Qualcomm’s next big Snapdragon PC chip lands in September

In terms of chips, Qualcomm didn’t really have anything to announce at Computex 2025. That will have to wait until the Snapdragon Summit, which takes place at the end of September.

“Nobody expected Qualcomm, the cellular company, to have the leading performance on an SOC for a laptop in the PC space,” Cristiano Amon, chief executive of Qualcomm, in a keynote address at Computex. “We’re going to do that again, and it’s going to be even bigger.”

“You’re going to see the next thing that we’ve been working on, the next chip for PC, and we’re going to provide another breakthrough in performance,” Amon added. “I promise you, you will be impressed.”

Amon used his Computex presentation to laud the success of the Snapdragon platform, which has enjoyed stellar reviews, including from PCWorld, and won me over. Over 85 different PCs now feature members of the Snapdragon X platform, and Amon said over 100 should be in users’ hands by next year.

To its credit, Qualcomm has moved quickly to shore up any holes in what it offers. App compatibility has been a concern, but Qualcomm seems to have mostly solved that problem. Growth in native apps have grown by three times, Amon said, and user time in native experiences has increased by 93 percent. Over 50 features take advantage of the Snapdragon’s NPU, which has forged close ties with Microsoft in rolling out new Windows features.

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Qualcomm representatives have indicated that they are attacking Intel hard in retail and in the consumer space, placing kiosks in key retailers and launching a number of commercials. Qualcomm is pushing the fact that it delivers about the same performance running on battery and while plugged in, while the performance of Intel’s Core Ultra drops substantially while on battery. (Our own tests of Intel’s Core Ultra “Lunar Lake” chips bear that out.)

Qualcomm has a weaker case to be made regarding games, but it’s addressing that issue, too. Amon reiterated that Fortnite is coming to Snapdragon PCs, along with Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat. He also showed off a surprisingly smooth gameplay video of Kingdom Come II: Deliverance, though it was impossible to tell what graphics settings or resolution the game was being played back on. In all, Amon claimed that over 1,400 games are running on Snapdragon.

Qualcomm’s Amon also spent considerable time talking about agentic AI, and about how a shift to that model would benefit the Snapdragon platform and its NPU. Microsoft has begun talking up the concept, sending out autonomous AIs, or agents, to pursue specific tasks without user control or direction.

Finally, Amon pledged that Qualcomm and its Snapdragon platform have another trick up their sleeve: targeting the data center, and the premium revenues that commands.