's getting the software apps to be compatible, whether it is getting the docs and peripherals to work, whether it's getting more than 2500 games to be compatible with Snapdragon, we led the way in driving that ecosystem, and I think this is positive tailwinds for the entire ecosystem. They'll tell us how we're all taking the ball forward in the trajectory that we started.

Journalist 3: This is for Nichole. She's had remarkable success in automotive and moving into robotics. Is there anything you’ve learned [unintelligible].

Qualcomm Representative: We’re learned a lot from automotive. I think AI at the edge with robotics is a really fascinating space, because you are starting to see this transition where you start to apply AI to start off with an unskilled worker, gradually start to go build up on level of skills, and ultimately start to get to something great. A lot of the underlying capability is similar to what we saw in the early days of automotive, especially the mobility part is quite similar. That will scale very quickly. We will start to see coarse dexterity, so that it's essentially transportation of goods, et cetera. That will happen over the next couple of years, and then the more complex final precision tasks will take more time.

But we are betting across the board, we are betting on models, we are betting on full embodiments. You'll hear more about this tomorrow. We're betting on a variety of different form factors with arms as well. We are also starting to look at what we can do in the end effector space, so we have a lot of technology around precision for the actual and effect of the arms, the actual digits, and what it is. What I like about robotics, which is quite different from the car, is that within the same embodiment, you have to have a lot of different technologies that cooperate, and that is something that we have a lot of capabilities. Lot more to come, but I think super interesting.

Journalist 4: When I was at the keynote from Jensen Huang, I was surprised when he mentioned the RTX Spark platform will support every Windows software ever written, and you suffered from Windows software in running on ARM. So, could you comment on that? And another question, if you could maybe share some more details about Snapdragon C platform, especially the TOPS. I saw a model from Asus, but it was behind in the glass box, and they didn’t have a lot to say of interest in that matter.

[Jensen Huang] mentioned that they will do an announcement tomorrow with Microsoft about the RTX Spark, and he mentioned that every Windows software that has ever been written will run on their platform, and this is not true for your platform, and probably for any Windows on ARM platform right now. So, I'm wondering if you want to comment on that.

Kedar Kondap: I don't want to speculate, but I'll tell you, our partnership with Microsoft has obviously gone several years in the past. We worked with them very closely. We launched the first Copilot class pieces together. We launched the first platforms where Microsoft OS supported it, and supported how these distributed computing work across a different course. So maybe once we start getting more information, we can, but I think I'm sure the engagement of Microsoft is strong enough where we work with them to build this entire ecosystem to make sure that it's compatible with Snapdragon and the architecture, so maybe once we get more information and get more, we can look at it.

The second question on Snapdragon C, so we haven't yet given out the specs for the products, but I'll tell you how I think about Snapdragon C. We wanted to, our OEMs are very anxious to bring this product to market, as is Qualcomm. There is, as we all know, there is a memory supply challenge in the market, and I've heard there's a storage supply that's also challenged, and we wanted to make sure that we have an offering where we can address a lot of price points that we've never addressed before, so think price points below what Snapdragon X has offered in the past. Snapdragon X will give you its relatable, you know, it's great platforms that get 599 today, some of them that hit 500 and above the X plus goes above and X Elite goes above that, so think it's a tier below what we can offer with Snapdragon X, and so our intent with that is to drive the same level of capabilities, obviously scaled to that tier, and what I'll tell you, it's just like the way we've exceeded expectations in launching specs of our products in the X series family of products. You should expect that the C in its class of products will lead its way, but we'll obviously give out specs for you.

Journalist 5: I've got a question regarding [Qualcomm’s] vision on how the tokens in a car, in a PC, in a smartphone and adapts and talk to each other. Cristiano said that we're going to need zillions of tokens, and they're going to be orchestrated. It means different parts going to generate the token, where it's relevant. Okay, like latency, horsepower. How do you gonna orchestrate them with your industry? Are you planning to build a software ledger, SDKs, or building a patented or open system? How do you plan in this vision to open everyone with a heterogeneous chip market, it's going to be difficult to make everyone work.

Qualcomm Representative: So I think it will vary by the ecosystem, but yeah, we will certainly build orchestrate the [unintelligible] where it does make sense. I'll give you an example of a car. We had already seen in the car a tremendous amount of content. You don't actually need, you can't even expect in many cases to be running models that all just have to go back to the cloud, just because of networking latency. So we have deployed already earlier this year 30 million parameter models in car. It depends upon what the types of use cases you're trying to run, but then if you think about this in the context of splitting search versus what it is that you're trying to run locally within the vehicle that is happening today. I think this starts to get more and more sophisticated as you start to define what is the use of the model at the edge.

So, with industrial, for example, we are starting to see already VMA is getting deployed in cameras when you have evidence at the edge, where you can annotate at the edge, send it out to cloud as an input, so it's going to depend quite a bit on which the ecosystem that you're trying to run your account. If you look at use cases like polling, if you look at use cases like search, those are probably obviously much more in consumer and enterprise nets, which should have different network orchestration, probably much more controlled by traditional ecosystems. An orchestrator is going to be a fairly standard offering as well.

Kedar Kondap: Aiden. I'm going to add a little bit more context also to what we'll just say, you know, the way you should think about how we think about overall income advantage, it's going to be the context awareness that you get across the various devices, and think of a personal knowledge graph that you build in the examples that he showed, right from whether you're wearing an XR glasses. We are able to connect. You can see what you see, you hear what you hear. You can have context awareness of what the user is doing. It's going to listen to what information you talk to when you're, say, at the doctor's office. You understand exactly when your next appointment is.

The ability for it to abstract all of this information, transfer that knowledge graph agentically into your calendar, into what your daily routine is, be able to take your personal information, whether it's talking about your healthcare routine. The goal that we see is first is to bring all of this orchestration together, and Qualcomm is uniquely positioned, as you can tell, right from whether it's a small physical personal device, whether it's a ring, or whether it's an XR glass, all the way from phones to PCs to automotive to robotics and data centers, we feel like we're in a unique position like one another.

Second, on the question about running stuff on device, now we've always said the world in the last two years. You know, I remember when we launched Snapdragon X Elite. We said with a lot of pride that, oh, we can run 30 billion parameter models. You know, today, fast forward that conversation, we showed 20 30 billion parameter models running on the C Snapdragon X platform. So, models have evolved. I can, what I could do earlier with, you know, accuracy of quantization and stuff, I can do a lot more than I couldn't do in the past. So the industry is evolving, where we're innovating, we're adding more capabilities to each of these devices on-prem, I'll say, or physically on device. At the same time, we know that the token economics, as Krishna showed, everybody in the industry see it?

So, if any of you use, if you have a poster subscription towards AI, you know you run out of tokens very quickly, and there is the fatigue is real, the fatigue on the side of a consumer, the fatigue on the side of the model. You cannot have both of those, the balance doesn't exist today, so the way we see it is one, you can connect all these orchestrations across the devices, same, you can orchestrate on what runs locally on the device, and of course we believe some of it will go in the cloud, and that hybrid orchestration is where we believe the industry is going, so build the knowledge graph across devices, run what you can locally on the device, if not, if the model is large enough, it will go to the cloud, and this whole equation will evolve over time as models start to become smaller, as they start getting quantized accuracies to be better.

What was, like I said, a 30 billion parameter running on a Snapdragon X, I can already run 30 billion parameters models quantized with very good accuracy. So that's how what we mean by this industry and ecosystem is going to change.

Journalist 6: I would like to touch on Snapdragon C again. You expect the platform to be a regional-specific solution, like for emerging markets, for example, and Qualcomm has great experiences in markets like India, for example, where do you expect it to be a global platform? And I'd like to touch on the NPU as well. Previously, every Snapdragon X platform, at least, had an NPU that OEM Certified Assistance for Copilot Plus seems to be the first solution where you sort of loosen your own set of requirements for a Snapdragon compute platform, and what led you to that decision?

Kedar Kondap: So, Nicholas, first I'll answer your first question, which is: it is a global platform. You will see this device launch globally. You know, for us it's there's a large stamp, as you know, in this particular segment. Lot of consumers that use PCs that sit in, I'll say, below the $500 price point. So, we have a large stamp that we can address there. The TAM [Total Addressable Market], as you know, is naturally biased towards emerging markets. So, from that perspective, yes, the focus, you'll see the platforms launch in many of the emerging markets, as well as developed markets. The TAM is much reduced in that, so it's just a function of the definition of where the time sits.

Your second question around NPU, no the platform does have an NPU, we just haven't talked about the sizing, but as you can tell, the silicon economics, we're sizing everything with the capabilities to be able to run use cases synchronously with the price point that we're addressing. So, think of it as you'll still be able to run, get a lot of the capabilities, you'll still be able to run a lot of use cases we talked about, while preserving the performance and battery life goodness that we bring with the Snapdragon product, so you'll see something very similar.

Journalist 7: There's been a lot of good questions on Snapdragon C, but if you're not competing with Neo, what specific product lines of products are you competing kind of in that below $500 price range?

Kedar Kondap: You know, you already heard a couple of our OEM partners talk about devices. I think Asus talked about the device. I want to make sure I don't jump the gun with the excitement that our partners want to launch it, but I think Asus has already announced. We've also addressed the fact that Lenovo, as well as HP, we announced with HP. Just want to give out somebody's information. We've announced with the OEMs, it will sit as I said, you know, Snapdragon X sits at around 599 type products, and it competes, as you know, better than what you can get with Neo and performance insights.

This gets the price points that it would be below 500, obviously. Now, the thing I always have to caveat is the memory and storage prices. I never know what it's going to do to devise price points, but that's how the platform is positioned. Think of it as small core competing products, but you know I'm nervous to say that, because it's going to be so much better than what existed in the market, so that's why I don't want to tell you that it's compete against that, because it's a different class, it's going to be a lot better than what's what you're used to seeing in market,

Journalist 8: Sorry to ambush you with another Nvidia question, as I know you already said you didn't see the announcement. They are going after a market that you guys have historically not went after, I think a few years ago you publicly said this is just not our wheelhouse, so are you guys planning to compete with what Nvidia is doing now, and if so, how?

Kedar: Like I said, I haven't seen this. I don't know what they've announced, but at the end of the day, look, we've come a long way from where we started. We go a couple years back, what we said, Rich, was we have the legacy, we have the technology in even things such as gaming. We come from, as you know, we have a very strong game studio house. We work with all the game engine guys to work with the net engine guys. We work with the studios on the mobile side and other platforms that we work with, but we bring all of the games to Snapdragon. Since we launched Snapdragon X in less than 24 months, we've done a lot of games that work with Snapdragon effectively go from 1300 to more than 2500, 2600. So I think what we've mentioned in the past is not that we couldn't support it, what we've said is we want to carefully not position this as a gaming laptop, right? The gamers who think of launching this as a AAA game-based laptop is not what we want to position.

We don't want to create confusion with what we're addressing, but from a technical perspective, nothing prevents us from addressing a lot of that, because, as you know, even when you think about creators, we've talked about our partnership, and what we've done with Adobe, what we've done with Black Magic, and others. So, we've already showcased that the entire creative industry is something that we support. We sold multiple use cases, so it's the entire ecosystem that already we've been addressing. So, like I said, I'm assuming that their introducing their platforms in market today is tailwinds for what the ecosystem will see as a strong showcase of non-x86 architecture.

Journalist 9: On the question of the Snapdragon C, somebody spoke about the emerging markets. One of the things which has happened in those emerging markets that arise on the tablet usage. So in the past three years, four years post pandemic, you can say that many of the people are buying who are stuck between a rock and a hard place, that you know, laptops are slightly expensive, they have a full use case of the productivity of a laptop, but they wanted a slightly bigger screen, so they are buying with sliders and the keyboard, especially the emerging markets. So, I just want to ask you, is your target that consumer, and do many of those cohorts is parents buying for the kids or education market, private or public, both? And the public market, you know, you know some of the PC loans, they've really done well, and they are restricted that success in the past year or so in education and some of those emerging markets, because the price points are creeping up now. So I just wanted to double click on that. Who is that target consumer in those emerging markets where we expect the volume to come from?

Kedar Kondap: So, as you know, we already play in a very strong manner with the Android tablets in all of those ecosystems, we have very strong partnerships across almost all the OEMs that you can think about. We have Samsung, OV, WOSU, Lenovo. We have all of these tablets that have launched. There are specific tablets I've launched that are focused on gaming all the way to productivity, all the way to education. So we have very strong portfolio products launched even in emerging markets with our partners.

With Snapdragon C, I can see a market out there, as you correctly pointed out, education being a very strong segment would address all of that. So, if you saw the press release that we talked about, which Snapdragon C we specifically call out that we will be in the education space. We are doing a bunch of pilot programs with our partners to go and address that. I wouldn't necessarily say that it's going to replace Android tablets, necessarily. I think hard to call whether that ecosystem is going to move away from Android to Windows, but right now they coexist pretty well. Like, there's a good TAM that's available for Android tablets with a stylus, as you correctly pointed out, as well as a TAM with Windows PC, and I think with this particular one, for now we'll be launching the Windows segment.

Journalist 10: Can I talk about we just launched, like Qualcomm with Asus A16? Will you deepen with Taiwan cooperation?

Kedar Kondap: I can't tell you how grateful I am for the partnership with the entire Taiwan ecosystem. The partnership goes obviously deep partnership with the ASUS, and we're grateful for the partnership with ASUS, brings a lot of innovation and market. If you've seen, if you haven't already played around with it, or if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to look at the A16 device with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme product. It's a beautiful, thin, light laptop with significant hours of battery life, so it's a, it's a beautiful laptop, and that's because Asus brings a lot of innovation. You heard yesterday from Acer with the Snapdragon C platform that they're launching, but it goes beyond just the OEM partnership for us here in Taiwan, right?

We work very closely with all the BIOS guys, whether you know all the IBDs, we work with the inside, we work with AI devotees, we work with all the partners there, we work with all of the EC manufacturers, we work with ecosystems, so it's not just one cookware, we work with the camera sensors. So we do a standard ecosystem partnership summit here in Taiwan, the offense is just because innovation is going to happen here, and I think what you hear, even as I speak on Wednesday, is as we talk about what we try to throw the vision of moving to agenting, it's going to need a lot of innovation, that innovation is going to change the way the PCs are going to look, is going to change the edge appliance market, is going to change, because now you're going to be running these hybrid models, running and stuff, and we really believe that Taiwan is the hub for driving innovation, and, like I said, we're very grateful for the partnership that we've had with this ecosystem for the last many years.

Journalist 11: Looking towards the intelligent orchestrator for managing workloads. Do you see a primary device managing the personal AI agents? Would it be a smartphone, a transportable puck, a locally hosted cloud instance, for example?

Qualcomm Representative: I think the orchestrator is actually going to be associated with the user, so it's going to be a personal orchestrator, and the devices will evolve along that orchestrator. I think it depends upon the specific ecosystem that you refer to. So, let me pick an ecosystem that may be different from a personal device that is owned by an Apple or Google system. There are several ecosystems where the personal draft, for example, is specific to the enterprise that would like to own that specific data. It could be within an industrial environment, it could be something that requires the data to be resident within the premise owned by that specific enterprise.

In those environments, it really just comes down to what is the type of data that is being exchanged, whether it is data at the edge, data that is network specific, that is manipulated, that is interacting by the specific data. As you start to think about this in the context of the enterprise, I think, depending upon the type of data that this might be, so if it's a personal device like a camera or my glasses, then it starts to move towards the context within the data, there will be changes in the interaction, so for example, today if you think about enterprise data that is sitting on your laptop, that is part of your email, that is part of your SharePoint. How does that interact with the personal devices that you have? Those are things that, in my mind, are still going to get sorted through, but you're going to start to see the personal graph nature move more and more towards the user itself as a personal device.

We believe that the cross-device, as I said earlier, is what will play a super important role. The context awareness from the agent having access to your personal information and bringing that context to information from one device to another, and being able to drive that continuum, is what's going to differentiate more common. We feel we're in a very unique position to be able to go from pocket all the way to the cloud in driving that entire ecosystem.

Journalist 12: I have a question about the economics of the new world you mentioned already, the memory crisis, the skyrocketing memory crisis. I would like to know what impact you expect of the rising memory prices on the development of these agents in future on the consumer side, enterprise side, but also maybe on the other platform side.

Kedar Kondap: I think let's separate out two different things. One is we've all people that have been in this industry long enough to know the sequential nature of what happens with memory. Of course, this time is an anomaly in terms of what we're all seeing. I respect that, but at the same time, we know that eventually the supply chain economics balance out with that, right?

Like, over time, it may not come to the same levels as what we've seen in the past, because this is obviously a super cycle in terms of memory that we've never seen before, largely because of the needs of what AI, what the ecosystem needs. At the same time, though the token economic problem is a real problem, which is you as a consumer you want to be able to use more AI and you want to be able to be more efficient with what you're trying to do, but you're there's only so much in terms of affordability, same thing on the enterprise side, all of what you think about op-ex moving to capex, you have to be able to have that migration happen where you see your op-ex that you invested in and you're going to start moving to capex, or you're going to start getting every employee is going to get multiple models and drive that efficiency that you can get as an enterprise that you want, that migration is going to happen once you move to the other side.

With that migration, the entire equation of economics changes. Why? Because now, if I'm an enterprise, I know that running stuff on device… I'll give you an example, if I can now start running 5070 100 billion parameter models locally on prem, whether the device is a laptop, whether it's a 5 billion parameter model that runs on a phone, or whether it's an edge of line that sits in my desk running a 50-100 billion parameter model, or it's an influencing card that sits in on-prem, I know that the token economics dramatically changed, but I also know that as an enterprise to be able to run trillion parameter models, I'm going to go to the cloud, but I know I need to invest to be able to run on device.

So this balance of equation is what's important, and we feel like this is where we've always said the world is going to go hybrid, we've always said it's not once you're done with training in the cloud, it's going to start moving to the edge with your inferencing, and we feel very good about the position we're in, because that's where we've been investing for the last several years to drive this on device as well as hybrid approach.

Journalist 13: While wireless transition is a very big effort [unintelligible] has put a lot of time in those transitions and a strong focus, you almost single-handed move the industry to the next level, and that Qualcomm changed a lot, now it's more, much more diversified. So, my question is, is Qualcomm from today able to have the same focus on the safety transition in the future, or it may be more help from the industry?

Qualcomm Representative: We are wireless company first, so yes, we have a lot of focus on safety. I think wireless is in the DNA of the company, and wireless is really part and parcel of everything that we do. I mean, if you think about the complexity of building a cell phone, then there is a reason why very few companies are successful with these things. I think the 6G transition, maybe just to speak with 6G, is a very interesting transition, because we believe that the networks are going to actually become very intelligent in 6G, you'll be able to get a sense of creating a virtual digital trend of environments around you. It will bring telcos into the fore in terms of being able to get a much better sense of the physical world. It's a major area of work for us, and these G transitions take a decade, right? So you know that it took a decade for us to be develop 5G.

Journalist 14: Kedar, you answered a couple questions already on the personal graph and that comment about the agent moving closer to the user. I get the point that Qualcomm spans across multiple devices, and that they're, you know, that you're at a unique advantage because of that. But can you take us through how that would be architected? I guess inevitably, if it's spanning across devices, cloud has to be involved in this process, right?

Kedar Kondap: I think Brian, the way you should think about it is, first, we know that the entire ecosystem is fragmented, and we believe that as different hyperscalers, as different model providers, as different OS vendors, as different silicon vendors, all of these need to come together. We were not giving out much information today on what we're doing there, but as you can tell, what we are trying to indicate to the industry is today we have the ability to thread all of these things together, and we're uniquely positioned on how we want to do this over the next several months. We will come out more with respect to how we want to be able to tie these together, but the industry challenge that you highlight, and that's why we feel like we're at the center of driving innovation across this to bring this industry along to try something that's innovative.

Journalist 15: I'm going to be one of those guys who brings it back to the ARM thing. I'm just going to read you what Jensen said in his keynote, because I think I'm just going to read it deadpan. “This computer literally runs everything the world has ever created, and it runs agents.” So I don't know if that's true, but I kind of wanted to give it to you, and kind of hear, what are you guys working on in terms of like compatibility, or even emulation, because we've seen a lot of interesting ARM-based emulation coming from like open source places, so is there anything you guys are working on in terms of compatibility that is trying to push things forward?

Qualcomm Representative: I don't know how to use a broad statement like this to give you a full answer, but I'll tell you what we'll do today. There's about the last night track with my team, was we were worried about 50 claws that are available in my team, and from a snap back in perspective, X series perspective, these are run on the device, I think Krishna showed a bunch of these, a bunch of claws that he showed on stage, so you should imagine that we're, we've been leading the industry with driving agentic AI and orchestration on the PC for the last couple years.

So a lot of these models already exist, a lot of these claws run very effectively on Snapdragon, the models are running effectively on Snapdragon, so you should just assume right now that we've shown you the data that we're already dealing with industry with tight innovation.

Journalist 16: Do you see robotics requiring the two layers of intelligence like with autonomous vehicles, or will the user interaction be more integrated with its physical functionality? Essentially, will the robot-human interaction be controlled more on the user side or the robot side?

Qualcomm Representative: I think that is going to predominantly be very similar to what they can do today already. So, language in the primary interface, what the human is talking about. Where it starts to get interesting is when you start to get into responding to a command. So, for example, if the human would like the robot to go do something that kicks off a task for the robot to be able to complete, and that is usually not a question answer conversational type interaction that usually requires the robot to be able to take on a longer horizon task that brings in additional models that bring in additional tasks that are outside of what humans might typically engage in, but the primary interface will remain the same conversation.

Journalist 17: I'll bring it back to Nvidia. I just want to add that from a CPU and NPU perspective, I think, from a GPU perspective the RTX 5070 class, what I have been missing is like what is called Qualcomm’s view from the GPU premium side of the market. Let's say personal computer market, so I need a bit of clarity there, and the second part would be to just focus it towards the developers and the AI community.

Kedar Kondap: Let me tell you, let me address your first question, which is when we look at launching a particular platform in market, whether it's the Snapdragon X Elite, the X Plus or the X. We always look at what the market needs, and we have a way to size where we feel like workloads are best run on a platform. It's the composition of how you could think about silicon. We have a very powerful GPU. We have the IP that we've invested in the high-performance GPUs and CPUs in-house for the last many, many years. We have to make sure that we're addressing a certain price point from X Elite to X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. We size a significant improvement in our GPU performance, largely to address a certain set at the same time. You have to know that where we're shipping products are in certain price points with that target ASP in mind. I don't know what the industry is looking at with newer platforms are getting launched in market.

I haven't seen any of that data yet, but I'll tell you, all the cores that we support are sized to do that. With respect to their second question on developers, we've come a long way today in terms of where you see developers. Like, the entire developer ecosystem is behind what we've done. I talked massive numbers in terms of apps ecosystem, we talked in terms of developers porting apps natively on platforms, natively on Snapdragon, optimized to the NPU, so we have all the tools, everything that we've provided. So I think you should just expect that as we start moving into this new era of agentic…

Brian asked the question of how we're going to bring all these together, you should assume that we're working with the entire ecosystem, because I'll repeat what I said earlier. We are in a very unique position to be able to bring all of that orchestration, so whether it's a wearable, like an earbud or a watch, all the way to whether it's a PC all the way to whether it's a tablet, auto, XR, you name it. We're going to make sure that we're sizing all our platforms and technology to what the industry needs for that particular segment, so it's very segment-based in terms of how we look at the market.

[Session Ends]

Microsoft has unveiled Project Solara, a chip-to-cloud platform designed to power a new generation of "agent-first" enterprise devices — hardware designed to run AI agents instead of traditional apps. Announced at the Microsoft Build 2026 Developer Conference on the 2nd of June, the platform, developed by Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, features a lightweight edge OS called the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP). Interestingly, the OS is built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) rather than Windows.

MDEP is paired with Azure-hosted agent services and persistent cloud-based state, meaning devices act as interfaces to AI agents running across Microsoft's cloud infrastructure rather than as fully self-contained computers. Together, the software stack forms what Microsoft describes as a chip-to-cloud architecture for enterprise AI devices, combining cloud-hosted agents with centralized security, management, and orchestration capabilities.

"The 'operating system' is liminal, transcending the device and the cloud. The system brings a lightweight window to the edge, where the agent manifests and where the state, via Azure, can encompass a constellation of specialized devices,” explained Steven Bathiche, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow in the Applied Sciences Group.

To populate that ecosystem with hardware, Microsoft has partnered with Qualcomm and MediaTek as its first silicon partners — Qualcomm for portable and wearable form factors and MediaTek for stationary devices. The company has no plans to manufacture end products itself. Instead, the company is releasing reference designs for OEMs to build from, alongside an "approved chipsets" requirement that gives Microsoft certification-level control over which hardware qualifies for the platform, similar to Google's GMS certification model for Android.

To demonstrate Solara, Microsoft unveiled two concept reference designs built on the platform. A stationary desk-mounted AI hub built around MediaTek IoT silicon and a wearable AI badge powered by Qualcomm hardware. The desktop companion features a display, a camera, a UWB (ultra-wideband) presence sensor that handles automatic login and lock, dual far-field mics, and two USB-C ports. Connected to an external display, the device can double as a Windows 365 cloud PC client.

Meanwhile, the wearable badge is equipped with a touchscreen, Hello for Business fingerprint sensor, far-field high-SNR microphone array, side-facing camera, and 5G, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GNSS connectivity — targeting front-line workers such as nurses, retail staff, and field workers. Microsoft confirmed that both devices are intended as reference designs for OEM partners rather than retail products.

Central to the platform is what Microsoft calls just-in-time UI — an adaptive interface layer that allows a single agent to render appropriately across different screen sizes and input modalities without requiring developers to rebuild the experience for each device. Microsoft positions this on a spectrum between conventional responsive design and fully generative UI, where AI constructs interfaces dynamically with no predefined structure; Solara currently targets the middle ground, prioritizing consistency while avoiding per-device redesign overhead.

“The same agent can render a custom experience on multiple screen sizes and modalities with little or no additional work from the developer. For us, that is the first proof point: a path to specialized devices without requiring developers to rebuild the experience from scratch each time,” said Bathiche.

Another notable aspect of Solara is Microsoft's decision to build MDEP on Android rather than Windows. AOSP scales naturally to the lightweight, constrained hardware that wearables and embedded devices run on — something Windows, with its memory and processing overhead, was never designed to do. It also sidesteps the application compatibility expectations that come with Windows. Because Solara devices are built around cloud-hosted agents rather than traditional software, Microsoft can optimize the platform for dedicated AI hardware without carrying decades of legacy PC baggage.

To manage multiple agents running simultaneously, Microsoft is also working on an agent dispatcher and agent task manager — components that automatically surface or activate the right agent based on context, rather than requiring users to launch each one manually. Neither component is shipping yet. Early agent integrations include Dragon Copilot for healthcare workflows and GitHub Copilot for developer task tracking — both exploring how persistent, context-aware agents behave differently on dedicated hardware than they do inside a browser or IDE.

The platform appears to be aimed at enterprise buyers in retail, healthcare, and field service sectors, where dedicated agent hardware makes more sense than repurposing a smartphone. Microsoft has already lined up pilots with Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi's, Target, and AccuWeather, with broader OEM deployment targeted across healthcare, hospitality, financial services, legal, and industrial verticals.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon C Platform on May 28th, ahead of Computex 2026 in Taipei, an entry-level Arm processor built to anchor Windows 11 laptops priced from $300. The chip abandons the Oryon CPU cores that define the Snapdragon X family in favor of an older Kryo design pulled from Qualcomm's smartphone parts, runs in machines carrying as little as 8GB of memory, and skips Microsoft's Copilot+ certification. We went hands-on with Snapdragon C at Computex 2026 today.

Meanwhile, analysts from TrendForce, Gartner, and IDC are all warning that a surge in memory prices is making the sub-$500 laptop market financially unviable, which could lead to its disappearance in its entirety.

Kryo cores, not Oryon

The "C" stands for Compute, and the new platform sits beneath every Snapdragon X and X2 part Qualcomm sells. Where those chips use the Nuvia-derived Oryon cores Qualcomm acquired in 2021, Snapdragon C reuses Kryo cores from its phone lineup, the architecture Qualcomm built laptop silicon on before the Oryon transition. Mandar Deshpande, senior director of product management at Qualcomm, told reporters at a pre-launch briefing that the platform "is not built to scale up to the Copilot+ requirements," meaning it clears neither Microsoft's 40 TOPS neural-engine floor nor the 16GB memory minimum tied to the Copilot+ PC program.

Qualcomm has disclosed little else; core counts, clock speeds, neural-engine throughput, the manufacturing node, and the supported memory type were all absent from the announcement, with the company saying it would detail them during its Computex keynote this week. Reported leaks point to a 6nm-class part with eight cores, though none of that is confirmed.

The first machine is Acer's Aspire Go 15. Acer's specification sheet lists a 15.6-inch 1920 x 1080 display, up to 8GB of memory, up to 512GB of storage, a 53Wh battery, and Windows 11 with a Copilot key but no Copilot+ branding. Acer hasn’t given the laptop a price or a release date, and HP and Lenovo, both named as launch partners, have yet to unveil their own machines.

Memory prices dictate retail prices

Snapdragon C enters a market where memory has arguably become the deciding factor in what a laptop ultimately retails for. TrendForce projects that conventional DRAM contract prices rose 90% to 95% in the first quarter of 2026 and will climb a further 58% to 63% in the second, with mobile DRAM — the LPDDR type Snapdragon C depends on — rising as much as 93% to 98% quarter over quarter.

Meanwhile, Gartner expects combined DRAM and SSD pricing to increase 130% by the end of 2026, lifting average PC prices 17% and pushing memory from 16% to 23% of a typical laptop's bill of materials. Ranjit Atwal, senior director analyst at Gartner, said in a February forecast that the increases have removed vendors' ability to absorb the cost, and that "the sub-$500 entry-level PC segment will disappear by 2028." IDC reached a similar conclusion, cutting its 2026 global PC shipment forecast to a decline of 11.3% and warning that bargain-priced PCs are, for now, behind us.

The squeeze is already visible further up the Windows line-up. HP told investors that memory now makes up roughly 35% of its PC bill of materials, up from the mid-to-high teens a quarter earlier, and Lenovo told TechRadar there was "no way around" the price increases it would pass to buyers. Microsoft's cheapest Surface Laptop now starts at $1,149, a position that no longer competes for budget buyers at all, and a significant jump from its original $899 launch price.

A new entry-level tier?

Qualcomm isn’t the first manufacturer to repurpose a binned phone processor; Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo, announced in March, runs the A18 Pro from the iPhone 16 Pro alongside 8GB of unified memory and 256GB of storage in a fanless 13-inch body. That’s the same maneuver Qualcomm is attempting by using Kryo silicon in the Snapdragon C.

Apple claims that the Neo runs up to 50% faster than a comparable Intel Core Ultra 5 laptop and three times faster in on-device AI, but that’s all based on its own internal benchmarks against an unnamed machine. Asus co-CEO S.Y. Hsu, on the company's first-quarter earnings call, called Apple's pricing "a shock to the entire industry."

On the Windows side, Intel launched Wildcat Lake as its Core Series 3 family in April, built on the 18A node with a roughly 17 TOPS neural engine and more than 70 laptop designs in the pipeline. Its Project Firefly reference platform targets sub-$600 x86 machines, and Chinese vendor CHUWI has already shown a Wildcat Lake laptop, the “UniBook,” at $449.

AMD's budget option remains the aging Ryzen 7020 "Mendocino" series, a 6nm part pairing Zen 2 cores with RDNA 2 graphics and no neural engine, with no direct successor yet below $500.

At this level, Qualcomm’s most immediate competition may well be its own back catalog. The Snapdragon X-powered Asus Vivobook 14, with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage, has sold for $379.99 at Best Buy, undercutting the price Snapdragon C is chasing while offering twice the memory and faster Oryon cores.

$300 and up figure is guidance

The $300 figure is guidance Qualcomm shares with manufacturers, not a price it sets, and Acer's refusal to confirm a number for the Aspire Go 15 is arguably an immediate tell that it’s not going to retail anywhere near that price.

With LPDDR5 contract pricing reported above $10 per gigabyte, the memory alone in an 8GB configuration now costs roughly what a whole budget laptop's components once did, and OEMs are passing those costs through. A first wave landing between $349 and $449 in the U.S. is a more realistic price point.

Dropping Copilot+ is, of course, a concession that has made this price possible; buyers lose Recall, Cocreator, and the richer Windows Studio Effects modes, and because Copilot+ has yet to drive measurable Windows upgrade demand, Qualcomm and its partners appear willing to trade the badge for a lower bill of materials.

Whether the platform holds its line depends on the specifications Qualcomm has so far withheld, potentially coming imminently at Computex, and on whether HP and Lenovo ship Snapdragon C machines this year or wait for memory prices to ease.

It is day three of Computex here in Taipei! With most of the big-name keynotes out of the way, we're traversing the show floor non-stop to bring you the latest, greatest, and weirdest from all your favorite hardware vendors.

Computex 2026: Headlines so far

• Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra weilds Nvidia's RTX Spark superchip with 128GB of RAM
• Nvidia lays out RTX Spark roadmap for laptops and desktop PCs at Computex 2026
• Nvidia unveils RTX Spark Superchip for laptops and desktop PCs at Computex 2026
• Intel details long-awaited Crescent Island AI GPU at Computex, boasts up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X
• Intel Xeon 7 ‘Diamond Rapids’ CPUs officially launching in 2027 on Intel 18A-P
• Intel Xeon 6+ ‘Clearwater Forest’ puts 18A in the data center with up to 288 cores
• AMD’s formerly China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE goes global for $549 on June 2
• AMD confirms AM5 support through 2029
• AMD brings back Ryzen 7 5800X3D, launches Ryzen 7 7700X3D
• Dell XPS 13 targets MacBook Neo with Intel's Wildcat Lake
• Alienware debuts 39, 34-inch OLED gaming monitors

Computex 2026: Live updates

Well, good morning, and a very (very) warm (and humid) welcome to our Computex 2026 live blog. Stephen from the UK here to see you through the first few hours of Monday. As mentioned, it has already been a jam-packed first day!

There's really nothing like Taipei during Computex:

Nvidia enters the laptop and desktop market

If you're just joining us, then welcome. It is evening in Taiwan and there's a lot happening. Headlines from the first day of Computex include Nvidia's incursion into the desktop PC and laptop market by way of its new RTX Spark Superchip. RTX Spark is a Windows on Arm platform for laptops, which Nvidia claims is the most efficient every built. Top-spec chips offer 20 Arm CPU cores, a Blackwell GPU with 6144 CUDA cores, 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and up to 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

• Nvidia unveils RTX Spark Superchip for laptops and desktop PCs at Computex 2026

Surface Laptop Ultra

One of the first companies to get behind Nvidia's new RTX Spark, understandably, is Microsoft. The company has unveiled a new Surface Laptop Ultra, effectively its own version of the MacBook Pro. It features a 20-core CPU, Blackwell GPU, 128GB of unified RAM, and more. That's housed in a 15-inch chassis with a mini-LED display, replete with HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, and an SD card reader.

• Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra weilds Nvidia's RTX Spark superchip with 128GB of RAM, 20 Arm CPU cores, and a Blackwell GPU

Intel Crescent Island

Somewhat overshadowed by Nvidia, Intel has unveiled its new Crescent Island AI GPU, featuring up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory. The data center GPU is "built for agentic AI," is built on Intel's Xe3P architecture, but details about raw specs are scant at this stage.

• Intel details long-awaited Crescent Island AI GPU at Computex, boasts up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X to combat memory shortages

Radeon RX 9070 GRE

AMD's China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE is going global, with a $549 price tag when it launches on June 2. This GPU sits right between the 9060 XT and the RX 9070, and you'll be able to catch benchmarks on Tom's Hardware very soon.

• AMD’s formerly China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE goes global for $549 on June 2

Jake is hungry!

"You ever get to the end of the day and realize you haven't eaten a thing." A quick look behind the scenes at Tom's Hardware, where CPU analyst Jake Roach has just realised that he hasn't eaten anything today. It's 8pm.

AM5 lives on

After previously only committing to supporting its AM5 platform through 2027, the company this week confirmed that it is actually going to support AM5 through 2029, with both Zen 4 and Zen 5 likely to see two further generations of CPU release. It's unclear if this is 2029 will mark the end of the line for AM5.

• AMD confirms AM5 support through 2029

The return of a legend

AMD has announced it will bring back its legendary Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and is also launching a Ryzen 7 7700X3D to fight the rising price of PC building. The latter is a downclocked version of the 7800X3D for AM5 platforms, but the real headline is the 5800X3D, which supports DDR4 RAM and, in theory, should give users a more affordable way to build a potent gaming PC on AM4.

• AMD brings back Ryzen 7 5800X3D, launches Ryzen 7 7700X3D to combat rising component prices

Dell comes after the MacBook Neo

This $699 XPS 13 laptop built around Intel's Wildcat Lake platform is the company's answer to the popular MacBook Neo. Featuring between 8-32GB of RAM, a 13.4-inch display, and up to 1TB of storage, it comes with either the Intel Core 5 320 or an upcoming Intel Core Ultra 7 355 variant.

• Dell XPS 13 targets MacBook Neo with Intel's Wildcat Lake — $699 starting price, $599 for students

DLSS 4.5

Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, an advanced denoiser for better ray-tracing and path-tracing image quality when it releases later this year. Nvidia says it can process 35% more input data and uses 20% more paramaters using the same compute budget as the previous-generation.

• DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction update arrives in August for better ray tracing visuals — broader training data set and second-gen transformer architecture combine for improved image quality

Qualcomm hands on

Qualcomm's new $300 and up ARM laptops come with a mystery eight-core CPU and active cooling. Rocking the new Snapdragon C chip, our very own Paul Alcorn made a discovery that perplexed even the Qualcomm representative on the floor...

• We went hands-on with Qualcomm's new '$300 and up' ARM laptop platform with mystery eight-core CPU — active-cooled Snapdragon C laptop surfaces in Acer Aspire Go 15

A big EXPO boost

AMD is launching a new automatic memory overclocking feature. EXPO Ultra Low Latency promises a 13% uplift in performance compared to standard DDR5 JEDEC speeds, and a 4% uplift over existing EXPO.

• AMD promises 13% uplift with new EXPO ‘Ultra Low Latency’ overclocking on DDR5 DIMMs — automatic memory overclocking delivers 4% improvement over standard EXPO, says AMD

Intel not resting on its laurels

Speaking to Tom's Hardware in response to news about Nvidia's RTX Spark, Intel says it treats all such developments with "a healthy does of paranoia," but touted the virtues of x86, warning of compatibility, DRM, and other issues that inevitably follow Arm CPUs entering the market.

• Intel warns it has 'a healthy dose of paranoia' over Nvidia entrance into PC market — company says RTX Spark is 'great for the market' while touting the virtues of x86

Supermicro makes an appearance

Computex isn't all about consumer hardware, with plenty of B2B and industrial hardware on display too. We got a look at Supermicro's new Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, replete with a new type of cooling that the company says offers 1,000 times higher electrical impedance than standard.

• Supermicro shows off Vera Rubin NVL72 rack with all-new type of coolant — company claims coolant offers 1,000 times higher electrical impedance over standard cooling

A staggering 5090 from Asus

To celebrate 20 years of its ROG brand, Asus has unveiled a monster new ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Edition 20, which includes a wraparound AMOLED display. There's also a 3,000W power supply, a new NUC, a PC case, peripherals, a gaming chair, and more.

• Asus' monstrous ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Edition 20 includes expansive curved AMOLED display — also debuts 3,000W power supply and striking PC case

See what happened at the show before the show

Computex starts before the show floor opens. While it's nighttime in Taipei, you can still take a look at everything we saw early with our Day Zero Wrap Up.

You'll learn more about chips from Intel and AMD, monitors from Acer and Alienware, and, of course, learn a ton about Nvidia's RTX Spark system on a chip.

That should hold you over until the show floor doors open and we get into even more of the nitty-gritty.

Read: Computex 2026 Day Zero Wrap-Up: Nvidia launches RTX Spark Superchip assault on laptop and desktop markets, Intel readies Xeon 6+

Vincent van Gogh, on a laptop

MSI is taking its Prestige 14 Flip AI+ and putting some prestige art on it. The company says the laptops are "inspired by The Starry Night and Starry Night Over the Rhône". That language makes it unclear if they're exact duplicates of the paintings, but either way, they don't look like anything else we've seen lately.

Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 finally brings an OLED screen

Among the many twentieth-anniversary branded Asus ROG gadgets the brand is releasing is a new version of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X.

The ROG Xbox Ally X20 bundle includes an updated version of the handheld, with a clear shell, OLED display, TMR joysticks, and a transforming D-Pad with four and eight-way movement. It still has the same AMD Z2 Extreme processor as its predecessor.

ROG XREAL R1 Edition 20 Gaming AR Glasses, with a 171-inch, 240 Hz virtual display at 4 meters.

No pricing information is available just yet.

Who ISN'T having a milestone anniversary?

Lots of companies and brands at Computex seem to have started in years that end with 6.

• Asus ROG has a 20th anniversary product line
• MSI is celebrating 40 years, marked by the Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Draco Epic laptop (pictured above).
• Gigabyte marked 40 years at the end of May, and is celebrating with its Infinity Design lanauage, including a GPU with rounded edges.

So consider this your reminder to at least get a card for your or a loved one's anniversary. Clearly everyone is celebrating.

How Intel is reacting to RTX Spark

With Nvidia's RTX Spark announced, CPU manufacturers are sizing up the field.

When we sat down with Tom’s sat down with Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of product management for Intel’s Client Computing Group, he told us how Intel is reacting:

“Nvidia puts out great products, right? And they know how to do gaming, they know how to do all these different things. So we always take everything with a healthy dose of paranoia, but we are also very, very confident with our products." He also pointed out Arm chips for Windows have typically had compatibility issues.

Read more: Intel warns it has 'a healthy dose of paranoia' over Nvidia entrance into PC market — company says RTX Spark is 'great for the market' while touting the virtues of x86

An 18-inch laptop for the rest of us

Usually, an 18-inch laptop is a massive workstation or gaming rig. But at Computex, Acer has an 18-inch system, the Aspire 18 AI designed for everyday use. Above, it's pictured next to a 16-inch PC.

That 18-inch screen has just a 1920 x 1200 resolution, but for people who turn up the font size to read (no shame in it!), it may still help. The refresh rate tops out at 165 Hz.

Specs include a CPU up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H, up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM, up to 2TB of SSD storage, and Wi-Fi 7 support. Acer claims 22 hours of battery life. And hey, there's room, so you get a number pad.

Like much of what we're seeing at Computex, we don't have a price. But if you've been jonesing for a big screen without a discrete GPU, it is on the way.

AMD had to reengineer the Ryzen 7 5800X3D for a rerelease

AMD's David McAfee shared the story behind the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and why it took so long to come to market. Apparently, AMD had plans to bring back the chip earlier, but the silicon bonding process TSMC had previously used was no longer available, McAfee says. That led to some additional development time in order to get the CPU into shape, which happened to line up with the 10th anniversary of the AM4 socket. - Jake Roach

Get ready for Intel's Computex keynote

Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan is set to take the stage at Computex in just under an hour, and we expect about a 45-minute keynote from the executive, followed by a Q&A session that Tom's Hardware is attending. Although we've already seen most of Intel's announcements, ranging from the G3 Extreme Range to a Diamond Rapids tease, it's possible Tan could drop some hints about next-gen Nova Lake chips during the keynote. - Jake Roach

• Watch Intel's Computex 2026 keynote here — CEO Lip-Bu Tan takes the stage in Taipei at 10:30pm PT on June 1

Intel's 3D V-Cache competitor?

Tom's Hardware attended a Q&A session with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, as well as a panel of executives, including Alex Katouzian, a Qualcomm veteran who recently joined Intel's ranks. We asked Intel about its supposed 3D V-Cache competitor, rumored to be called bLCC or Big Last Level Cache, and Katouzian shared the following:

"When I first came in and started reviewing road maps for the team, I was very pleasantly surprised. So, stay tuned, a very strong roadmap coming, and we will be gunning for that section of the market as well. And so, please stay tuned," Katouzian told Tom's Hardware.

Phison has demoed its future PCIe 6.0 SSD controller in the past, but the earlier displays last year merely showed the chip on a large development. Development of the new X3 controller has obviously moved forward well, as the company had two reference SSDs on display in its booth here at Computex.

Phison says these new SSDs deliver up to 28 GB/s of sequential read/write throughput and an incredible 6.8 million IOPS, easily beating anything available on the market. Stay tuned for our full write up.

Stephen checking in

Well a very good morning from day 2 of Computex! Stephen here to see you through the next few hours.

Timing is everything!

Computex is just like comedy, timing is very important! Coordinating a team around the globe is pretty hectic, so here's some insight into how tricky it can be. It's 10:24am in the UK, but our team on the ground in Taipei have already been at it all day, where it's currently 5:24pm. Of course, our U.S. readership and staff are just waking up. Lots of companies are still working in Eastern or even Pacific time too. A lot of plates in the air.

Snapdragon makes an appearance

We haven't heard too much from Qualcomm this week, with Nvidia dominating the headlines thanks to RTX Spark. However, this Asus Ascent QN10 is a nifty new Mini PC with Snapdragon X2 Elite, which QC claims is the world's first to deliver 80 TOPS through its NPU.

Noctua's latest cooling efforts

For those who want to squeeze every last drop of power and temperature optimization from their CPU, Noctua has announced new thermal pads for AMD chips. Made in partnership with Carbice, these pads are for AM4 and AM5 Ryzen CPUs and are made from carbon nanotubes to improve thermal conductivity.

• Noctua announces new thermal pad for AMD chips in partnership with Carbice — product will work with processors in AM5 and AM4 sockets

Gigabyte's latest and greatest monitors

Gigabyte has unveiled a new series of Aorus Elite gaming monitors. Ranging in size from 27 to 32 inches, three of them feature fourth-generation Tandem WOLED technology for improved color and brightness. The fourth is a mini-LED monitor.

• Gigabyte debuts fourth-gen Tandem WOLED and multi-mode Mini LED gaming monitors — 27 to 32 inches, up to 480 Hz, and up to 5K resolution

Asus’ ROG Harpe II Extreme Edition 20 hands on

Asus is going big to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Republic of Gamers brand. Alongside a monster RTX 5090 and a 3,000W PSU, there are new peripherals including this Asus ROG HArpe II Edition 20 gaming mouse. It features a gold logo and scroll wheel, as well as gold accents. A little garish for some tastes, it'll cost an eye-watering $259.99.

• Hands-on with Asus’ ROG Harpe II Extreme Edition 20 gaming mouse – 24K gold and a 65K sensor

Relive Intel's keynote

Intel held its Computex keynote overnight, with CEO Lip-Bu Tan taking to the stage. You can relive the keynote below!

The latest in cooling from Frore

Frore has been showing off its latest in solid-state cooling tech. Its AirJet Mini is out here cooling Intel's Wildcat Lake laptop reference design. With 15W of sustained power and just 11.3 mm in total thickness, could it give the MacBook Neo a run for its money?

• Frore System’s solid-state AirJet Mini cools Intel’s Wildcat Lake laptop reference design – 15W of sustained, fanless cooling helps MacBook Neo competitor reach a svelte 11.3 mm, remain silent

Take our quiz!

'The single most important tool of humanity'

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company wants to 'reinvent the single most important tool of humanity' with its new RTX Spark. The company unveiled its new chip for desktops and laptops at the start of this week.

• Jensen Huang says Nvidia wants to 'reinvent the single most important tool of humanity' with RTX Spark — Nvidia CEO touts support of 'literally every computer maker in the world' for its agentic AI PC platform

Favorite Computex announcement so far?

Cooler Master's MasterDimm

Unveiled ahead of Computex, this Cooler Master MasterDimm is a collaboration with G.SKILL that brings active cooling to DDR5 RAM. No word on just how big those sticks are yet...

New from Gigabyte

Gigabyte is another vendor celebrating a major anniversary at Computex, specifically 40 years in the game. There's new motherboards, GPUs, and a monster 1,600W power supply.

• Gigabyte showcases new Infinity products for its 40th anniversary — X870 Infinity Next halo motherboard boasts metal 3D-printed elements, Aero Wood goes dark, MicroATX Stealth boards, Infinity-style GPUs extend down the product stack

Phison shows off its new controller

Down at Phison, we took a look at its new PCIe 6.0 SSD controller, the X3. The company touts sequential speeds of up to 28 GB/s and 6.8 million IOPS in random read/write workloads. There were also benchmarks on display for a new DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 SSD controller. Get the details here:

• Phison shows PCIe 6.0 X3 SSD controller with 28 GB/s of bandwidth and 6.8 million IOPS, supports 2 petabytes per drive— also new power-sipping E37T SSDs for PCIe 5.0 systems consume a mere 4.5W

You don't know the HAF of it

More from Cooler Master, where we took a look at the company's new cases, fans, and coolers. The new HAF500 case supports up to E-ATX motherboards, dual-GPU setups, and plenty of cooling.

Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro Edition 20 gets decked out in black and gold

Asus just launched the ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro Edition 20, the 20th-anniversary edition of its existing ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro. The overall design of the new router is identical, but the stealth black look is now accentuated with gold trimmings. You can even see gold plating beneath the clear plastic window on top of the router, along with a 20th anniversary badge finished in gold.

While you can expect the same blazing performance as the ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro, the ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro Edition 20 also includes an exclusive Signature Edition 20 web interface for configuring the router.

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ joins the growing number of handheld gaming PCs

There's a new competitor to take on the likes of the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and Legion Go 2. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is a fresh entry using a 14-core Intel Arc G3 Extreme CPU and an Arc B390 GPU. The handheld can also be decked out with up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage.

The design looks somewhat unorthodox, with the 8-inch 1080p IPS display jutting well below the flanking controllers. The display is spec'd for a 120 Hz refresh rate and maxes out at 500 nits. Rounding out the main features is an 80 WHr battery inside the 1.3-pound package.

Best Buy already has a product page for the Claw 8 EX AI+ on its website, listing the 32GB/1TB configuration at $1,699.99. However, the handheld is only shown as "coming soon" rather than being available for preorder.

Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro will be among the first Wi-Fi 8 routers on the market

If you want to be on the bleeding edge in wireless networking, you won't have to wait much longer for Wi-Fi 8 routers. The first Wi-Fi 8 router coming from Asus will be the ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro, which is a gaming router aimed at the high end of the market.

We must caution that Wi-Fi 8 routers won't result in another huge leap in theoretical performance over existing Wi-Fi 7 routers. Instead, optimizations with the standard will make it so that real world performance and range will far exceed what's possible with current hardware. We should also see even longer range for IoT devices, epecially those sitting at the far reaches of the coverage for your home router.

The ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro will also include a wide range of LAN/WAN ports, including two 10 GbE ports and four 2.5 GbE ports.

• Asus unveils its first Wi-Fi 8 router — ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro offers up to 2x real-world throughput uplift over Wi-Fi 7

We go hands-on with the Acer Predator Atlas 8 Arc G3 gaming handheld

Last week, we brought you news that Acer was working on a Predator Atlas 8 gaming handheld. Well, we got a chance to get a hands-on with the device at Computex, and it's quite impressive.

The Predator Atlas 8 uses Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme processors paired with an Arc B370 or B390 iGPU. Systems come with an 8-inch 1200p 120 Hz variable-refresh-rate display rated for up to 500 nits of brightness. An 80 WHr battery should help extend your gaming runtime, and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are included in the mix.

At 1.79 pounds, the Predator Atlas 8 slots in between the Legion Go and the Steam Deck OLED in weight.

Intel's Xeon 6+ in the flesh

We stopped by Intel's demo suite, and the company had a Xeon 6+ chip, along with a wafer, hanging on the wall. This is Intel's first time using 18A in the data center, with Xeon 6+ now sporting up to 288 Darkmont E-cores. You can learn more about it in our Xeon 6+ write-up and go behind the scenes with our Xeon 6+ interview transcript on Tom's Hardware Premium.

Day 3

Good morning and welcome to day three of Computex! I say day 3, but as we've explained before timing is tricky here. In Taiwan day three is almost over, but for our global audiences in places like the UK and U.S., it's just beginning! - Stephen Warwick

Some highlights from Acer

We dropped by Acer to see what the company has to offer at Computex this year. We saw the new Acer Swift Spin 14 AI tablet, the new Predator Atlas 8, and more!

Jensen will sign anything

Everyone knows that if you see Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at Computex, chances are he'll sign something for you. How about this epic Nvidia GTX 1080Ti Founders Edition?

Noctua's AIO in all its glory

We've been hearing a lot about Noctua's entry into the AIO market for some time. The company is back at Computex 2026 and has finally revealed specs, pricing, and release date. Coming on June 16, pricing should be around $250 (It is listed at 220 euros), with more expensive 360mm and 420mm options available. The NL-LC1 features Asetek's Emma V2 pump and NF-A12/14 fans.

• Noctua's first-ever AIO features a silenced Asetek Emma V2 pump and NF-A12/14 fans — 240mm NL-LC1 starts at around $250, could cost $325 for 420mm cooler

The first 8K ultra-wideband gaming keyboard

Cherry's gaming branch Cherry XTRFY has unveiled the first 8K ultra-wideband gaming keyboard at Computex. With a 70% layout, the technology should be more reliable than 2.4GHz wireless. That means a more stable connection that is less vulnerable to interference from other wireless devices.

• Cherry XTRFY launches first 8K ultra-wideband gaming keyboard — featuring more compact 70-percent layout

Corsair's new mouse feat. Stream Deck

New from Corsair is this Nightsword v2 Wireless SD Stream Deck gaming mouse. Striking name aside, you can map its buttons to Stream Deck features, eight in all, so that you can control streaming functions without taking your hand off the mouse. It's a similar philisophy to the Scimitar Elite Wireless SE. However, the Nightsword also comes with a unique dedicated Stream Deck Launch button.

• Corsair shows off gaming mouse with dedicated Stream Deck launch button — wireless mouse also gets almost 50 hours of 8K battery life

New from NZXT

We stopped by NZXT to see what's news. The company showed off new RGB fans, cases, and more.

Counterfeit DRAM

Tom's Hardware spoke to G.Skill and V-Color at Computex. The latter confirmed to us that it has seen an influx of counterfeit DRAM hitting markets in China, to the extent that it is negatively impacting sales.

• Counterfeit G.Skill and V-Color DDR5 modules hit Chinese marketplaces, impacting company sales — cheap contraband memory using identical PCBs and heat spreaders almost impossible to spot

A long day for Jensen

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is one of the main attractions at Computex, and is often mobbed wherever he goes, shutting down booths or even entire floors here in Taipei. Here he is enjoying some brief respite at the Gigabyte booth with a beer and some barbecue.

Taipei drone show

The evening skies in Taipei lit up with a drone show to celebrate Computex, check it out!

Lian Li's new Edge PSUs

Take a look at Lian Li's new Edge Platinum V2 PSUs, equipped with LED dust indicator, magnetic filter, snap-on fan, and a USB header hub. There's also the trademark 90-degree power connector.

The claaaaaaw

The new MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is an 8-inch handheld that features a 120 Hz display and new ergonomic grips. Bathed in a striking 'Void Purple' finish, our immediate hands-on yielded some impressive performance.

• MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ brings Intel Arc G3 Extreme to handhelds — 8-inch, 120 Hz display and new ergonomic grips

AMD reacts to Nvidia RTX Spark

AMD is acting confident in the face of Nvidia's new RTX Spark announcements.

"I’m really excited that Nvidia has joined the game. You know, we were the only game in town for almost two years now, and the large local memory is becoming super critical in the agentic AI [workloads],” said AMD’s Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client business. at Computex “I'm actually happy to see Nvidia join the race for these great products.

Comparing the specs, he suggested that "Gorgon Halo, which is coming out in Q3, is going to be a better product.”

We'll see how these platforms shake out later this year.

Read more: AMD executives react to Nvidia’s RTX Spark — ‘you’re just wrong if you don’t get a Strix Halo notebook’

Sizing up the Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Neo

Which of these systems is thicker? Trick question: both are half an inch thick. At Computex, our own Jake Roach saw the two together at Dell's booth.

The Neo's bottom is thicker, while Dell's is a bit more equal. And the XPS has a slightly rounded bottom, making it appear slightly thinner than Apple's blockier design style. But both list the exact same height, and the spec sheets are identical.

The XPS, however, is lighter than the MacBook Neo, at 2.2 pounds, compared the Apple's 2.7 pounds.

See all of the photos in the gallery above.

MSI adds an internal SSD slot to its flagship Wi-Fi 7 router

Wi-Fi 8 is just around the corner, but there’s still plenty of life left in the Wi-Fi 7 standard. MSI is proving that with a new flagship Wi-Fi 7 router called the RadiX BE19000. At first glance, the RadiX BE19000 looks like any other high-end gaming router, complete with eight antennas that give it an arachnid-like appearance.

However, the RadiX BE19000 hides a secret within — it features a PCIe SSD slot, making the router what MSI calls “NAS Lite.” You can add your own M.2 SSD to enable PC backups or simply to share files across your network.

You still get all the usual trimmings, like tri-band Wi-Fi, dual 10 GbE ports, and four 2.5 GbE ports. In addition, MSI says that the RadiX BE19000 is compatible with its proprietary mesh standard, allowing you to expand your network with compatible routers and access points.

Read more: MSI unveils latest set of WiFi 7 gaming routers touting ultra-fast speeds — flagship RadiX BE19000 model comes with a built-in SSD slot for 'NAS Lite' experience and wireless speeds up to 19 Gbps

Do your science homework

We talked a bit about Noctua's new AIO cooler in this live blog, but one thing we didn't mention: just how much homework they show. The company is ready to defend its doctoral thesis.

If you're ever at Computex, need to rest and do some not-so-light reading to explain what a thermosiphon or a flooded condenser is, Noctua has your back. You can see some of it in the gallery above, and believe me, that is just some of it.

Here ends Computex

Good morning folks, Stephen here to announce that we are signing off our Computex coverage for 2026. At least, our live correspondence from the floor. There's still plenty of news and insight to come from our conversations, but we'll be winding up this live blog soon. It'll remain on the site so you can look back and trawl through any announcements you may have missed, but thank you for joining us for another great year!

We've learned a few new details of the Snapdragon C platform at Computex 2026 by opening up a few Windows utilities on a demo unit. Qualcomm's new Snapdragon C Platform is designed to bring more compute performance to a lower price point, but the company has been tight-lipped about the finer details of the chip behind the new $300 and up platform. We managed to see the Snapdragon C chip in the flesh for the first time in the 15" Acer Aspire Go 15 (AG15-Q31P), which was dutifully locked in a glass case to keep the prying eyes of the press at bay. However, we managed to tinker with a unit that was briefly allowed outside of the case by a Qualcomm rep, thus getting access to the Windows Task Manager and System Information utilities.

Qualcomm hasn't shared the specific model of the CPU yet, but we are told that it uses a customized version of the mobile-focused Kryo chips. The Task Manager shows one new tidbit: the CPU comes with an eight-core CPU that was running at 1.67 GHz, but this was at idle - the chip has a listed 3.01 GHz base speed. The Task Manager names this as the Snapdragon 8c Gen 3, a chip that does not exist, but certainly aligns with the basic naming nomenclature of the 8cx Gen 3.

A Qualcomm representative was quite perplexed by this, saying that this is not the official name of the chip and that it is probably a placeholder identity string used by Acer's engineers for the Engineering Sample system (EDIT: Qualcomm has now confirmed this is not the correct name for the processor).

We can also see that the chip sports 512 KB of L1 cache, 1.5 MB of L2, and 2.0 MB of L3, all of which are significantly less than seen with the 8cx variant. It is unclear if those values are also merely placeholders.

Likewise, the integrated GPU is listed as the Adreno 8c Gen 3, featuring 1 MB of dedicated GPU memory and 3.9 GB of shared memory. We can also see that it supports DirectX 12. The System Information utility notes that the system runs Windows 11 Pro and, as expected, is an ARM64-based PC.

The laptop has a 16.5" FHD display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, up to 8 GB of system memory, a 53 Wh battery, and up to 512GB of storage, with the latter two being slim but expected given the price point and current SSD and memory shortages. Additionally, it comes with a FHD webcam.

We also spot two USB-C ports on the side of the unit, but the speeds of these ports are unknown. There's also an HDMI port, a USB-A port, and a headphone jack. It also has support for Wi-Fi 6.

The grey clamshell design is attractive, with a sparkly paint that our Managing Editor Matt Safford likened to the sparkly paint jobs found on a 1980's BMX. The plastic case is rigid, so it doesn't feel like a flimsy low-end system when I snapped the screen open and closed.

As we noted in our original coverage of the Acer Aspire Go 15, the keyboard sports a Copilot+ key even though representatives have confirmed this device does not meet that standard due to its 8 GB of memory (16 GB is required). The Go 15 has a full-sized keyboard replete with a slim numpad, which I consider a big plus.

Neither Acer nor Qualcomm have shared performance projections yet for the new system, but we see that it has active cooling with a single fan nestled under the exhaust vents on the bottom of the machine, with some of the copper in the cooling subsystem also peeking through. We also see three exhaust ports on the base of the machine facing toward the screen.

Acer hasn't shared pricing yet, but we certainly expect this system to land in the "and up" part of the expected Snapdragon C Platform's "$300 and up" target market.

Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon C Platform today in the runup to Computex 2026. The Snapdragon C (Compute) Platform will power budget laptops designed to compete in the the $300 range, and features a processor based on a custom variant of its Kryo chip architecture that was originally designed for mobile phones. The platform is designed to slot in under the company's higher-performance Snapdragon X chips and runs Windows on Arm, but it notably features an NPU for local AI workloads in this low price tier, whereas most Windows-based Copilot+ laptops with an NPU fall into a higher price tier. However, while the platform supports local AI processing, Qualcomm did confirm that Snapdragon C will not support Copilot+.

Given its low price point, it isn't surprising that the Snapdragon C Platform addresses light workloads for families, small businesses, and students. Utilizing a customized Kyro architecture tailors the chip for long battery life and cool operation, which hints at the option for fanless designs.

While the company hasn't shared any meaningful details about the chip or laptop specifications, we do have a few details from Acer's announcement of its Aspire Go 15 based on the new platform. The Aspire Go 15 will feature 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, though it is unclear if that will represent the high watermark for the new platform. Qualcomm did say that we should expect limited RAM capacity due to increasing memory pricing, a side-effect of the ongoing shortages.

Naturally, at around $300, these chips will compete with Chromebooks powered by Intel's N-Series and Mediatek's Kompanio series. AMD also competes in this pricing tier with its Medocino processors.

“As costs rise and customer expectations evolve, Snapdragon C brings together value oriented computing, all-day battery life, AI capabilities and responsive performance in cool-quiet devices for expanded platform choice,” said Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm's SVP and GM of Compute and Gaming. “We’re delivering modern computing experiences that help our ecosystem reach new audiences and expanding access to reliable, efficient technology for students, families, customer-facing small businesses, and beyond.”

Acer, HP, and Lenovo will launch new laptops based on the chips, but haven't shared firm specifications or launch dates. Qualcomm says it will reveal more details during its Computex 2026 keynote.

Clearly, the affordability and quality of design that Apple’s MacBook Neo delivers struck a nerve with Windows device makers. First, we heard about Intel’s competing low-cost Core Series 3 (Wildcat Lake) platform, and now Qualcomm is jumping in on the low-cost game as well, with the Snapdragon C Platform, announcing first in Acer’s Acer Aspire Go 15.

As of this writing, we know next to nothing about the specs of the Snapdragon C (it’s even unclear whether or not there will be more than one chip). Qualcomm has revealed that the Snapdragon C devices will be priced at $300 and up. But according to Acer’s press release, its Acer Aspire Go 15 will sport a Snapdragon C processor, and sell for a non-specific “entry-tier price point” at an even less-specific “later date.”

But we do have a few photos of the new laptops, and Acer is clearly taking jabs at Apple with the proclamation that its laptop sports “dual full-function USB Type-C ports and an HDMI port.” You’ll also get twice the storage of the baseline Apple Neo, at 512GB, but you’ll have to live with 8GB of RAM, just like, well, probably all entry-level laptops at this point – at least until someone tries to get away with 4GB again.

The Aspire Go 15 will run Windows 11 Home, have a 1920 x 1080 (16:9) display, a 1080p webcam, and a 53 Wh battery. Interestingly, the laptop will still sport a Copilot key, despite just 8GB of RAM. And at least in Acer’s announcement, there’s no mention of TOPSs. Something might have changed since 2024, but Qualcomm has seperately confirmed that Snapdragon C will not support Copilot+.

The Swift Spin 14 AI is a convertible, not a modern washing machine setting

The other Qualcomm-based laptop that Acer is announcing at Computex combines two of its sub-brands, the Swift and the Spin, resulting in the Swift Spin 14 AI. Rather than the most-marketed setting on a 2026-model Maytag washer, the Swift Spin 14 AI is a convertible laptop powered by either a Snapdragon X2 Elite, or an X2 Plus processor, both with 80 TOPS of local AI capabilities. So this model will be decidedly pricier than the Aspire Go 15.

With up to 12 CPU cores, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage, its 65 Wh battery is said to deliver up to 23 hours of video playback, or 16.5 hours of web browsing. The cobalt blue aluminum shell certainly stands out, and the included 100W PD adapter should make for very fast charging.

The 16:10 IPS display delivers 1920 x 1200 resolution at a rating of 300 nits, and the laptop makes room for an internally stored stylus, while weighing in at 2.95 pounds. Price had yet to be determined at the time of writing, but Acer says the Swift Spin 14 AI will be available in starting in July Europe, Middle East, and Africa, in August in North America, and a less-specific Q3 in Australia.

If you’ve been paying close attention over the past year and change, you’ll quickly learn that while PC gaming is clearly struggling from apocalyptic component pricing, players are slowly looking to alternative platforms and operating systems to play games on. Valve’s Steam Deck is a primary cause for this success and has spawned a breed of x86-based handheld devices over the past few years. While Sony is reportedly developing its own handheld, Valve has been hard at work developing its own hardware ecosystem, or at least trying to, no thanks to the ongoing DRAM and NAND pricing devastation.

Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame will make use of an ARM-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, notably differing from the x86-based chips inside the now four-year-old Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine. Alongside choosing an Arm-based chip for its upcoming VR headset, the company has been quietly contributing to a translation layer named FEX.

What is FEX?

FEX or FEX-Emu, translates raw x86 instructions into ARM64 instructions, with Proton handling the software and OS-level translations from Windows into something that can be understood by Linux. When FEX and Proton work in tandem, it means that Arm-based chips could very well run many “full-fat” games stored in your Steam Library.

Valve has been funding the development of FEX for years, which is, in itself, open source. As such, over the past year or so, development has started on getting FEX up and running on Android-based devices. One such example is GameNative, a slick open-source app that can tap into your Steam Library and allow you to make use of FEX (and Proton) to run games. There are additional apps that perform similar functions, such as GameSir’s Gamehub, which is a closed-source alternative that, in late 2025, came under fire for its capture of sensitive user telemetry data. So, be sure to research these options wisely if you want to try something like this out for yourself.

So, with that all in mind, let’s try to push current Android hardware to its limits and see just how well FEX is shaping up.

Setup

Of course, many Android devices might not be up to the task of running AAA, x86-based games. As it happens, I was shopping for a new Android tablet, and lucked out finding a deal on a used RedMagic Astra Gaming tablet, which is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 4 SoC, Adreno 830 GPU, and 24 GB of LPDDR5T RAM. The device is also equipped with active cooling, which is a rarity in smaller Android tablets.

It should be noted that Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chips are rolling out in the Android ecosystem, but availability remains limited in the U.S. With a decently powerful Android device in hand, it’ll serve as a good testbed to see exactly how (and if) current hardware on portable ARM-based devices is capable of running demanding games.

GameNative’s APK is available directly from their GitHub repository, and installation was simple: Once the app was installed, all I had to do was log into my Steam account, and voila, my entire library was available to choose from. The gamepad-friendly interface allows you to select from “Compatible” titles, and with that flicked on, I was able to view exactly which titles might play nicely with the RedMagic Astra.

For this test, I wanted to test a handful of AAA gaming titles to see how well they might run and to get a good understanding of how these titles can perform on modern hardware. For a baseline, Cyberpunk 2077 (RED Engine), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Unreal Engine 5), and Resident Evil 3 (RE Engine) all serve as solid showcases to see how well these games might run. Resident Evil 3’s remake is an older RE Engine title, but given my Steam Library's lack of newer Capcom titles, it’ll just have to do.

Stalled boot

With Cyberpunk 2077 installed on the device, GameNative automatically chooses the best configurations for you and then pulls all of your Steam Cloud data to sync things up. This part of the process took a while, which is (what I presume to be) the sheer number of save files on my particular Steam Cloud variant. But it dutifully whittled away at downloading all of the required files to get Cyberpunk off the ground. And then… Nothing. Cyberpunk 2077 crashed to a halt. It took some tinkering with graphics drivers and Proton versions, then running a driver test to see if everything lined up.

Afterwards, I managed to finally load Cyberpunk 2077. Given that we want to run this as more of a proof-of-concept, rather than testing the silicon to its limits from the start, I immediately went to the settings menu and put everything on low, with FSR 2 off. After loading a save in a dense urban area, the game hangs, and seemingly nothing I did managed to solve that particular problem. Onwards, I pushed to the next title, undeterred.

Playable perfomance

Resident Evil 3, by contrast, offered a much smoother experience when running the title at 720p. With settings locked in and the application allowed to access the large RAM pool of the RedMagic Astra, I was able to play the introductory segments of the title with little to no issue. That should come as little surprise to anyone who knows that Capcom’s RE Engine scales incredibly well with lower-end devices, especially if they are limited in scope, such as Resident Evil 3 – I wouldn’t chance running a heavier, open-map title like Monster Hunter: Wilds on here so soon.

With the game up and running, I then pushed the image quality with settings set to prefer performance, with no upscaling. Resident Evil 3 stayed at a steady 40- 60 FPS for most of the introductory segment, and only when dealing with more challenging scenes with multiple light sources and particle effects did our frames begin to drop to lows of around 27 FPS. That’s still playable, though not quite offering a perfect experience, and some subjectivity comes into play. Following this, testing the ‘Prefer Graphics’ preset with no upscaling, we reached a range of 25-42 FPS, which is again, more than playable enough for a single-player title. While you’re not going to get that ideal 60 FPS target, the game also doesn’t look like you’re playing it through a vaseline filter, which is a plus.

With Resident Evil 3 producing solid results, I marched on to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This Unreal Engine 5-based title was a tricky one to get up and running. Firstly, I had to set the lowest possible internal resolution, then select the correct drivers to get things set up. Following that, we were in the game. But there was one glaring issue: Image quality. The selected graphics driver (nor any other combination) actually yielded anything that remotely looked like Clair Obscur, with textures going haywire and environments missing some textures entirely. This one was a total, unplayable mess; even measuring its performance would have been a waste of time. So, what’s going on under the hood, and why is performance so variable between titles?

Fractured configurations

To understand why individual titles run so differently is to understand that each game runs a wholly different engine. CD Projekt Red’s RED Engine has proven to scale to systems like the Steam Deck and Switch 2, but performance in-game on the RedMagic Astra has yet to match either a Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch 2 in image quality.

For Expedition 33’s Unreal Engine 5, this is a complicated nightmare. The CPU translation layer, in addition to DirectX12’s VKD3D translation, is what’s causing things to not load correctly, such as DX12’s mesh shaders. To put things simply, there’s a complex stack of operations required to run things smoothly, and when those graphical pipelines get as complex as a modern title, like Clair Obscur, the house of cards begins to fall down.

This isn’t a problem for Resident Evil 3’s RE Engine, which uses a lighter and cleaner implementation of DirectX12, especially when compared to Unreal Engine 5. You also have the option to launch with the DirectX 11-based DXVK, which, in itself, is much easier for a translation layer to handle than the more complicated VKD3D. The caveat here is that you’ll have to access a different legacy beta branch to enable that, as the main branch of the title forces DirectX 12.

Worsening things is the fact that so much of this support relies on community-developed graphics drivers, most notably, custom “Turnip” drivers, based on the open-source Linux Mesa project, which patches Vulkan extensions that are actively still being reverse-engineered by the developers. These optimizations get missed by the official Qualcomm system drivers, which are closed-source. Therefore, as demonstrated in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, when Turnip drivers are met with complex shader pipelines from UE5, the GPU driver can fail to render geometry correctly, even if the title boots.

Many titles that do not require the usage of such demanding graphical pipelines can work without breaking much of a sweat: So, if you’re missing out on Slay the Spire, or Hollow Knight: Silksong, those titles are demonstrably stable using FEX and emulator apps like GameNative. For our tests, we wanted to see how FEX handled complex shaders, graphics, and modern “big-budget” experiences.

Where does this leave FEX?

In and of itself, FEX is an ongoing project, and we’re not going to see major miracles happen overnight when it comes to elements out of the project’s scope, such as Qualcomm’s development of official drivers that officially support mainstream games.

Qualcomm’s mobile chips were built strictly to run mobile apps and games, meaning that adding the wrinkle of supporting elements like desktop-level Vulkan instructions is a use case they simply never really considered supporting before. If the company wants to capitalize on the work being done by the FEX team, Qualcomm-based chips must also come with similar levels of support as desktop graphics drivers, and the likelihood of that happening is quite slim indeed. As of the time of writing, community drivers for specific titles can enhance the experience of some titles, if you're willing to go to those lengths.

While the efforts of FEX-Emu and its complex, layered translation to get things running are indeed impressive, you’re not about to be able to take your whole Steam Library with you anywhere, until there’s more maturation of these applications and the community-made drivers (potentially with the help of a company like Valve) to create workarounds, or dedicated drivers. For now, it’s still too early to start throwing FEX out as a feature in a mainstream product until all of those rougher edges, like driver support, are smoothed off for end-users. Anyway, my tablet’s back to being relegated to being a very fancy comic-book reader again until the entire software pipeline has matured.

Just several months after leaving Qualcomm, distinguished CPU and system architects Gerard Williams, John Bruno, and Ram Srinivasan, who are celebrated for their high-performance processors developed at Apple, Nuvia, and, more recently, Qualcomm, established a new CPU startup — Nuvacore — that promises no less than to 'rewrite the rules of silicon.' The new general-purpose CPU core set to be developed by Nuvacore is projected to excel in all data center AI workloads, and the motto of the new company is 'Engineered for Altitude.'

"For decades, the semiconductor industry has been dominated by an 'old guard,' titans of tech that design for the ground, iterating on yesterday's architecture," a statement by Nuvacore reads. "But as artificial intelligence and core infrastructure demands skyrocket, iteration is no longer enough."

Based on the description on Nuvacore's website, the company is developing a new general-purpose CPU core designed from scratch for data center and AI infrastructure, and the key focus of the all-new design is maximizing performance and area efficiency. The new high-throughput core will be optimized to efficiently sustain long-running, compute-intensive tasks, including always-on workloads such as advanced AI systems and agentic computing. The startup is funded by Sequoia Capital.

One would notice that all modern server CPUs are explicitly designed for 24/7 operation, high utilization, and long-running workloads. Sustained quality-of-service (i.e., performance and latency), reliability, and efficiency under continuous load are compulsory characteristics in the data center. However, Nuvacore positions its upcoming design as one optimized for AI-heavy, continuously saturated environments, not just general-purpose server CPUs.

Whether that translates into something materially different from existing CPUs is an open question, as the statement itself looks more like marketing than a fundamentally new characteristic of a data center processor. Perhaps, the design will be very clean and feature optimizations for working alongside AI accelerators, and/or special features to handle vast amounts of data common for AI systems.

One thing Nuvacore does not disclose is the instruction set architecture of its upcoming CPUs. Arm is certainly among the options, particularly because many hyperscalers use custom Arm-based processors for their emerging AI workloads.

Gerard Williams III is renowned for his high-performance breakthrough 64-bit Arm-based CPU cores for Apple iPhone and iPad, as well as Mac computers spanning from the Cyclone generation in 2013 (Apple A7, iPhone 5S) all the way to the Firestorm generation (M1-series CPUs, A14 application processors). At Apple, Gerard Williams worked closely with John Bruno, who was responsible for system architecture; Ram Srinivasan, a specialist in system-on-chip architecture; and Manu Gulati, who was the lead SoC architect for multiple iPhone and iPad generations from 2009 to 2017.

Having developed multiple generations of successful client platforms, Williams, Bruno, and Gulati founded Nuvia to develop high-performance Arm-based data center-grade CPU cores. Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm in 2021 with the aim of using its technologies primarily for client applications, though it is highly likely that eventually architectures developed by the ex-Nuvia team will be used for the company's data center products.

Now, Williams, Bruno, and Srinivasan plan to develop an all-new clean-sheet general-purpose CPU design specifically for 'intense, continuous demands of advanced AI systems and agentic computing.' Perhaps it is about time now that most hyperscalers have their own custom silicon programs aimed at developing compute platforms aimed specifically at diverse AI workloads. All of these companies, already investing tens of billions of dollars in their AI infrastructure, will be tremendously interested in getting their hands on a clean-sheet CPU core design better tailored for AI than general-purpose competitors.

In an unexpected turn of events, Kevin O'Buckley, the head of Intel Foundry, decided to jump ship for Qualcomm after just two years at the company. From now on, Intel Foundry will be headed by Naga Chandrasekaran, who was previously in charge of front-end process technology development and manufacturing.

"We thank Kevin O'Buckley for his contributions to Foundry Services and wish him the very best as he pursues an opportunity outside the company," an Intel spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "Intel Foundry remains one of Intel's highest strategic priorities, and under Naga Chandrasekaran's leadership the organization is focused on disciplined execution and delivering for customers."

As Chief Technology and Operations Officer as well as the head of Intel Foundry, Chandrasekaran now oversees both development of advanced process technologies and day-to-day execution of Intel's global manufacturing network, a role that Intel previously lacked as both O'Buckley and Stuart Pann before him were responsible for day-to-day execution and expansion efforts, but not development of advanced fabrication technologies.

By contrast, Chandrasekaran is in charge of creating and rolling out next-generation silicon logic nodes, advanced packaging solutions, and test technologies, while also supervising front-end wafer fabrication and back-end assembly and packaging operations worldwide. In addition, Chandrasekaran leads Intel Foundry's customer engagement and ecosystem initiatives, as well as strategic planning, corporate quality and reliability programs, and the company’s supply chain operations. In short, he runs the technology roadmap and the factories.

As executive vice president and chief technology and operations officer of Intel Foundry, Naga Chandrasekaran has been in charge of Intel Foundry and Foundry Services since September, so making him the GM of the whole Intel Foundry organization looks like a logical move for Intel. Naga Chandrasekaran was previously the head of technology and operations at Intel Foundry, overseeing front-end process technology development and manufacturing. In this capacity, he was already in charge of both the Technology Development (TD) group and the Foundry Manufacturing and Supply Chain (FMSC) organization, which he has been overseeing since mid-2024.

Navid Shahriari will continue to be responsible for packaging development and operations at Intel Foundry.

As for O’Buckley, he will be executive vice president in charge of Qualcomm's Global Operations and Supply Chain and will lead the company's worldwide chip production activities, overseeing manufacturing engineering, relationships with contract manufacturers, and component vendors. O'Buckley will report directly to Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm’s executive vice president, CFO and COO. After spending seven years at IBM Microelectronics and GlobalFoundries and then a little less than two years at Intel Foundry, O'Buckley will now supervise how Qualcomm turns its designs into finished silicon.

Whether or not Intel Foundry will produce any of Qualcomm's future designs is something that remains to be seen.

It's perfectly normal to consider that Nvidia and AMD are the only players in the AI accelerator space, at least for the time being. Other marques want a slice of that pie, though, and Qualcomm is among them. The Snapdragon maker has finally scored a big deployment, installing 1,024 AI100 chips in Saudi Arabia's Humain outfit, its CEO announced. There's only one slight issue, though: AI100 unveiled in 2019, and is looking pretty old by today's standards.

The AI100 has been available as a drop-in card since mid-2023, but its architecture is now about six years old. Although at the time it was a promising design banking on power efficiency for inference tasks, it's a pretty tough sell today as its small memory capacity (only 128 GB in the Ultra variant) limits the size of the models it can run — reportedly only those with up to 32B parameters. In 2026 terms, that's peanuts, as contemporary reasoning models use tens of times that amount.

As far as we could tell, Humain's deployment is the very first one at scale for Qualcomm's wares, possibly signaling that the U.S. company is exceedingly late to the party and more than a few dollars short. Even still, the AI100 racks must have some redeeming qualities for Humain to have bought them. Since latest-gen chips are on back order for at least months if not years, and every slab of silicon is being hoovered by the likes of OpenAI, Oracle, et al, perhaps Humain opted to go with what it could actually get its hands on, even if it's old hardware.

The Saudi outfit announced partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm in May 2025. Said announcements earmarked 18,000 of Nvidia's GB300 Grace Blackwell accelerators, and 500 MW worth of compute capacity from AMD wares. Adobe is reportedly Humain's first AI datacenter customer, so one might hypothesize that the Qualcomm AI100 accelerators are fine for basic image-fill and generation tasks. For its part, Qualcomm has already announced its AI200 chip for late 2026 and AI250 for 2027. Let's hope the timeline actually sticks this time around.

Among semiconductor companies, Intel has always been the biggest one both in terms of revenue and in terms of headcount. However, following massive layoffs at Intel in recent years, TSMC has by now outpaced Intel as the world’s biggest semiconductor employer. While Intel is still an exceptionally huge semiconductor company that employs more people than AMD, Nvidia, and Arm combined, the moment when TSMC becomes bigger than Intel from a headcount point of view represents a milestone for the industry.

85,100 employees after years of cuts

Intel employed 85,100 people as of December 27, 2025, following substantial job cuts at Intel in 2024 and colossal job cuts in 2025. TSMC had 83,825 full-time employees serving in various capacities as of December 31, 2024, following years of aggressive hiring amid expansions overseas as well as building out new production capacity in Taiwan. As of December 31, 2025, TSMC employed 90,557 people, according to its Annual Report the company published this week, which is nearly 7,000 full-time employees more than a year before, therefore surpassing Intel as the biggest employer in the semiconductor industry.

To put the numbers into context, AMD had approximately 31,000 of full-time employees (FTE) in the end of 2025, Nvidia employed around 36,000 people full time at the end of its fiscal 2025 (i.e., calendar 2024), Qualcomm had about 52,000 employees on its payroll as of September, 2025, Apple exited its fiscal year 2025 with 166,000 full-time equivalent employees, whereas Arm had roughly 8,330 FTEs as of March 31, 2025. All of these companies have been hiring aggressively in recent years as they have benefited greatly from the increased demand for semiconductors amid the AI and cloud data centers expansions. This makes Intel one of a few semiconductor companies that have been aggressively reducing their headcount in 2024 – 2025.

It should be noted that comparing Intel to other companies in the industry is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Intel is among a few remaining integrated design manufacturers (IDMs) and is the only IDM that still produces chips on a leading-edge process technology in-house. By contrast, TSMC is the world's largest contract chipmaker that certainly runs more fabs and packaging facilities than Intel at this point, so the number of its employees shows how vast its manufacturing operations are. Yet, TSMC does not develop its own products. AMD, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm develop very competitive products, but they do not conduct any in-house manufacturing, so they do not have appropriate personnel.

One may argue that Intel employs way too many people in terms of such metrics as revenue per employee. That being said, Intel maintains and operates multiple fabs and packaging facilities across the world (something none of its direct rivals do these days, except TSMC); it has vast R&D operation as it develops process technologies (again, only TSMC does it among its rivals), it designs multiple products, and it also happens to develop technologies that become industry standards. Although Nvidia designs vertically integrated data center platforms, whereas AMD tends to adhere to industry standards, Intel does plenty of fundamental work behind things like DDR, PCIe, USB, and Thunderbolt, just to mention a few technologies.

Intel still spends more than AMD and TSMC on R&D

Intel's spending on research and development (R&D) illustrates how many projects the company handles at once, both on the foundry and on the products side. Even after a sharp cut of R&D expenses in fiscal 2025, Intel spent $13.8 billion on R&D, which is more than AMD, TSMC, Qualcomm, or TSMC did. Nvidia yet has to report its FY2026 results — which roughly correspond to calendar 2025 — and while it will likely leave Intel behind, this will be the first time ever. Of course, the company has been outspent by Apple since 2018, but Apple spends a lot on development of actual products, so this is again not an apples-to-apples comparison.

For obvious reasons, after cutting approximately 40 thousand positions in two years, it is hard to expect Intel to keep R&D investments at its 2025 level. Along with people, dozens of projects have either been shut down or merged with others, so the company's R&D expenses will be reduced further in 2026. At this point, we can only wonder whether Intel's R&D budget for this year will match that of AMD and TSMC, or will still remain ahead of both companies.

To some degree, R&D spending is a good benchmark that shows the financial health of the company. However, it also gives an idea of where the company is going in the next three to five years. In Intel's case, it must spend on the development of products that will be competitive with those from AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm in the latter half of the decade and early next decade. It must also spend on next-generation process technologies to stay competitive with TSMC.

Therefore, in the best-case scenario, Intel must spend more than AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and TSMC combined — like it used to do in 2014 – 2019 — to stay ahead of everyone. However, given the current situation (after Intel exited 5G, modem, 3D NAND, Optane, servers, and many other businesses), the company's R&D budget must be comparable to the combined R&D spending by AMD and TSMC, its two key rivals in the products and foundry realms. If Intel cannot properly fund R&D for its products and semiconductor production operations, it only remains to be seen whether the company retains its relevancy in the late 2020s and the early 2030s.

The talk of the town in the world of AI right now is almost exclusively about the amounts of money shifting from one company to the next, but the latest event might have farther-reaching effects than most business deals. Eric Demers, who designed ATI's best GPUs and spearheaded almost all of Qualcomm's Adreno designs, has now joined Intel's GPU team "with a focus on AI."

The blue team's GPU efforts are all but guaranteed to be significantly bolstered by Demers, a particularly welcome development in these troubled times for the company. According to Moor Insights and Strategy, this move is "bigger than people realize", as "[Demers] is an executive, but also he is a GPU architect, of which there are not that many that are at the level that he is at because he can basically build a GPU architecture from the ground up.”

Although so far Intel has been quiet on the exact wording of his new position, the reports so far predictably indicate that Demers will be in charge of designing AI accelerator GPUs, much to the chagrin of hopeful gamers who would like to see Intel's Arc series get an influx of brainpower.

Nvidia and AMD's accelerators are the first ports of call for datacenter-grade AI chips, and Intel wants in on that action, having produced three generations of Gaudi accelerators. The last one, Gaudi 3, is from 2024 and was presented as a more affordable alternative to Nvidia's now-aging H100. Gaudi is set to be superseded in the coming years by Falcon Shores and Jaguar Shores chips. The Shores silicon will exist alongside Crescent Island, a bespoke design for inference tasks.

The chip architect knows GPUs from the first transistor to the video outputs, having spent most of career designing them for AMD (formerly ATI), and Qualcomm in the past 14 years. His designs live in millions of smartphones right now as part of Snapdragon chips, and he was the lead architect for ATI's R300 and R600 series. For those who remember the names, he was at Silicon Graphics and even Matrox during his early years.

The R300 is fondly remembered by any techie in the early 2000s in the form of the Radeon 9700 and 9500 series that delivered a one-two punch to Nvidia's offerings of the time, namely the much-maligned FX 5800, known still today as the Dustbuster. When AMD absorbed ATI, Demers became the company's graphics Chief Technical Officer, a position he held until 2012 when he joined Qualcomm, and now Intel in 2026. Reports of loud expletives heard from Nvidia's offices are as of yet unconfirmed.

Qualcomm has acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a RISC-V CPU specialist whose engineers have spent several years pushing the open instruction set toward high-performance server and edge designs. The deal brings Ventana’s core CPU talent in-house just as Qualcomm is broadening its compute ambitions well beyond smartphones, balancing Arm-based designs with a growing interest in RISC-V as AI continues to disrupt, well, everything.

Qualcomm is in the middle of expanding Oryon, its custom CPU architecture that debuted in Snapdragon X Elite and underpins its push into data center accelerators, Windows PCs, and automotive compute platforms. Adding Ventana gives Qualcomm direct access to a mature RISC-V design team, rather than relying solely on internal experimentation or third-party IP, and it does so as customers across all markets are asking questions about long-term architectural flexibility.

RISC-V as a hedge

Qualcomm executives have said publicly that the company is capable of building high-performance CPUs on RISC-V if it chooses to do so. The Ventana acquisition turns that assertion into reality, as the company’s work has focused on scalable, out-of-order RISC-V cores with features expected in enterprise-class CPUs, including coherent interconnects and virtualization support. Folding that expertise into Qualcomm reduces the friction of turning RISC-V from a research effort into a deployment-ready option.

None of this is to say that Qualcomm is abandoning Arm, though. The duo’s relationship remains central to its smartphone and PC businesses, and Arm-based cores will continue to dominate shipping volumes in the near term, but roadmap alignment and geopolitical risk have become more visible considerations for large chipmakers. RISC-V offers a way to diversify architectural exposure without committing to a clean break, something that, for Qualcomm, offers value even if RISC-V volumes ramp gradually.

Ultimately, RISC-V has moved past its early microcontroller roots and is now entrenched in storage controllers, networking gear, industrial controllers, and an increasing share of automotive silicon. Competition within the ecosystem is intensifying as major vendors seek influence over extensions, toolchains, and software support. Owning a credible in-house CPU team gives Qualcomm leverage in those conversations and reduces dependence on external roadmaps.

Industrial and automotive momentum

Outside consumer devices, RISC-V is becoming mainstream in areas that value long product lifecycles and architectural stability, like industrial control systems and embedded platforms. Qualcomm has been expanding its presence in these markets through its IoT and industrial compute groups, and deeper RISC-V capabilities will help it compete against vendors that already ship large volumes of RISC-V silicon.

The automotive sector is following a similar trajectory, with software-defined vehicles driving consolidation of compute functions into centralized platforms. Automakers in particular are increasingly sensitive to licensing costs and supply chain risk — as we saw during the chip shortage of 2020 to 2023, and more recently with the Nexperia-China drama — which is leading them to prepare RISC-V-based compute platforms for systems like infotainment and ADAS.

Speaking of China, customers in the region who are facing uncertainty around access to certain Arm-based products have become more receptive to RISC-V as a neutral alternative. That demand shift has contributed to a rapid increase in RISC-V investment and product development across the region. While Qualcomm does not need to tailor products exclusively for China to benefit from that momentum, having strong RISC-V capabilities lowers barriers to participation in markets where openness and local control are being increasingly prioritized.

Where Oryon and AI intersect

One of the more interesting implications of the deal is the intersection of RISC-V flexibility and AI workloads. As AI inference spreads across edge and embedded devices, the line between CPU, GPU, and NPU responsibilities is blurring. In certain classes of workloads, especially control-heavy or sparsely parallel tasks, a well-designed CPU can approach accelerator-class efficiency when paired with the right extensions and memory architecture.

RISC-V’s modularity makes it very attractive in this context, with custom extensions allowing vendors to tailor cores for specific inference patterns without waiting for standardization cycles. Qualcomm’s Oryon CPUs are already positioned as high-performance general-purpose cores optimized for AI-adjacent workloads. Integrating Ventana’s RISC-V expertise creates room for parallel exploration, where RISC-V designs could complement Oryon in products that prioritize consolidation of compute over raw peak throughput.

This does not imply that Qualcomm plans to replace NPUs with RISC-V CPUs, or to collapse its architecture stack into a single design. Instead, it reflects a broader industry trend toward heterogeneous compute, where CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators are selected based on workload characteristics. Having both Oryon and RISC-V options will give Qualcomm more freedom to potentially tune that mix across product categories.

A maturing ecosystem

Skepticism around RISC-V has often centered on ecosystem maturity, particularly software and tooling, but that argument is becoming harder to sustain. RISC-V is now present across cloud and edge computing, and while mass-market consumer devices remain dominated by Arm and x86, many emerging application domains already include RISC-V deployments. Toolchains and OS support have improved substantially, driven by commercial demand, but they still remain behind what’s available for Arm and x86.

Qualcomm’s decision to acquire Ventana, however, fits nicely within RISC-V’s general upward trajectory, apparently timed to coincide with expanding addressable markets and a clearer picture of customer demand. Ventana’s team brings immediate engineering expertise, while Qualcomm provides scale, manufacturing access, and integration experience across multiple industries.

In that sense, the acquisition can be seen as Qualcomm preparing for the inevitable and ongoing reshaping of compute requirements by AI. Customers will seek greater control over their silicon roadmaps in response, making architectural flexibility a competitive offering. By deepening its RISC-V capabilities while continuing to invest in Oryon and Arm-based designs, it appears that Qualcomm hopes to pivot around that transition with fewer bottlenecks.

Korea's Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has carried out an on-site investigation of Arm's office in Seoul, according to a report published by The Korea Times. The article cites unnamed sources — which is standard practice for the publication — and says the raid is tied to allegations of unfair market practices involving Arm's long-running licensing dispute with Qualcomm. The KFTC declined to comment on the report.

According to the report, the investigation focuses on whether Arm has improperly limited access to its chip-architecture technologies after years of maintaining a more open and widely accessible licensing model. The inquiry reportedly stems from a complaint Qualcomm filed in March with antitrust authorities in Korea, the United States, the European Union, and other jurisdictions. Qualcomm alleges that Arm restricted it from continuing to use licenses originally held by Nuvia, the custom-CPU startup Qualcomm acquired in 2021 that is responsible for the design of its powerful Snapdragon X Elite processors and their soon-to-be-released successors.

The licensing battle between the two companies has been underway for more than three years. It began when Arm terminated Nuvia's Architecture License Agreement (ALA) shortly after the acquisition, arguing that Qualcomm needed to renegotiate the license to continue using Nuvia's custom-core designs. Qualcomm countered that its own longstanding Arm architecture license allowed it to develop and use the Nuvia technology without any new agreement.

In September, Qualcomm won a decisive victory in U.S. federal court. The judge affirmed a jury finding that Qualcomm's use of Nuvia-derived technology was covered under its existing Arm license and rejected Arm's remaining claims, shutting down Arm's attempt to block Qualcomm from using the designs. Arm has said it intends to appeal the ruling, but legal wins do not resolve the broader commercial and regulatory tensions around Arm's licensing practices.

Qualcomm itself filed a separate lawsuit against Arm earlier this year, accusing the company of withholding required technical deliverables, interfering with Qualcomm's customer relationships, and attempting to shift its business model in ways that disadvantage existing licensees. In that suit, Qualcomm argues that Arm's recent conduct represents a departure from its traditional role as a neutral technology supplier.

Regulators appear to be paying attention. Korea is home to several major Arm licensees — including Samsung, both a rival and a large partner for Qualcomm — and the country's antitrust authorities have a history of aggressive enforcement in cases involving global technology suppliers. An on-site inspection typically signals that regulators have found the complaint credible enough to warrant closer scrutiny, though it does not indicate any preliminary finding of wrongdoing.

Whether the KFTC probe will broaden into a deeper multinational regulatory investigation remains unclear, and Arm has not yet issued public comment on the Korea Times report. Qualcomm, for its part, has been escalating its complaints worldwide following the court victory, seeking to frame Arm's behavior as a systemic issue rather than a contractual dispute limited to Nuvia's chips.

For now, the Korea Times report adds only one concrete data point: Korean regulators are taking at least an initial look. With Arm's appeal pending in the U.S., Qualcomm's countersuit still underway, and multiple antitrust agencies reviewing the allegations, the global fight over Arm's licensing model isn't close to finished. As more filings surface and regulators weigh in, the full scope of the conflict as well as its implications for the broader Arm ecosystem will become clearer in the months ahead.

Qualcomm on Monday formally announced two upcoming AI inference accelerators — the AI200 and AI250 — that will hit the market in 2026 and 2027. The new accelerators are said to compete against rack-scale solutions from AMD and Nvidia with improved efficiency and lower operational costs when running large-scale generative AI workloads. The announcement also reaffirms Qualcomm's plan to release updated products on a yearly cadence.

Both Qualcomm AI200 and AI250 accelerators are based on Qualcomm Hexagon neural processing units (NPUs) customized for data center AI workloads. The company has been gradually improving its Hexagon NPUs in the recent years, so the latest versions of these processors already feature scalar, vector, and tensor accelerators (in a 12+8+1 configuration), support such data formats as INT2, INT4, INT8, INT16, FP8, FP16, micro-tile inferencing to reduce memory traffic, 64-bit memory addressing, virtualization, and Gen AI model encryption for extra security. Scaling Hexagon for data center workloads is a natural choice for Qualcomm, though it remains to be seen what performance targets the company will set for its AI200 and AI250 units.

Qualcomm's AI200 rack-scale solutions will be the company's first data-center-grade inference system powered by AI200 accelerators with 768 GB of LPDDR memory onboard (which is a lot of memory for an inference accelerator) that will use PCIe interconnects for scale-up and Ethernet for scale-out scalability. The system will use direct liquid cooling and a power envelope of 160 kW per rack, which is also an unprecedented power consumption for inference solutions. In addition, the system will support confidential computing for enterprise deployments. The solution will be available in 2026.

The AI250, launching a year later, keeps this structure but adds a near-memory compute architecture to boost effective memory bandwidth by over 10 times. In addition, the system will support disaggregated inference capability that enables compute and memory resources to be dynamically shared across cards. Qualcomm positions it as a more efficient, high-bandwidth solution optimized for large transformer models, while preserving the same thermal, cooling, security, and scalability characteristics as the AI200.

"With Qualcomm AI200 and AI250, we’re redefining what’s possible for rack-scale AI inference," said Durga Malladi, SVP & GM, Technology Planning, Edge Solutions & Data Center, Qualcomm Technologies. "These innovative new AI infrastructure solutions empower customers to deploy generative AI at unprecedented TCO, while maintaining the flexibility and security modern data centers demand."

In addition to building hardware platforms, Qualcomm is also building a hyperscaler-grade, end-to-end software platform optimized for large-scale inference. The platform is set to support major ML and generative AI toolsets — including PyTorch, ONNX, vLLM, LangChain, and CrewAI to while enabling seamless model deployment. The software stack will support disaggregated serving, confidential computing, and one-click onboarding of pre-trained models to simplify deployment.

"Our rich software stack and open ecosystem support make it easier than ever for developers and enterprises to integrate, manage, and scale already trained AI models on our optimized AI inference solutions," said Malladi. "With seamless compatibility for leading AI frameworks and one-click model deployment, Qualcomm AI200 and AI250 are designed for frictionless adoption and rapid innovation."

One crucial aspect about its AI200 and AI250 rack-scale solutions for inference that Qualcomm did not disclose is which processors these machines will run. The company formally began development of its own data center-grade CPUs earlier this year. While some CPU microarchitecture groundwork has probably been done by the Nuvia team before that, it is still going to take about a year to define and develop logical design, then at least six months to implement the design and tape it out, then months to bring the chip up and sample it. In short, it is reasonable to expect Qualcomm's in-house CPUs to emerge in late 2027, but rather in 2028. That said, at least the AI200 is poised to use an off-the-shelf Arm or x86 CPU, so the question is, which one?

China's regulatory body for business, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMD), has announced an antitrust investigation is now under, looking into the purchase of Israeli connected-vehicle technology company, Autotalks, by Qualcomm earlier this year, according to Bloomberg. With the deal now months old and having cleared all regulatory approval in the U.S., this move is largely seen as a punitive measure towards America as part of the ongoing trade negotiations and ahead of the proposed meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping at the end of October.

U.S. and Chinese trade relations have been volatile throughout much of 2025. On-again, off-again tariffs and blocks on key materials like GPUs and rare earth minerals have soured relations and led to worsening trade conditions between the two countries. There's been a lot of posturing to go with the economic maneuvering, and as part of that, China has initiated several investigations into U.S. companies. It began with an antitrust investigation into Nvidia's purchase of networking hardware company, Mellanox, earlier this year. Now it's opening an investigation into another US company, and a key technology venture, Qualcomm.

The deal SAMD is keen to look into is Qualcomm's acquisition of Israeli connected car chip firm, AutoTalks. Qualcomm initially offered $350 million for the company in 2023, but following regulatory concerns, the deal ultimately fell apart in 2024. When AutoTalks struggled to find enough commercial partners for its technology, Qualcomm swept in again in July 2025 and offered a much lower, undisclosed bid, rumored to be somewhere south of $100 million.

SAMD claims the deal may fall afoul of China's anti-monopoly laws. Although the results of the investigation remain to be seen, it's a curious stance to take since Qualcomm and AutoTalks operate in entirely different industries. Indeed, Qualcomm's initial interest in AutoTalks was seen as a way to diversify its portfolio of businesses and open up new avenues for profit-making.

That's why much of the analyst opinion of this announcement has been leaning towards this being another attempt to sway ongoing and upcoming trade negotiations. With the U.S. and China continuing to discuss how to handle the sales of high-end GPUs for AI training and inference, and America's access to Chinese rare earth minerals, this investigation is a chip China has placed on the negotiating table. It could be withdrawn as a form of carrot to encourage favorable terms for China, or doubled down upon as a stick to extract further concessions from the Trump administration.

China's investigation into Nvidia's business dealings, as well as claims it installed tracking hardware in its GPUs, were seen as much the same. The tightened export controls on Chinese rare earth minerals China instigated this week, are thought likely to be moves to strengthen China's position during negotiations.

If you can't beat them, join them

The irony of all this is that China is pursuing an aggressive merger and acquisition (M&A) strategy of its own. Following the trade turbulence and supply chain disruption during the trade war between the US and China this year, Chinese companies have been pursuing strategic acquisitions in Southeast Asia to circularize supply chains and add additional resilience and redundancy to industries vulnerable to outside interference.

China relaxed M&A-related loan regulations for technology companies earlier this year and tried to force more localized hardware sourcing with requirements that data center firms source at least 50% of their chips from domestic sources. This has led to a 45% increase in M&A activity in mainland China over the first half of this year, according to SCMP, totalling $171.5 billion. There were also 29 individual deals worth more than a billion dollars, compared with just 17 last year. That's still less than the peak times between 2015 and 2021, where M&A activity was as high as $250 billion in each of those years, but shows a huge swing in Chinese policy.

Major investment targets for China include Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, all of which enjoy close proximity to China, shortening supply chains while enhancing Chinese supply line durability. This is all part of what companies are calling a "China+N" approach, where Chinese companies diversify their supply lines through a range of companies from different countries: "N." This is starkly different from the China+1 strategy, which sought to add at least one more international company to the supply chain.

It's not all plain sailing for Chinese companies, though. A drive towards having semiconductor tool-making companies merge to be more centralized stalled in late Summer due to difficulties matching company infrastructure and goals among the dozens of potentially merged firms.

Mergers can't account for American leads in certain fields, too. Although China is working hard to develop domestic AI hardware, its GPUs are years behind U.S. counterparts.

A multi-polar world

China's long-term strategy has certainly shifted in 2025, moving towards a more self-sufficient, Asia-first focus that is seeing it pull away from traditional American partners. This is largely down to trade disruption from the Trump administration's tariffs and punitive trade policies that were very adversarial in the first half of the year.

There were signs of the trade war cooling in recent months, with President Trump flip-flopping on his public opinions on China-linked Intel CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, and eventually allowing high-end GPUs to be sold to China. However, in recent weeks, the Chinese curbs on exports of rare earth minerals, these additional investigations, and tit-for-tat port fees have soured the relationship again.

There are now discussions of whether the planned trade talks between the two countries' leaders will happen at all at the end of October.

Although industries and governments no doubt hope for a return to tighter talks and negotiations, there does appear to be a global shift from a highly integrated worldwide economy to more of a multi-polar one. Global Bank and investment firm, Arc Group's September analysis suggests Europe, America, and Asia (with China at its heart) are all developing their own independent supply chains that are more locally resilient and less reliant on global cooperation.

If that proves true in the months and years to come, we may see more investigations into U.S. companies in further attempts to limit their activity and provide a stronger footing for their Chinese counterparts.

Recent AI market plays have produced all sorts of inter-company investments and flat-out acquisitions. Most of those are somewhat predictable, but occasionally an unexpected deal comes out of left field. Mobile chip giant Qualcomm is acquiring microcontroller expert Arduino for an undisclosed sum. Along with its acquisition, Qualcomm also announced a new Arduino Uno Q board and Arduino App Lab IDE software.

The chipmaker claims that buying Arduino allows it to deliver "a full-stack edge platform," or in other words, edge-device AI, with Arduino microcontrollers as the hardware piece of that puzzle. That would make a measure of sense, given Qualcomm's remarks that this acquisition should dovetail nicely with its acquisitions of the Edge Impulse IoT AI platform and IoT DevOps provider Foundries.io.

Since its founding in the mid-2000s, Arduino has grown to become the default option for anyone wanting an affordable microcontroller, thanks to the open-source design of the hardware and software. The devices spawned thousands of clones and an immense community that makes it exceedingly simple for newcomers to join in. The main distinction between an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi is the former is microcontroller based, the latter being a micro-computer. Though, Raspberry Pi has entered the microcontroller scene with its Raspberry Pi Pico, powered by its own RP2040 and RP2350 custom silicon.

The immediate question likely to be on most enthusiasts' minds, then, is what will happen to Arduino now that it's owned by one of the largest technology companies on the planet. For its part, Qualcomm states that Arduino will "preserve its open approach and community spirit" and "retain its independent brand, tools, and mission".

While that statement sounds good at face value, Qualcomm's (in)famous legal team might take umbrage with the amount of "-duino" clones out there. The Arduino ecosystem is a free-for-all (in a good way), and if Qualcomm adds any barriers to Arduino device usage, like forced product registrations or more restrictive licensing, that could put a significant chill on the project.

The devices themselves (and their clones) are ubiquitous and can be found most anywhere that sells electronic components and even big-box retailers. Any tightening of the supply chain or preferential resellers would also carry a negative impact.

Having said all that, there's no denying that having immediate and direct access to Qualcomm's technology and resources might prove a substantial benefit to Arduino. Chips and designs ought to be far easier to source, and Qualcomm's weight in purchasing components could result in even more affordable or better-performant Arduino devices.

This week, Qualcomm secured a final legal win against Arm in a high-profile licensing dispute around CPU cores developed by Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired in 2021. A U.S. District Court has now rejected all of Arm's claims, affirming Qualcomm's right to use Nuvia's technology under its architecture license agreement (ALA). Without any doubt, this is a big legal win for Qualcomm. However, this win could have reverberations throughout the entire industry, as it could set a precedent that allows architecture licensees to develop custom CPUs in whichever way they deem necessary.

Origins

The legal conflict between Arm and Qualcomm began shortly after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, a startup focused on high-performance Arm-compatible CPU designs for the HPC segment, and promised to build CPUs for consumer PCs based on Nuvia's IP.

Arm claimed that the transfer and use of Nuvia's designs under Qualcomm's umbrella required renegotiation of Nuvia's original architecture license agreement (ALA), as Nuvia had only planned to use the cores in the data center space, whereas Qualcomm had much broader plans for the IP. Qualcomm, on the other hand, maintained that its own existing ALA was sufficient to incorporate Nuvia's work and continue development and deployment of custom cores based on the Arm instruction set architecture. Arm then revoked Qualcomm's ALA in October 2024, citing a violation of the agreement for not renegotiating it after acquiring Nuvia.

Arm opposed Qualcomm's use of Nuvia’s CPU IP across broader market segments, which would include everything from entry-level consumer devices to high-end servers, because it threatened Arm's control over licensing boundaries and its ability to extract additional royalties. Arm likely viewed the transfer of that IP to Qualcomm, followed by its broad deployment across various markets, as a breach of scope, as the original Nuvia agreement had narrower terms.

Furthermore, Qualcomm used Arm's off-the-shelf Cortex cores under a technology license agreement (TLA) license. This provides Arm more control, as well as a per-core license. This clearly hurt Arm's bottom line, as ALA royalties are considerably lower than TLA royalties.

If Qualcomm can freely use Nuvia's custom Arm v8 cores across segments under an existing ALA, it would theoretically enable other licensees to do the same thing. Companies would be able to acquire CPU startups that receive an ALA on certain conditions, then roll them into their own ALA if they have one, and sidestep core-level royalties.

By allowing Qualcomm to integrate Nuvia's custom cores under an existing architecture license, Arm risked weakening its tiered licensing model and losing leverage over other major partners that considered similar custom silicon strategies. Perhaps Arm also viewed Qualcomm's move as a competitive threat to its own Neoverse core roadmap, Neoverse CSS roadmap, and ultimately its processor or custom processor roadmap. Therefore, blocking this reuse was an attempt to preserve both licensing revenue and product relevance in high-performance markets.

In December 2024, a jury sided unanimously with Qualcomm, finding no breach of the Nuvia ALA and confirming the legitimacy of Qualcomm's use of the technology. On September 30, 2025, the U.S. District Court in Delaware reaffirmed that position, dismissing Arm's final remaining claim and denying a request for a retrial. The judgment, now final, delivers Qualcomm a complete legal triumph and blocks Arm from any further recourse in the case. Furthermore, Qualcomm's countersuit against Arm is still pending and expected to go to trial in March 2026.

A green light for Qualcomm's expansion

When Nuvia first introduced its Oryon/Phoenix processor core in 2020, it demonstrated considerably higher performance efficiency than Apple's A13, AMD's Zen 2, and Intel's Sunny Cove, as well as other relevant CPUs over time. After several delays, when the Oryon-based Snapdragon X Elite CPUs hit the market in 2024, they demonstrated competitive performance. However, the Snapdragon X2 Elite processors look considerably more promising, and the launch of the next generation coincides with the legal win.

"This decisive legal victory is monumental for Qualcomm, clearing the path to fully integrate and scale the acquired Nuvia assets under Qualcomm's existing Architecture License Agreement (ALA)," said Neil Shah, VP of Research at Counterpoint Research. "This win provides Qualcomm with significant momentum, enabling them to accelerate the deployment of custom Nuvia-based CPU cores across a much broader spectrum of applications from PCs, smartphones, and automotive to high-performance computing domains like AI servers and even humanoid robotics."

With a better CPU and presumably system-on-chip design, ALA licensing fees, and without legal obstacles and risks, the company can now scale Nuvia cores for a wide range of client (and eventually data center) product categories, including automotive, PCs, and smartphones.

Furthermore, now that it is perfectly legal for Qualcomm to use Nuvia-designed cores, PC OEMs may be more willing to integrate Snapdragon X2 Elite CPUs into their systems, especially considering that Windows on Arm is attempting to gain more traction. Ultimately, this supports Qualcomm’s efforts to challenge the x86 incumbents in the laptop market.

Keeping in mind that Qualcomm also has competitive neural processing units (NPUs) for AI, the company may also introduce new product categories that take advantage of the highly efficient Oryon CPUs and sophisticated NPUs.

And Arm-based custom silicon

Qualcomm's sweeping legal victory against Arm marks an important moment in the semiconductor industry, reaffirming the rights of architecture licensees to develop and scale custom CPU designs without renegotiating terms, which somewhat reshapes the balance of power between IP holders and their partners.

One of the most immediate effects of the ruling is a renewed sense of legal clarity for holders of Arm architecture licenses. Qualcomm’s position that an ALA provides broad design rights, including the freedom to integrate acquired IP, has now been upheld at the highest level. This has implications not just for Qualcomm, but for other major licensees. Companies such as Amazon, Broadcom, Google, MediaTek, and Nvidia have all used custom or semi-custom Arm-based cores in their products.

The precedent set here assures licensees that they can pursue internal development and even acquire CPU startups without facing retroactive restrictions or new licensing demands from Arm. In an era where companies are increasingly seeking to differentiate their silicon at the architectural level, this kind of legal certainty is vital.

Arguably, the verdict also preserves the original intent of the ALA license: to empower chipmakers to innovate freely within the Arm ecosystem and retain Arm as the owner of the ISA. In particular, under a standard ALA license with Arm, licensees can design their own CPU microarchitecture from scratch that runs a specific Arm ISA (e.g. Arm v9), and add internal optimizations, such as specialized execution pipelines, custom data paths, or micro-op fusion techniques, as long as these do not break ISA compatibility. They could even implement custom accelerators or extensions, provided they do not interfere with standard ISA behavior and are not exposed to software that expects strict Arm compliance.

They still will not get as much freedom as they get with RISC-V, as the process of adding to the Arm ISA is complex and takes years. However, companies like Apple canned its custom AMX instruction set with the M4 chipset in favor of ARM's SME.

What about Arm and Qualcomm's relationship?

While Qualcomm has prevailed in the legal fight with Arm, the impact on the latter has yet to be determined. Arm still controls the dominant ISA used across mobile and embedded platforms worldwide, which is gradually expanding into the PC space. Its core IP, software stack, and ecosystem partnerships remain extremely valuable and widely used. But this case has damaged its reputation with one of its largest customers, specifically Qualcomm, which has long been a flagship licensee.

"While Arm's decision to pursue legal action was an understandable measure to protect its business, it was an unfortunate necessity that strained its relationship with a premier customer and partner," Shah said. "Despite this, Arm unequivocally retains the industry's leading low-power architecture, coupled with a robust software and tools ecosystem for computing. Moving forward, Arm must seize the opportunity to mend fences and rebuild trust with Qualcomm.

To avoid a further erosion of trust, Arm may need to shift away from legal enforcement and instead re-establish its relationship with Qualcomm. But the path toward reconciliation remains rocky, as Arm itself is moving toward designing its own CPUs. In fact, this move could make other partners gravitate towards custom designs or alternative architectures.

There's also the question of Qualcomm's countersuit against Arm, which accuses the British company of contract breaches and customer interference. Depending on how that case unfolds in March 2026, the relationship could deteriorate further.

This ruling could define the future of Arm

Qualcomm, along with its subsidiary Nuvia, have finally won the legal battle against Arm Holdings, which had accused the chip-maker of violating license agreements tied to its chip designs. A U.S. District Court judge in Delaware ruled that neither Qualcomm nor its subsidiary breached any of Arm’s architecture license agreement (ALA), dismissing the lone remaining claim in the case and also rejecting Arm's request for a new trial.

The latest ruling follows Qualcomm’s trial victory from December 2024, where the company was found innocent. However, at the time, the jury was unable to agree on whether Nuvia violated its licensing terms with Arm.

The dispute centered on Qualcomm’s use of Oryon cores for its Snapdragon X range of client processors based on Arm’s v8 architecture, created by Nuvia for server-grade chips.

Arm claimed that Qualcomm was supposed to renegotiate licensing terms following its acquisition of Nuvia. Additionally, Arm demanded that the designs be scrapped for allegedly breaching Nuvia’s original Arm licenses. Qualcomm, however, maintained that its existing Architecture License Agreement (ALA) for Arm’s instruction set architecture already extended to designs developed by its subsidiaries, including Nuvia.

Following the verdict, Ann Chaplin, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Qualcomm, said “With the Court’s decision today, Qualcomm and its subsidiary Nuvia have achieved a full victory. This decision follows Qualcomm’s December 2024 jury trial win and is a full and final judgment in Qualcomm’s favor. Our right to innovate prevailed in this case and we hope Arm will return to fair and competitive practices in dealing with the Arm ecosystem.”

It is interesting to note that the Qualcomm Oryon general-purpose cores found inside Snapdragon X processors are based on Arm’s Armv8 instruction set architecture (ISA). However, it incorporates “one percent or less” of Arm’s own technology according to Gerard Williams III, one of the lead developers of Oryon and former Apple chip designer.

Williams co-founded Nuvia in 2019 with the aim of building high-performance, energy-efficient custom CPU cores for datacenters, known as Phoenix. To do so, the company secured two licenses from Arm, including a Technology License Agreement (TLA) to modify existing cores and an Architecture License Agreement (ALA) to design custom ones. Since Nuvia’s strategy was to pursue custom designs from the outset, the team developed its cores from scratch, relying minimally on Arm’s physical IP.

Qualcomm has stated that a separate lawsuit against Arm is still ongoing. The case involves claims of breach of contract, interference with customer relationships, and conduct aimed at hindering innovation while promoting Arm’s own products over those of long-standing partners. The company added that it expects the trial to begin in March 2026.

At Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, the company unveiled its Snapdragon X2 Elite processors for PCs. They serve as the follow-up to last year's X Elite series, which served as a kickstart for Windows on Arm and made an attempt to rival Apple's M-series. Qualcomm's reference designs on display at the summit included laptops, tablets, and some fascinating mini PCs, including a circular puck and a small square that docks into a monitor.

Pictured above is a reference design mini PC built around the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, an 18-core powerhouse capable of boosting up to 5 GHz (across two cores) with support for 228 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It's a tier above even the X2 Elite, which begs the question: how is it so thin? We know that some of Qualcomm's concepts were cooled by Frore AirJets, so it's possible solid state cooling played a role.

The completely circular design is unlike anything we've seen before — it's like if someone took a trash-can Mac Pro and squashed it down to look like a coaster. It even appears like a modern Apple computer from the bottom, and has suitably similar I/O in the form of two USB-C ports, a headphone jack, and a barrel jack connection for power. The device also seems to be milled from aluminum, with a Snapdragon red finish.

Qualcomm also showed a square unit compressed down to be almost as thin as a USB-C port. This one's a bit different because it's intentionally squared to fit in as part of a modular all-in-one system. The mini PC slides into a base, connected to a large monitor, which it subsequently powers.

It feels like an upgrade to all-in-one computers that have existed for decades, but this one looks like you could swap out the computing parts.

Speaking of which, the company did tell PC Mag that it's working with at least three OEMs in Taiwan. That means it's possible there might be some interest in adapting these reference designs down the line.

Qualcomm is back for round two of its push into Windows PCs. At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the company revealed its Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. These chips will serve as the high-end offerings in Qualcomm's second generation of Arm-based chips for laptops and other PC form factors.

The Elite Extreme is a new tier above the standard Elite, which was the top chip in the original X-series line. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme will offer up to 18 cores, and Qualcomm claims it's the first Arm chip to hit 5 GHz (on up to two cores).

The company says its Elite chips will be made on a 3-nanometer process node. The Snapdragon X2 Elite uses a mix of Qualcomm Oryon Prime cores and what it calls Performance CPU cores. This is seemingly a standard Performance/Efficiency layout with different names. At normalized power, Qualcomm says it offers up to 75% more performance than its competitors. In multitasking, it claims the new chips will offer up to 31% faster performance at a normalized ISO power, while needing 43% less power than last-gen chips. We don't yet have benchmarks to share, and Qualcomm didn't note the exact TDPs for these chips.

The Elite Extreme has higher clock speeds in both single- and dual-core boost and multi-core max than the other two Snapdragon X2 Elite variants. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is model X2E-96-100, while the standard Elites are X2E-88-100 and X2E-80-100. The Extreme and the 88-100 each have 18 cores, while the 80-100 has 12 cores.

There's also a new Qualcomm Adreno GPU, which the company says brings a 2.3x increase in performance per watt and power efficiency compared to the last generation. The new 80 TOPS NPU looks to be the fastest in a laptop (with INT8 math), with 78% more TOPS than the previous generation, 45 TOPS NPU. In its press release, Qualcomm writes that this NPU "is designed to handle Copilot+ and concurrent AI experiences." (Copilot+ doesn't include actual Copilot, the assistant that runs largely in the cloud.)

The X2 Elite chip supports Qualcomm's x75 5G modem-RG system, with up to 10 Gbps peak downloads. It also works with Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 for Wi-FI 7/6/6E and Bluetooth 5.4 LE. Qualcomm's new Guardian is an out-of-band management feature for business-focused remote oversight, akin to Intel’s vPro.

Qualcomm says that it expects systems with the X2 Elite to ship in the first half of 2026. That may mean we’ll see a device or two at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, before launch. Notably, Qualcomm's images and a sizzle reel both suggest that the X2 Elite will appear in both laptops and mini PCs.

The upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 was formally announced a few days ago, but now Geekbench leaks are rolling in.

The keen-eyed X leaker Longhorn noticed an unnamed Xiaomi 25113PN0EC device (possibly a Xiaomi 17 Pro) with the Qualcomm SoC inside, posting a whopping 3,831-point single-threaded score, a value that should put it head-to-head with Apple's A19 Pro SoC inside the iPhone 17 Pro.

If that figure is reflective of shipping products, that would be quite the leap for Qualcomm's chips. The company's SoCs have historically trailed Apple's designs by some margin in both performance and efficiency, so catching up would be quite the feat. The A19 Pro rings in at close to 3,900 points in Geekbench. To put this into perspective, even the mighty Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D post scores of about 3,400 and 3,500, respectively. That's by no means an ultimate measure of real-world performance, but it does display the might of contemporary Arm-based chips, at least in power-constrained scenarios.

The 3,831-point figure for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 might sound a little too good to be true — particularly as it would mean a generational uplift of over 34% — but it is at least consistent with leaks that showed a purported Samsung handset displaying a score of nearly 3,400 at only a 4 GHz boost clock speed. Per Qualcomm's recent announcement, the chip uses two performance cores and six efficiency cores, with the performance cores hitting 4.61 GHz in the standard configuration, or 4.74 GHz in a Samsung Galaxy-specific flavor. This makes 3,831 points at least plausible, as the recent score post shows 4.6 GHz for the performance cores. The new SoC is manufactured in TSMC's 3-nm N3P node, an evolution of the previous N3E.

That's not the only noteworthy difference, though. Longhorn points out in their X post that "SVE2 and SME say hello", implying that the new chip ought to support the newer versions of Arm's Scalable Vector Instructions and Scalable Matrix Instructions. Both of these CPU instruction sets are called "SIMD" (Single Instruction Multiple Operation), making it easy for developers to efficiently process chunks of data at a time with few instructions.

That means that applications that can make use of those instructions should see quite a significant speed boost. The original SVE was designed for AI-related data processing, but Arm says that SVE2 should cover more broad uses cases, and calls out general-purpose software, multimedia, computer vision, and in-memory databases. Geekbench does use SME (which in turn apparently needs a subset of SVE2), so the posted scores should reflect the use of these optimizations.

By the way, if the "Gen 5" name in this report is throwing you off, know that you're not alone. Many people thought the new Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC would be called "Gen 2", but Qualcomm has decided that the "Gen" suffix now applies to its series of Snapdragon products, making this chip the fifth generation, across Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3, with the original Snapdragon 8 Elite counting as "Gen 4".

Of course, consider that these recently-posted figures originate from leakers around the globe and may not reflect production silicon, clock-speed targets, or power envelopes of their final devices. Second, although Geekbench single-core results mostly track with general application performance, that may not be true of every scenario. Regardless, even if figures for production Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices are somewhat lower, that would still be an impressive showing.

We already know that the next-generation Wi-Fi 8 (IEEE 802.11bn) specification is not meant to improve performance, but rather to boost reliability of wireless connections as they become even more ubiquitous. Since improving reliability is a pretty vague description, the IEEE has issued a scope document that quantitatively defines these enhancements. According to a new post by Qualcomm (which is a contributor to the standard), the IEEE wants Wi-Fi 8 devices to offer a 25% improvement across a number of metrics, under the umbrella of Ultra High Reliability, or UHR.

Just like Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 8 is set to offer a peak physical layer (PHY) rate of up to 23 GT/s, though it remains to be seen whether such rate will be achievable in real-world conditions. The UHR goals in Wi-Fi 8 aim to deliver a 25% increase in real-world data throughput specifically under challenging signal conditions.

UHR means devices operating at the edge of network coverage, or in areas with interference or weak signals, can still achieve significantly better performance compared to Wi-Fi 7 (i.e., move data fast even when signal quality is not ideal).

The standard also targets a 25% reduction in latency at the 95th percentile — not just average latency — to improve worst-case responsiveness, which is critical for time-sensitive applications like augmented reality, industrial automation, and AI-based systems that depend on fast and predictable communication.

Finally, Wi-Fi 8 is designed to achieve 25% fewer dropped packets, especially when users or devices move between access points. As part of the overall Wi-Fi 8 standard, this goal is meant to support seamless roaming and uninterrupted connectivity, which promises to make it far more suitable for environments where mobility is common, such as enterprise campuses, public venues, and production environments, such as plants.

At a broad technical level, Wi-Fi 8 (802.11bn) shares much of the same foundation as Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be): it operates across the 2, 4, 5, and 6 GHz frequency bands, employs 4096-QAM modulation, supports up to eight spatial streams, utilizes MU-MIMO and multi-user OFDMA, and maintains a maximum channel width of 320 MHz.

To achieve its goals, the Wi-Fi 8 specification is set to support a number of key new features, including Coordinated Spatial Reuse (Co-SR), Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF), Dynamic Sub-Channel Operation (DSO), and enhanced Modulation Coding Scheme (MCS).

If the IEEE's guidance bears out, Wi-Fi 8 could significantly benefit applications that require reliable, low-latency connectivity, particularly in environments with congestion, interference, or mobility. In enterprise and industrial settings, it could support mission-critical systems like autonomous guided vehicles, collaborative robots, and factory automation to ensure seamless operation even during transitions between access points.

In public venues such as airports, malls, or stadiums, Wi-Fi 8 could improve workloads like AR navigation, live video sharing, real-time translation, and critical systems like surveillance and emergency communication. As for the home, users might experience higher performance and more reliable connections in dense residential buildings.

Fabless chipmaking giant Qualcomm is set to grow yet stronger with a $2.4 billion agreement to acquire Alphawave Semi now inked. Qualcomm’s freshly acquired wholly-owned subsidiary is best known for its high-speed wired connectivity and compute technologies. This deal appears to offer great synergies, particularly in the wake of Qualcomm confirming its reentry to the data center market in mid-May. Please keep this news between you and us, for now, dear readers, as Qualcomm’s press release date indicates this acquisition announcement was supposed to hit the wires tomorrow. (Or it's a typo)

Qualcomm was already poised to make a big splash with its new data center processors. Its Oryon CPU cores have a great reputation for processing power and efficiency. Moreover, it should follow up with second and third generation Oryon cores from its Nuvia team in the coming months.

The chipmaker also has a potent Neural Processing Unit (NPU) in the heart of the Hexagon processor. This has also been earmarked for deployment in any upcoming data center processor. Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU is designed for AI inference, machine learning, a multimedia processing prowess. It is also highly efficient, with its roots in the mobile Snapdragon range of SoCs.

A seasoned tech tipster has stated that Qualcomm is testing Snapdragon X2 Elite devices in configurations with 64GB of RAM. Roland Quandt, best known for his exclusives published via Germany’s WinFuture.de, stated this weekend that the “SC8480XP aka SD X2 Elite [is] in testing with 64GB RAM.” He is also more convinced than ever that this upcoming Oryon V3 CPU architecture chip will come packing 18 cores.

PC enthusiasts are hopeful that Qualcomm has learnt some lessons from its initial Snapdragon X Elite venture. It had a lot of help from Microsoft to spearhead Copilot PCs using the first Oryon architecture processors last June. However, interest in them fell sharply as AMD and Intel responded rather swiftly with their own power-sipping but potent AI/NPU-enhanced laptop processors.

The last time we heard murmurings about the touted SC8480XP was back in March. At the time, we highlighted that 18 cores would increase the CPU core count by 50% vs the first-gen Snapdragon X Elite. Moreover, the newer architecture is expected to deliver its own performance boost.

Rumors also point to the Snapdragon X2 Elite looking to push into the desktop side of the market, or even servers. This notion comes from chatter about Qualcomm testing chips like the SC8480XP with advanced cooling solutions, including a 120mm radiator toting AiO. That would mark quite an intergenerational change.

Moving on to other SoC specs, like onboard RAM, the last we heard, the SC8480XP was being tested in Qualcomm SiP (system in package) format with 48GB RAM on board, as well as a 1TB SSD storage on board. Now it looks like options with up to 64GB of RAM on board may be offered.

New processors expected in September

Qualcomm's team seems to be in the final development stages of its second-generation Snapdragon X processors for client PCs, and it looks like it is about time for the first leaks about the CPU performance to emerge. This week, a Chinese blogger said that the next-generation Snapdragon X will increase performance by 18-22% compared to the existing Snapdragon X processors, but there are some catches about this claim. The main one is that we are dealing with unofficial information that should be taken with a grain of salt. 

"Hearing that the second-generation Nuvia is expected to start at 4.40 GHz," wrote Focused Digital, a Chinese blogger with 2.227 million followers (via @Jukanlosreve). "Performance is estimated to improve by 18% – 22%." 

Max multi-threaded frequency of PC-oriented Snapdragon X processors with Oryon cores developed by the Nuvia team made on TSMC's N4P process technology (4nm-class) varies from 3.0 GHz to 3.80 GHz, whereas their boost clocks vary from 4.0 GHz to 4.30 GHz. 

We do not know which process technology will be used by Qualcomm's second-generation Snapdragon X CPUs, though a roughly 20% generation-to-generation performance increase looks reasonable if we are looking at a CPU due in 2025. That said, we can only wonder whether the increase is enabled by higher clocks or microarchitectural improvements. If we are talking about processors that are due in 2026 (based on a Dell roadmap that was obtained unofficially) that will compete against 2026 processors, a 20% overall performance increase may not be sufficient to stay competitive. 

The information about the performance of Qualcomm's next-gen Snapdragon X processors for PCs comes from a Chinese blogger who presumably obtains information from the PC supply chain, and given the number of followers, we may expect this information to be more or less accurate. The post was reposted by a South Korean blogger, who has access to data from Korean financial analysts and who, for some reason, also thinks that the information has merit. 

Qualcomm released its first Snapdragon X Elite processors for PCs (model number SC8380XP) in mid-2024 and reportedly initiated internal testing of its second-generation Snapdragon X Elite processors (model number SC8480XP) in September, 2024. At that time, we did not hear anything about performance estimates of the CPU, but as of now, it's looking like the new processors will offer an 18–22% higher performance than their predecessors.

Amid a fierce trade war with the US, China's General Administration of Customs has changed its rules of how the origin of imported chips must be classified, now deeming that the wafer fabrication location should be counted as the origin of chips shipped to the country. This rule exempts products from AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel, and other chipmakers who outsource wafer fabrication to Taiwanese companies from the punitive 125% tariff China now imposes on products from the U.S. However, this badly hurts Intel, Global Foundries, Texas Instruments, and chip designers who produce chips in America.

Today, the China Semiconductor Industry Association published an urgent notice regarding the rules for determining the 'country of origin' of semiconductor products shipped to China. As it turns out, the location where the wafer was processed is deemed the 'country of origin,' no matter where the chip was developed or packaged, according to a CSIA document published in WeChat and republished by various analysts. The rule applies to both packaged and unpackaged semiconductors.

Because China deems Taiwan its own territory, chips fabricated by TSMC, Micron, UMC, Vanguard, and other chipmakers in Taiwan will be exempt from punitive 125% import duties imposed on products from then U.S. even though virtually all contemporary chips from companies like AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia, Micron, and Qualcomm are developed in America and are sold by U.S.-based company.

By applying this rule, the Chinese government kills two birds with one stone.

On the one hand, it allows chipmakers to ship their products to China without any restrictions or punitive tariffs, which enables China-based fabs to continue making actual products based on those chips, thus keeping Chinese facilities busy. As an added bonus, China shows American companies that it considers Taiwan its own territory and actually means it by not imposing any punitive import duties.

On the other hand, it punishes American chipmakers and chip designers that produce their ICs in the U.S., which includes companies that outsource to GlobalFoundries' Fab 8 in New York as well as Texas Instruments, which builds its chips in Texas.

As an added bonus, the Chinese government helps TSMC, UMC, Vanguard, and China-based foundries to potentially land new customers. This has implications, too. Many products made in China use chips from American companies produced in America by companies like Analog Devices, GlobalFoundries, NXP, or ON Semiconductor, or fabbed by contract chipmakers in the U.S., such as Intel or GlobalFoundries. Consequently, companies that use chips from the U.S. will now have to find alternatives, which takes time and costs money. For some, this may be the end of the line.

One thing to note is the stark contrast between how Chinese customs treat semiconductor products and how American customs treat chips in terms of 'country of origin.' The U.S. determines the 'country of origin' by the location of the last substantial transformation, where the product undergoes a major change. For example, a memory IC developed in the U.S., fabbed in Japan, but packaged in China is considered a Chinese product subject to punitive tariffs, according to the current laws. The same applies to logic chips designed in the USA but fabbed in Taiwan and packaged in China by subsidiaries of Taiwanese OSAT giants. By contrast, China's customs determine the 'country of origin' by the location of the actual wafer fabrication facility.

Right now, at Amazon, you can find the 15.6-inch Samsung Galaxy AI Book4 Edge laptop for one of its best prices to date. This Snapdragon X Plus-based laptop usually goes for around $899, but right now it's marked down to just $695. So far, no expiration has been specified for the discount, so we don't know for how long it will be made available at this rate. It is, however, labeled as a limited offer.

We haven't had the opportunity to review the Samsung Galaxy AI Book4 Edge so far, but we're plenty familiar with several Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ machines. Recently, some controversy arose when the Surface Laptop 7s were frequently returned due to compatibility issues. If you're considering this laptop, you might want to research a little and make sure your favorite games and apps are able to run well on Windows-on-Arm systems. On the positive side, once you go Arm, you should enjoy the best "long-lasting battery" life available on Windows devices.

The main processor driving the Samsung Galaxy AI Book4 Edge is a Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100. This CPU has eight cores with a base speed of 3.4 GHz and a single-core boost feature that takes it up to 3.8 GHz. For graphics, it relies on a Qualcomm Adreno GPU which outputs to a 15.6-inch anti-glare display with an FHD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels.

As far as memory goes, this edition comes with 16GB of LPDDR5X and a 500GB internal SSD is fitted for storage. It has a couple of 2W speakers integrated for audio output, but you also get a 3.5mm audio jack to take advantage of. It has an HDMI 2.1 port for outputting video to a secondary screen and a handful of USB ports, including one USB 3.2 port and two USB4 ports.

It is also worth noting that this price is cheaper than the current offer over at the official Samsung website. If you want to check out this deal for yourself, head over to the Samsung 15-inch Galaxy AI Book4 Edge product page on Amazon US for more information and purchase options.

Microsoft announced this week its DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2 application programming interface, which introduces new features that significantly improve visual quality and rendering performance by up to 2.3 times. AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, along with game developers like Remedy, are working to integrate DXR 1.2 technologies into future gaming hardware and software.

The DirectX Raytracing 1.2 update includes Opacity Micromaps (OMM) and Shader Execution Reordering (SER), two technologies that boost performance in raytraced games by 2 (SER) to 2.3 times (OMM). Both technologies must be implemented into actual games or game engines to experience the performance benefits.

2X – 2.3X performance boost

One of the main issues with alpha-tested geometry (foliage, fences, hair, etc.) in raytracing is extra calculations required for light to determine whether it hits a surface or passes through. Opacity Micromaps (OMM) improve how alpha-tested geometry processes by applying a texture with an alpha channel to a flat surface. It then removes pixels below a certain transparency threshold. OMM reduces the number of times shaders need to be used, leading to higher efficiency and performance.

In the best-case scenario, Microsoft claims an improvement of 2.3 times. However, keep in mind that not all games and scenes contain a lot of elements like foliage and fences. For example, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has loads of grass, leaves, and fences in practically all scenes, Cyberpunk 2077 barely has any foliage.

Shader Execution Reordering (SER) seems to be a more universal feature as it reorders how shaders are executed to avoid shader divergence. Shader divergence occurs when nearby pixels require shaders to do different tasks, a common situation in scenes with heavy raytracing effects, such as complex lighting, realistic shadows, and detailed reflections.

GPUs process shaders in parallel threads organized into groups called warps or wavefronts. Ideally, all threads within a group execute identical instructions simultaneously, maximizing GPU efficiency. Shader divergence occurs when threads in the same warp or wavefront need to perform different instructions. In this case, simultaneous execution is impossible, forcing the GPU to handle each instruction path separately, leaving some threads idle and increasing latency.

According to Microsoft, SER sorts or batches similar shader workloads together, reducing divergence and maximizing GPU utilization and speeding up rendering by up to two times.

Hardware support

Regarding hardware support, the situation is a mixed bag, which is common with new API features.

All Nvidia GPUs dating back to Turing (GeForce RTX 20-series) support Opacity Micromaps (OMM), so these graphics cards can potentially experience a performance boost once game developers implement them into their titles. Intel said its next-generation Celestial (Xe3) GPUs will also support OMM.

Nvidia's GPUs have supported Shader Execution Reordering (SER), starting with the GeForce RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace family. Intel said it looks forward to supporting SER "when it is available in a future Agility SDK.' However, whether it will be supported on Intel's Arc 'Alchemist' or Arc 'Battlemage' GPUs (or both) is unclear.

AMD does not seem to support OMM or SER on its RDNA 2/3/4 GPUs, though Microsoft said that the red company is working with it on the widespread adoption of these technologies. Also, AMD has certain scheduling optimizations that may mimic how SER works, so if game developers take time to optimize for Radeon GPUs, the latter may get some speed improvements.

Qualcomm also does not support OMM or SER, but it said it would on its next-generation integrated GPUs.

The preview version of DXR 1.2 will launch in April 2025.

Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, stated that his company had not been approached to participate in a group effort to acquire a stake in a company that would operate Intel's foundry unit. He dismissed claims that Nvidia was working with industry peers and TSMC on such a deal at a press conference at GTC, reports Reuters. 

Separately, Paul Liu, a TSMC board member and the head of Taiwan's National Development Council, denied claims that the company is considering purchasing Intel's struggling foundry unit, reports DigiTimes.

"Nobody has invited us to a consortium," Huang said, according to Reuters. "Nobody invited me. Maybe other people are involved, but I do not know. There might be a party. I was not invited." 

While speaking to Taiwan's Legislative Yuan Economic Committee on March 19, Paul Liu stated that the acquisition of Intel Foundry has never been discussed at the board level and compared it to mixing two incompatible substances, something that one in the semiconductor industry can consider both figuratively as Intel and TSMC have vastly different corporate cultures and literally as the two companies use different chemical substances for manufacturing. As a result, industry experts believe such an acquisition would be more harmful than beneficial to TSMC.

Liu explained that stabilizing the company's most advanced production technologies already takes between 18 and 24 months. Exporting such a node to the the U.S. would add another year, making American operations three years behind those in Taiwan, according to Liu. He also addressed concerns about a possible second Trump presidency leading to a shift of Taiwan's semiconductor industry to the U.S., urging lawmakers to see the U.S. as a partner (which accounts for the lion's share of TSMC's revenue) rather than a competitor.

Earlier this year there were rumors that the U.S. government pushed TSMC to take over Intel Foundry and operate it. The plan involves Intel spinning off its Intel Foundry unit, which makes chips for itself and external clients. TSMC would acquire less than half of the new entity, while the remaining shares would go to industry partners. The list of industry partners included AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, according to Reuters. However, speaking at the conference, Huang denied any involvement in discussions about a potential consortium to take control of Intel's fabs. 

For Nvidia, which produces billions of dollars worth wafers every year, a dual sourcing supply strategy could make sense. However, designing large AI/HPC GPUs for different process technologies used by Intel and TSMC would significantly affect Nvidia's costs. Investing in a fab joint venture would also be odd for the company, which started as — and remains — a fabless chip designer.

The talks reportedly started before TSMC's March 3 announcement of its $100 billion U.S. investment. This plan includes five additional Fab 21 modules, two advanced packaging facilities, and a research center. However, according to Reuters' own report, the conversations about the fab joint venture continued after the announcement as TSMC was seeking agreements with major fabless chip design companies. As a result, Taiwanese lawmakers raised concerns following such media reports and pressured Liu for clarifications.

The global semiconductor industry saw explosive growth in 2024, mainly driven by sales of processors for AI applications, according to TrendForce. The Top 10 largest fabless chip developers earned nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars last year; roughly half of that sum came from Nvidia.

The largest fabless chip designers generated $249.8 billion in revenue, up 49% from the previous year. The growth boomed due to skyrocketing demand for AI GPUs, ASICs, adjacent chips (e.g., network processors, DPUs), datacenter CPUs, and recovered demand for client PCs. Market consolidation also intensified, with the Top 5 firms now accounting for over 90% of the revenue among the Top 10.

Nvidia was at the forefront of the industry and extended its dominance, posting $124.3 billion in revenue (a 125% increase from 2023) and capturing 50% of the revenue share. Hopper-based H100, H20, and H200 GPUs drove the company’s revenue increase, as Blackwell-based B200/GB200/B100 only emerged in the fourth quarter. As demand for Blackwell parts — which are believed to be more expensive than Hopper GPUs — increases this year, they will likely enable an even higher revenue for the green company this year.

Qualcomm ranked second, earning $34.86 billion, a 13% year-over-year increase. The company’s growth came from smartphones, the automotive sector, and PCs, a new source of the company’s revenue. The company secured a legal victory against Arm, and there are no risks that the latter will withdraw its licenses. The company also confirmed its interest in datacenter CPUs, though its entry into this market is likely a few years down the road.

Broadcom held third place, with its semiconductor unit bringing in $30.64 billion, up 8% from the previous year. AI-related products accounted for more than 30% of its semiconductor revenue. Despite a mid-year slump, demand for wireless communication, broadband, and server storage will drive the company’s growth in 2025.

AMD followed in fourth, increasing revenue by 14% to $25.79 billion. Its server business surged by 94%, boosting its position in datacenters and the cloud. Strategic partnerships with Dell, Google, and Microsoft are expected to help sustain its momentum, according to TrendForce.

MediaTek secured the fifth spot, with $16.52 billion in revenue, marking a 19% annual increase. The company’s success was driven by mainstream 5G smartphones, power management chips, and AI-related products. Its collaboration with Nvidia on Project Digits positions it for further expansion in 2025 as AI integration in mobile devices increases.

Marvell was the sixth largest fabless chip designer, with 5.637 billion in revenue, up 2% from the previous year. Realtek moved to seventh place with $3.53 billion (16% YoY growth), benefiting from a recovery in PC and automotive-related sales. Meanwhile, Novatek dropped to eighth, with revenue declining 10% to $3.2 billion.

Will Semiconductor and MPS closed the top ten, each showing 21% revenue growth, reaching $3.05 billion and $2.2 billion, respectively. Will Semiconductor benefited from high-end CMOS image sensors in Android phones and autonomous vehicles, while MPS saw success as its power management chips entered the AI server supply chain.

TrendForce expects AI to drive growth in various sectors, from datacenters to personal devices, in 2025.

Although TSMC has committed to invest an additional $100 billion in its own Fab 21 campus in the U.S., a potential joint venture to run Intel's manufacturing capacity is still in the works, according to Reuters, citing four sources. TSMC would reportedly not own more than 50% of the proposed joint venture. A venture that would see leading American fabless chip designers — AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Qualcomm — get stakes in the joint venture, which will be operated by TSMC.

The initiative emerged following a request from President Trump's administration, aiming to bolster Intel while ensuring continued American control. Under the terms of the proposed scheme, Intel will have to spin off its Intel Foundry (IF) division that produces chips for Intel and third-party customers, and then TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, buys less than 50% of IF, leaving the rest to partners. TSMC reportedly initiated discussions with AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, but the talks remain preliminary and sensitive, according to four anonymous sources familiar with these discussions. It is also noteworthy that TSMC has not pitched its main client, Apple, to invest in the JV.

The idea of such a collaboration aligns strategically with President Trump's goal to revive domestic advanced manufacturing, and reviving Intel is one of the administration's priorities. However, it is unclear whether splitting the company and handing its parts to TSMC helps with competition between foundries.

According to Reuters' sources, TSMC approached potential partners about the joint venture prior to its March 3 announcement of plans to invest an additional $100 billion in its U.S. manufacturing capacities, which includes the construction of five new Fab 21 modules over the next several years, building two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D center. Discussions regarding the joint venture involving Intel's foundry division have continued since then, according to the three sources, with TSMC aiming to secure partnerships with multiple chip design companies.

Technical, operational, and business complexities present significant hurdles for the potential joint venture.

• According to an Intel filing with the SEC, Intel's manufacturing and real estate assets cost around $108 billion, so interested parties will have to invest tens of billions of dollars to get a sizeable stake in Intel Foundry.
• TSMC is unlikely to be interested in owning a 50% stake in a JV that uses its own process technologies and competes against the Taiwan foundry.
• Transferring TSMC's production nodes to Intel's advanced fabs with EUV tools is hard, if possible at all, as Intel and TSMC operate vastly different manufacturing processes, employing distinct equipment configurations and chemical substances at their respective fabs.
• Intel has fabs that can only produce chips using its own process technologies. These fabs — which cost tens of billions of dollars — will continue to serve Intel for a while, but they present little value for outside investors.
• It is unclear how operating a JV aligns with TSMC's own manufacturing operations in the U.S.

The news had immediate market implications. Intel's stock price rose more than 7% in pre-market U.S. trading following reports of this potential partnership, according to Reuters. However, it is unclear whether the aforementioned fabless semiconductor developers are interested in getting into manufacturing. All of them chose to be fabless because they did not want to get into a complex capital-intensive business, and it is unclear what could drive their interest towards putting tens of billions of dollars in a JV considering the fact that they already have pre-booked capacity at TSMC.

Significant new details of a next-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 processor for Windows PCs have been shared Germany's WinFuture (machine translation). The big news is that the new X2 chips may come to the PC market with up to 18 Oryon V3 cores, that's 50% more than the current generation Qualcomm chips for PCs. The extra, more powerful, cores will help 'Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2' chips in the high-end laptop market and in desktops, reckons the source.

This isn't the first we have heard about the generational successor to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors for Windows-based client PCs. Last October from the same source we heard that Qualcomm had already got test silicon for the Snapdragon X2 chips, which were codenamed Project Glymur, and featured the model number SC8480XP.

Today, the deeper dive into Snapdragon X2 details also focuses on the SC8480XP. However, this time, WinFuture says it has had eyes on undisclosed import-export databases and spews forth some important tech specs.

In the intro, we mentioned that the next-gen Windows PC chips from Qualcomm might move up to 18 cores, from 12. That's not all. WinFuture has spied documents which suggest the new Qualcomm SiP (system in package) will fold in both RAM and flash storage. Specifically, the SC8480XP features 18 cores, 48GB of SK hynix RAM, and a 1TB SSD onboard.

Qualcomm comes at PCs from a different heritage to traditional players like AMD and Intel, so perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised at its different take with the SiP implementation. The source also indicates that Qualcomm is testing the next-gen processor with an all-in-one cooler and 120mm radiator. It may be trying to see what advantages a desktop could bring compared to the thermally constrained portables its chips usually find a home.

As if there weren't enough Qualcomm codenames numbers and brands mentioned already, WinFuture indicates the upcoming chips might fall under the 'Snapdragon X2 Ultra Premium' brand. A wry response to that might be – why no AI?

Lastly, remember this Snapdragon X2 information comes via an unnamed import-export database leak, so please regard it as an indicative information nugget, at best. Our next window of opportunity for some real first-hand information on Snapdragon X2 chips is very near, though. Qualcomm will have a significant presence at MWC, and this mobile trade show kicks off in Barcelona tomorrow.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said during the company’s 1Q25 earnings conference call that Arm “has no current plan to terminate the Qualcomm Architecture License Agreement.” This announcement came soon after it won over Arm in a legal battle over the custom core designs that Nuvia made. When Qualcomm bought Nuvia for its CPU designs and used it as part of the Oryon CPUs found in its Snapdragon chips, Arm was up in arms, saying that Nuvia cannot transfer its designs without prior approval, reports The Register.

This has led to a massive legal feud between the two companies, with Arm terminating Qualcomm’s license and demanding that Nuvia’s blueprints be destroyed. Arm says that it’s missing out on $50 million of annual royalties because Qualcomm did not renegotiate Nuvia’s license after the acquisition; however, the Snapdragon designer argues that its Oryon CPU cores use less than 1% of original Arm tech, saying that it’s almost entirely custom.

Despite Qualcomm’s victory, Arm is still asking for further clarification on the legalities of the deal, especially as the jury is hung on whether Nuvia was in breach of its contract with the company. Because of this, there’s a chance that Arm would ask for a retrial, at least for this issue.

Nevertheless, Arm’s legal defeat to Qualcomm has no expected effect on the company’s bottom line and revenue forecast. Arm CFO Jason Child said the company assumed it wouldn’t win the lawsuit and would continue receiving royalties from Qualcomm from its existing ALA and other licenses. “The primary reason for the lawsuit was very much around defending our IP and that’s important,” Child said. “But from a financial perspective, we had assumed that we’ll continue to be receiving royalties at basically the same rates that they’ve been paying for in the past and will continue to pay.”

Even though Arm was unsuccessful in forcing Qualcomm to renegotiate its contracts, it still benefits from the latter’s success. During its last quarterly earnings announcement, the Snapdragon maker said that its revenue jumped by 18% yearly, leading to a 15% growth in its net income. It also claimed it cornered 10% of the U.S. Windows PC retail market for $800 and up devices. Arm’s revenue for this period also increased by 18% year over year, showing how closely the two companies are connected.

Qualcomm just released its first-quarter financial results for fiscal year 2025, covering the period from October to December 2024, and it has made some bold claims to investors. According to analyst Sravan Kundojjala, the company said that 10% of Windows PC sales in the U.S., worth $800 and above, are powered by Snapdragon X chips. This is quite an assertion, especially as it only captured 0.8% percent of the market in the third quarter of 2024, having only sold 720,000 units.

This headline PC shipments figure rings somewhat true, especially with the qualifiers included in the statement. The Windows PC retail market is tied to consumer purchases only, so Qualcomm probably didn’t consider institutional purchases, like those coming from the government and other private businesses. Aside from that, it also only counted PCs worth $800 or more, which is slightly above the average laptop selling price of $750 in 2024.

Whatever the case, we’re going to see more Snapdragon laptops and PCs this coming year. Qualcomm has already announced an 8-core Snapdragon X chip that will bring down prices to around $600, making its devices more accessible for buyers. We’ve also seen mini-PCs with these chips coming to market a few months after the company abruptly canceled its $899 dev kit. These new devices are part of the 80 or so models planned to arrive (or already launched) in 2025, with a further 100+ more coming next year.

Windows on Arm PCs still have a long way to go to reach market share parity with x86_64 devices, especially as they continue to have some compatibility issues with legacy software and gaming. However, they also come with several advantages, especially in the efficiency department. We’ve even seen Snapdragon X Elite laptops lasting more than 15 hours of real-world use on a single charge, finally allowing Windows devices to somewhat catch up with the battery life you can find on Apple's MacBooks.

With continued development, we might eventually see a time when Windows devices are evenly split between Arm and x86 processors. But it will likely take time, and we can only wait and see if the Qualcomm CEO’s prediction that the Snapdragon X chips will take 50% of the Windows PC market by 2029 will come true.

Microsoft just announced that it will release NPU-optimized versions of DeepSeek-R1, allowing it to take advantage of AI-optimized hardware found in Copilot+ PCs. According to the Windows Blog, the feature will first arrive on Qualcomm Snapdragon X PCs, to be followed by Intel Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake) and other chips. The initial release will feature DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, which an AI research team from UC Berkeley has discovered is the smallest model that delivers correct answers, but larger models featuring 7 billion and 14 billion parameters will arrive shortly thereafter.

DeepSeek’s optimizations meant that it needed 11x less compute versus its Western competitors, making it a great model to run on consumer devices. However, it also uses Windows Copilot Runtime so developers can use on-device DeepSeek APIs within their apps.

Furthermore, Microsoft claims that this NPU-optimized version of DeepSeek will deliver “very competitive time to first token and throughput rates, while minimally impacting battery life and consumption of PC resources.” This means that Copilot+ PC users can expect the power and performance of competing models like Meta’s Llama 3 and OpenAI’s o1 while ensuring that the devices it’s installed on still offer great battery life.

That said, DeepSeek’s availability on Copilot+ PCs is geared more toward programmers and developers instead of consumers. Perhaps Microsoft is using it to encourage them to build more apps that would take advantage of AI PCs as many people still don’t see the need for it and market research suggests users only purchase these devices because they’re the only available option nowadays.

Another thing that got us curious is Microsoft’s preferential treatment for Qualcomm Snapdragon X PCs at this time. While it launched the Copilot+ branding with these chips last July, the latest mainstream Intel and AMD laptops now also have built-in NPUs. AMD has even released instructions on how users can run it on Ryzen AI CPUs and Radeon GPUs, with the company even claiming that the RTX 7900 XTX runs DeepSeek better than the RTX 4090.

Whatever the case, we’re still excited about the possibilities that DeepSeek unlocks for AI. Since it’s open source, nearly anyone can download it and run it locally, allowing others to build upon the advancements and optimizations the original model has put into place.

Qualcomm has hired Sailesh Kottapalli, a former chief architect of Xeon server processors at Intel, to lead the development of the company's data center CPUs, reports CRN. Kottapalli spent 28 years at Intel and worked on various projects, including x86 and Itanium, as well as CPUs and GPUs. More recently, he was responsible for multiple generations of Xeon processors. 

"As we head into 2025, I am excited to share that I have joined Qualcomm," Kottapali wrote in a post on LinkedIn. "The opportunity to innovate and grow while helping to scale new frontiers was immensely compelling to me, a once-in-a-career opportunity that I could not pass on. The start of this new chapter also coincides with the closing of a previous one at Intel that lasted 28 years. This experience was tremendously gratifying, and I would like to acknowledge it." 

Kottapalli joins Qualcomm as a senior vice president and will lead the company's data center CPU efforts. Qualcomm's upcoming server CPUs are expected to use cores developed by engineers from Nuvia, a company Qualcomm acquired for $1.4 billion in 2021. Nuvia originally designed its Arm-based Phoenix (now called Oryon) cores with data centers in mind, but Qualcomm uses them for Snapdragon X system-on-chips (SoC) for consumer PCs, which upset Arm and led to litigation between the two companies. 

This is not Qualcomm's first foray into server CPUs. The company previously attempted to enter the market with Centriq but abandoned those efforts in 2018 and laid off its development team. This new initiative marks a return with a stronger focus and expanded resources. 

It should be noted that a wider range of data center software now supports the Arm instruction set architecture. Furthermore, as Amazon expands its Graviton-based offerings, the data center industry's confidence in Arm processors increases, so Qualcomm has every reason to assume that demand for its upcoming server processors will be higher than it was back in the day. To some degree, the hire of Sailesh Kottapalli serves the same purpose as people tend to trust server industry veterans. 

Just yesterday we also learned that Qualcomm is looking for an SoC Security Architect for its Data Center Team.

Qualcomm is assembling a team of developers to design server processors for the data center. Evidence of this comes via a vacancy posted on the company's own website (noticed by Longhorn). The company is looking for a server system-on-chip (SoC) security architect, and the details of the listing outline that the company is "developing reference platforms based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC, delivering a comprehensive solution that includes hardware, software, reference designs, user guides, SDKs, and more."

The job listing confirms the existence of a 'Qualcomm Data Center' team that is designing a 'high-performance, energy-efficient server solution for data center applications.' While we are, of course, speculating, Qualcomm may plan to use the high-performance energy-efficient cores designed by its Nuvia team for data center applications. This same team developed the company's Snapdragon X processors for laptops, but it originally designed server processors before it was brought into the Qualcomm stable. 

In fact, Qualcomm used to develop and sell Arm-based data center CPUs back in the day without much success, which is presumably why it stopped. However, Amazon’s Graviton processors have proven that Arm-based solutions can thrive in the data center, and the market is wide open for more innovative entrants. Apparently, Amazon's success made Qualcomm rethink and return to the drawing board with data center CPUs. 

"We are seeking experienced SoC Security Architects to join our team," the job listing reads. "If you possess a deep understanding of hardware security architecture and are passionate about architecting and designing complex SoCs at advanced process nodes, we would be pleased to hear from you. This critical role involves architecting the next-generation security system and hardware infrastructure by collaborating with other platform architects to optimize overall Power, Performance, Area (PPA) efficiency and security assurance while ensuring compliance with industry standards."

Interestingly, when acquiring Nuvia, Qualcomm specifically noted that it planned to use Nuvia's Phoenix cores in its processors for client PC and not data centers, despite the fact that Nuvia originally designed its cores with the data center in mind. Nowadays, the cores dubbed 'Oryon' power Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors for client PCs.

But now that Qualcomm has apparently changed its mind about data center products and is assembling a team of SoC developers (the core team is already there), it is reasonable to expect the company to develop a data center solution within the next couple of years. While we do not know for sure, the first devices to use Qualcomm's CPUs would likely be the company's platforms for 5G and then eventually 6G base stations, a space where the company controls the hardware and software stack. As for Qualcomm's development of chips for data centers currently dominated by x86, only time will tell if that is the company's ultimate intention. 

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.

Qualcomm launched a new 8-core Snapdragon X model here at CES 2025 in Las Vegas as it looks to reduce the pricing of Arm-based Windows CoPilot+ laptops based on its platform down to the $600 price range to help penetrate the lucrative high-volume mainstream segment of the market. That broadens the company’s approach to the mainstream segment further in the wake of its Snapdragon X Plus chips that brought pricing down to the $799 range. Despite the new chips’ lower price point, the company isn’t skimping on performance; in single- and multi-core Geekbench, Qualcomm claims to offer 163% and 157% faster performance, respectively, at the same power level as a competing Intel chip, or use 168% and 240% less power to deliver the same level of performance. The company also teased that it would announce the world’s first Snapdragon mini desktop PCs tomorrow.

The launch comes as Qualcomm fights to gain more market share in the PC market from x86 industry stalwarts Intel and AMD with its Windows laptops, a task that, given recent market share reports, will require both an extended period of time and a broader range of price points. However, the company says it is off to a solid start, with Snapdragon processors comprising 95% of the shipping Windows CoPilot+ PCs, with sales in 20 countries addressing over 60% of the total addressable Windows market.

The Qualcomm X1-26-100 slots in as the lowest-tier ‘Snapdragon X’ model, joining the other three platforms already available, like the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus. The chip is an eight-core processor fabbed on the TSMC 4nm process node that boosts up to 3.0 GHz in all-core workloads, with the slightly lower CPU clock speed being the key differentiator compared to the 8-core Snapdragon X Plus processors. The chip wields 30MB of total cache and delivers up to 1.7 TFLOPS of performance from the Adreno GPU, with up to 45 TOPS of performance coming from the AI-focused Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU). The processor supports LPDDR5x-8448 memory that provides up to 135 GB/s of

memory throughput across a 16-bit memory bus. Qualcomm says it has five laptop OEMs, including Dell and Lenovo, bringing new notebooks to market with the chip under the hood.

Qualcomm and Intel have been engaged in a tit-for-tat benchmark war, and today’s launch is no exception. Qualcomm claims that Snapdragon X outperforms Intel’s 10-core Core 5 120U in the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme GPU benchmark by 319% at the same power level, and that the Intel chip requires 258% more power to deliver the same level of performance. Notably, this synthetic benchmark often doesn’t correlate directly to real-world gaming performance, and Snapdragon PC chips have struggled with teething issues with many games that aren’t yet optimized for Arm-based processors. That means that Intel holds the compatibility lead in gaming.

Qualcomm also says its chip outperforms the 120U by 2.2X in performance per watt in the web browser benchmark Speedometer, and by 2.8X the performance per watt in the Procyon productivity suite, which encompasses performance in a range of office applications. Battery life is the key selling point of the Arm-powered Snapdragon platform, and Qualcomm says it delivers anywhere from 35% to 106% more battery life than a Core 5 120U-equipped laptop in a range of benchmarks, including streaming, web browsing, office applications, and Teams video calls.

Being a CoPilot+ PC platform, AI is also a central focus of Qualcomm’s performance claims, including a claimed 5.6X advantage in the Procyon AI Score and a whopping 17X advantage in performance-per-watt during the test. That’s possible because Snapdragon X uses its power-efficient NPU for AI tasks while the Intel processor relies upon the decidedly less performant and efficient integrated GPU. As highlighted in another slide, Intel’s 120U and AMD’s Ryzen 5 7540U, the latter of which was curiously left out of Qualcomm’s other benchmarks (Qualcomm clearly has Intel in the crosshairs), don’t have an NPU that can run the Procyon AI test.

Leading performance and battery life in any given laptop price tier is usually a winning combination, but the advancement of the Arm-compatible software ecosystem looms large as Qualcomm’s primary barrier to wider adoption. In partnerships with Microsoft and a wide range of ISVs ,Qualcomm is working to defray compatibility concerns and ensure that applications not only run on Arm, but that they also run at their full performance potential. To that end, the company says that it has expanded the roster of Arm-native applications to include 20 of the top VPNs, 50 of the top security and cloud applications, along with new music Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) and Virtual Studio Technology (VST) applications. The company also now has 50 native NPU-powered applications that look to capitalize on the AI potential of CoPilot+ PCs.

The Snapdragon X platform will launch globally beginning in January 2025, and as you’d imagine, we’ll have systems in for review in short order.

Arm-based PCs won't rock the PC world in 2025, according to a recently published report by self-described tech intelligence experts, ABI Research. In a report outlining 101 tech trends that will – and won't – shape 2025, the analysts at ABI say they expect that "Arm-based PCs will represent only 13% of total PC shipments in 2025." This prediction might chill the hearts of companies like Qualcomm, and its investors, so let's take a closer look.

By the summer it seemed like we had been waiting for eons for the first Nuvia (Oryon) core-powered Arm processors to be released by Qualcomm for the PC market, and they were duly trotted out at Computex 2024. We also heard rather a lot of bluster and bravado regarding the expected fortunes of Arm PCs over the coming half-decade. Most notably, both the Arm CEO and Qualcomm CEO talked in public about Arm Windows PCs gaining a 50% market share within five years.

At release, the first Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus machines were propelled by featuring the first processors certified for Microsoft's Copilot+ PC program, and the stellar battery life offered by these laptops redefined untethered portability for Windows users. However, people weren't, and still aren't, impressed by Microsoft's Copilot+ misfire(s), and it only took a few months before the incumbent Intel and AMD Windows laptop rivals trotted out efficiency-tuned architectures to basically nullify the greatest selling point for Arm Windows PCs – battery life.

Is it any surprise, then, that ABI Research now thinks that there is limited potential for further Arm PC penetration in the coming year? The report highlights this is a pivotal year for the Arm PC platform, but it looks like it may be a dud.

ABI notes that as well as AMD and Intel spoiling the Arm PC dream, there has been disruptive legal squabbling between Arm's biggest players, especially regarding licensing and royalties. Last but not least, ABI doesn't see the x86 software advantage going away this year, either.

Though the laptop segment is the biggest target for Arm PC proponents, we reported on a very interesting Cinebench world record-setting 128-core Arm PC desktop tower yesterday.

Other ABI predictions for 2025

The full report from ABI touches on many other aspects of tech. We think readers might also be interested to hear that the analysts think AI PCs will become the new normal in 2025. Hopefully, moving local AI out of premium means there will be more reasons to own an AI PC, in a chicken-and-egg kind of fashion.

In other tech trend highlights, ABI predicts AI humanoids won't take over the world, semiconductor onshoring will still need several years to materialize as planned, and most people still won't want to wear smart glasses.