Qualcomm’s high-end PC chips have a new name: Snapdragon X

Qualcomm, the company behind the popular Snapdragon smartphone chips featured in many Android phones, has announced its long-awaited new chip platform for PCs will arrive under the ‘Snapdragon X’ moniker.

“Snapdragon X series represents our latest leap forward as we broaden our aperture to deliver intelligent computing everywhere,” says Qualcomm.

The upcoming ‘X’ SoC (system on a chip) platform is notable for its inclusion of custom ‘Oryon’ technology, developed after the company’s purchase of Nuvia in 2021.

For context, Nuvia was founded by a group of ex-Apple engineers who helped develop the ARM-based ‘A’ series chips found in the iPhone. These same chips later became the foundation of the ‘M’ series of Apple Silicon chips.

Qualcomm’s purchase of Nuvia naturally proved contentious, exacerbating ongoing tensions between it and Apple.

While Qualcomm and Apple have since come to terms, the company behind the ARM architecture is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the maker of Snapdragon.

As ARM-based SoCs have become more powerful while retaining their energy efficiency properties, they have become viable processors for full-blown laptop and desktop computers.

Qualcomm has long teased that its upcoming chips will have the chops to take on Apple’s ‘M’ series chips head-on. The company says that 2024 will be ‘an inflection point’ for its compute platform for PCs.

Image credit: Qualcomm

Source: Qualcomm Via The Verge