CES Qualcomm has unveiled the latest addition to its Snapdragon X Series of Arm-based chips to power Copilot+ PCs, targeting systems in the $600 range.
Announced at CES 2025, the fourth platform to join the Snapdragon X Series is somewhat prosaically (and potentially confusingly) just called Snapdragon X.
Devices powered by the latest silicon are expected to be available from vendors including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo in early 2025, Qualcomm said, enabling Windows Copilot+ PCs in the $600 range.
And while Snapdragon X chips have so far only powered laptop designs, the San Diego chips and telecoms biz said that mini desktop PC designs are also in the pipeline. CEO Cristiano Amon hinted at this during last year’s Computex show, when he said its silicon would be coming to all form factors of PC.
Just a single chip makes up the Snapdragon X line-up so far, listed as the X1-26-100. This has 8 of Qualcomm’s custom Arm-compatible Oryon CPU cores with a maximum​ multi-core​ frequency of 3 GHz and 30 MB of total cache.
That puts it at the bottom end of the broader Snapdragon X Series portfolio, as you might expect of a budget chip, but it still boasts a 45 TOPS Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU), which means that systems built with it qualify as a Windows Copilot+ PC – unlike those using some of Intel’s latest laptop silicon.
Qualcomm suggests that systems based on Snapdragon X will appeal to students, freelance workers, or budget-conscious consumers looking for a reliable and powerful laptop. The company naturally likes to claim that its platform matches the performance of other PC silicon, while offering a battery life of several days on a single charge.
The chipmaker’s group general manager for mobile compute Alex Katouzian said that the Snapdragon X Series offered the most powerful and power-efficient processors for Windows in their class, making Copilot+ PCs powered by these “the ultimate choice for users who want a laptop that can do it all.”
That will be music to the ears of Microsoft, of course, as the Redmond giant has been pushing hard for users to switch over to Windows 11 –  even dubbing 2025 “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh” – despite there being little in the way of real benefits to tempt users to make the move.
“The introduction of Snapdragon X further reinforces a new wave of PC innovation and enables the latest technologies to be brought to a broader range of Copilot+ PCs,” Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows + Devices Pavan Davuluri said in a canned statement.
However, Arm-based PCs such as those based on Qualcomm’s silicon are not entirely compatible with the vast library of applications developed with Windows on x86 in mind, and have also been reported to underperform in use cases such as gaming.
Qualcomm said in its launch announcement, coinciding with tech fest CES, that Native apps for Windows 11 on the Snapdragon platform now include 20 of the most popular VPNs and 50 of the most popular security apps and cloud storage apps.
It also claims that research from Microsoft indicates that “90 percent of the total app minutes people spend today have native versions,” which we think means that it believes most people are likely to end up using native apps most of the time. Microsoft 365 is available in a native version, for example.
Gartner Research Director Ranjit Atwal said, “We have estimated our increasing share of Arm based PCs in 2025 on the basis of these appearing at lower price points. Now Microsoft also has to provide the Copilot features for the PC, to further attract users.” ®