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3 months ago
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Sponsored feature For years, Snapdragon chips have spent years sipping energy rather than treating your phone's battery like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Now it wants to bring the same discipline as it moves beyond phones, targeting laptops exclusively with its Snapdragon X Series non-x86 processor family. Who knew restraint could be so radical?
The great PC power rethink
Intel's fall from grace in recent years is prompting a rethink of the PC processor market. For years, x86 ruled, and AMD has certainly benefited from Chipzilla's poor fortunes. However, this shifting ground has also opened up new opportunities for a new generation of non-x86-based chips designed with power efficiency in mind from the beginning.
Apple's transition to ARM is a case in point, with its M-series architecture delivering marked increases in battery life. This move enabled it to fast-track innovation in power management.
Microsoft is doing its best to expand processor options for its customers, and it's working closely with Snapdragon to do it, according to Craig Tellalian, director of field applications engineering at Qualcomm Technologies. He knows Redmond inside out after spending ten years there, the last four as enterprise CTO in the worldwide commercial business.
"There's a lot of innovation that hasn't happened in the PC industry for so long," he explains. "Now we're coming in and disrupting it with a great story of performance, efficiency, power, and great thermals."
Snapdragon traditionally focused on smartphones but had made several runs at the PC market before in collaboration with Microsoft. Now, Snapdragon X Series represents a fundamental shift in PC design philosophy.
Launched in three formats (the Snapdragon X, Snapdragon X Elite, and Snapdragon X Plus), this architecture uses the Qualcomm Oryon core. There are 12 cores on the Snapdragon X Elite and a choice of 10 and eight on the Snapdragon X Plus.
Even with the rise in mobile computing and the endless power-saving rhetoric, PCs' underlying architectures have come from a desktop-first mentality. Coming from a smartphone world where every milliwatt counted gives the company a true mobile-first mindset. It focuses on power efficiency from first principles, scrutinizing thermal management and battery optimization from day one.
From smartphone to silicon powerhouse
Tellalian cites silicon efficiency as the primary factor for PC power management rather than display technology, especially on the mobile PC devices that Snapdragon X Series processors will be used for. Holding up a phone, he explains his perspective.
"I come from this. It's my world," he says. "You have to design a chip architecture that can get you through multiple days without becoming a hot pocket when you're carrying it. And you have limited real estate for a large battery."
You don't get a fan in a phone, and you also have to do always-on, instant wake very well, because phone users won't wait.
The Snapdragon X Series draws on these principles with its modular multi-engine architecture.
"Historically, when you think of a traditional PC, you had a large motherboard, and you had these modules, CPU, GPU and everything, and they all were fairly aggressive and power hungry in terms of what they needed to do," he says.
The Snapdragon X Series system-on-chip configuration changes that.
"To design a chip around a small component like this, we integrated engines," he continues. "Each of them only gets spun up and draws power when it needs to be activated, and so that allows for a much more power efficient model."
The postage stamp-sized system-on-chip has independent modules like the GPU working separately. This makes it possible to scale power dynamically. This translates into some serious performance savings or the modular architecture when operating in power-constrained environments, according to Qualcomm Technologies,, with up to 90% faster than other processors when unplugged from the wall.
Multi-day battery life becomes reality
One area where this really stands out for business and consumer users alike is battery life when compared to traditional x86 laptops. Real-world battery performance benchmarks show up to 22 hours of battery life.
Longer battery life is a big deal for mobile workers, and those in field service power is limited will love the battery life feature, says Tellalian.
The power-saving capabilities don't just mean more battery life. He points to some other advantages, such as connected standby and instant-on capabilities.
"In the PC world, once you go into a sleep state, you tend to then have to hibernate, and then it may take a while for it to resume again," he says.
Phones sleep when the screen goes off but when notifications arrive they turn back on again instantly. PCs powered by Snapdragon are the same. It means no more finger-drumming while you wait for your PC to wake up.
"That goes back to it being a low-power island," he continues. "We don't require a lot of juice to reactivate the CPU or the GPU and wake up again."
AI without the power penalty
One of the most beneficial components in the Windows on Snapdragon architecture is the neural processing unit (NPU), which is another separate module on the chip. Qualcomm Technologies designed this to enable local AI processing at minimal cost to battery life.
"Think of it as a highly tuned, power-efficient engine that does a lot of CPU-like computations, but it's doing it at 1/28th of the typical power that a CPU would need," Tellalian says.
This offers 45 tera operations per second (TOPS), which exceeds Microsoft's 40 TOPS minimum requirement for Copilot+ PC features. That's why for a while you could only buy Copilot+ PCs sporting Snapdragon X Series chips; Intel didn't have that capability until it shipped its Lunar Lake silicon.
Snapdragon's NPU architecture is the same across all the chips in the series,, enabling them all to handle on-client AI use cases. The outfit worked closely with Microsoft on this integration.
Microsoft has built a lot of small language models into the Windows 11 Copilot+ PC experience, according to Tellalian. The NPU will pick up the slack when running those LLMs, along with video and audio effects, taking the load from the GPU. That allows advanced application functionality and built-in Windows features to run without the performance impact that some complained about with its chips for the Surface Pro.
This LLM processing is useful for privacy-sensitive operations, reducing cloud data exposure. That's especially important for some corporate applications. It's handy for low-latency use cases where you don't want to wait for a cloud response. It also eliminates the water consumption that your query will likely contribute to through evaporative cooling if sent to datacenters, Tellalian points out.
Tools for creators are already taking advantage of these capabilities. Tellalian sees the combination of fast processing and power efficiency increasing as application developers come to grips with its capabilities.
The emulation challenge: Running x86 in a non-x86 world
Microsoft has boosted the non-x86-based Windows effort by relaunching its x86 emulator technology as PRISM. The code evolved from the emulator in Windows 10 for non-x86 processors, which originally just handled 32-bit x86 apps. Then it got 64-bit compatibility, and got so good in Windows 11 that Redmond decided it was worth branding on its own.
"It really got good," says Tellalian. "In multi-threaded experiences, we're seeing emulation run at 90 percent of what it would be if it ran native on our silicon."
Hopefully, though, emulation will become less important over time as more applications move to run natively on non-x86 processors in Windows. You can already run software including Office, Chrome, Spotify, Zoom, WhatsApp, Blender, the Affinity suite, and DaVinci Resolve natively on machines with the Snapdragon X Series.
"As more ISVs start to figure out how they can run some of these language models locally and offload them to the NPU, it'll allow my app to run better," Tellalian says.
It can also help with applications such as DLP and file scanning for security.
"If I can now scan twice the amount of files in the same amount of time at a lot less power, the end user is going to love my platform," he adds.
In time, he predicts that many OEMs will develop their own self-healing agentic AI models, where the device uses on-board data analysis to help solve its own problems and perhaps avert upcoming ones. The result? A PC that, for once, actually improves its performance over time. That would definitely buck a long-standing trend in the PC market.
A new era for power efficiency and performance
This power-efficient architecture is a departure from Qualcomm's previous efforts with PC chips. Past attempts powering Windows RT and Windows 10 were still firmly from the smartphone camp, which had implications for performance.
The Snapdragon X Series processor family is something different. Its design maintains strong power efficiency but also creates a step change in performance. Make no mistake; this is Qualcomm Technologies' serious, head-long run at the PC market and people are taking notice.
Sponsored by Qualcomm Technologies.
