Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is now a proper competitor to Apple’s M-series of chipsets, which only means that the San Diego firm has a flock of partners ready to add this SoC to their notebook computers. In fact, the latest silicon’s capabilities are so impressive that Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon informed people at a Q&A session that the company’s partners estimate that within three years, Snapdragon chipsets will make up to 60 percent of their sales.
ARM-based SoCs are estimated to capture 50 percent of the entire PC market, claims Qualcomm CEO, starting with the Snapdragon X Elite
At Computex 2024, Qualcomm’s CEO answered some questions, some of which related to the future of ARM chipsets in the PC market. In one of the exchanges, Tom’s Hardware reports the following regarding the future of Snapdragon and these chipsets in general:
“The CEO of Arm said yesterday that he’s aiming for Arm to comprise 50% of the Windows PC market within the next five years. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that’s realistic, and how much of that do you think Qualcomm can address with Snapdragon chips?”
Amon responded that everyone, including Qualcomm, is playing their part to ensure that such a possibility is achieved. However, the chipset giant’s CEO appears optimistic about the future of Snapdragon chipsets powering products in the PC segment because he states that OEMs are talking about different statistics. A few of them estimate that Snapdragon could make up 60 percent of their total PC sales in the next three years.
“Different OEMs are talking a little bit differently. I like, for example, some of the things that some OEMs said in their earnings calls. How they think about this is changing. Some OEMs are talking about 40 to 60% of their total sales within three years. I also saw some OEMs talking about 50%, but those are the order of magnitudes. That’s kind of the opportunity that we have.”
However, it will be a tough road ahead, as Qualcomm’s competitors, Intel and AMD, are not sitting idly by. AMD recently announced its Ryzen AI 300 ‘Strix’ APUs that will be found in future notebooks, while Intel is prepping its Lunar Lake family of processors. If that was not enough to put pressure on Qualcomm, NVIDIA is also reported to get into this market, with the company said to be developing a Blackwell RTX GPU paired with onboard LPDDR6 memory and ARM’s Cortex-X5.
One rumor claims that Qualcomm has already commenced work on the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2, which is said to sport an overclocked version of the Adreno 830 GPU. While the information is extremely scarce at this time, it hints how deeply invested Qualcomm is about penetrating this area and taking the fight to Apple, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA.
