Qualcomm gave people of the media a deeper look at the Snapdragon X Series chips during the recent Snapdragon X Series Southeast Asia Media Summit held at the W Hotel, Sentosa, Singapore.
During the summit, Qualcomm detailed the prowess of the AI PCs powered by the latest Snapdragon X Series chips and demoed different use cases.
After the main event we got to have a roundtable interview with ST Liew, VP of Qualcomm Technologies and President of Qualcomm’s business in Taiwan and SEA; and Nitin Kumar, Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm.
The Qualcomm executives highlighted how they prioritize actual experiences over the specs when designing a chip — an Apple-esque take and refreshing approach from other Windows chipmakers.
“We don’t start with the specs, we start with the experiences, then draw back to see what is required to enable the experience,” said Kumar.
Instead of simply adding cores to their chips — which could unnecessarily blemish the chips’ stellar battery life — they analyze what the experiences would look like for the “user, consumer, officer worker, productivity user” and then decide “what is the fundamental hardware spec” they need to drive those experiences.
The Qualcomm executives also addressed the issues with app support when switching from x86 machines to ARM chips.
They reported how they have achieved tremendous progress in working with app developers to ensure that apps are “one, compatible with the Snapdragon platform, second, make them native on the Snapdragon platform, and third, have the apps that are even native to further take advantage of the fundamental architecture of optimized NPU applications.”
When asked about their plans to compete with Intel and AMD in markets like the Philippines, the executives said that they are going to “lead much, much faster” on the innovation front.
“We’re bringing much faster innovation that is going to help us with the adoption, that is going to help us drive the message with the consumer.” Qualcomm is also positive that the power of the Snapdragon brand on the mobile industry will give them leverage in the PC market.
“We’re going to drive that performance, drive that battery life, drive that on-device AI, and we will continue to make investment in the region to make sure that there is that adoption of that message across the broader set of countries, of course, including the Philippines as we,” said Kumar.
Creating chips that give laptops uncompromised performance and modern AI features, all while achieving impressive battery life and ultra-portable designs, will allow Qualcomm to help Windows capture a greater share of the market — a market they share with Macbooks.