by Dave James saw a laptop once
This week I have mostly been: Playing around with one of the most ridiculous handsets … which I still can’t help but like, and lose myself gazing lovingly at the glorious Razer Blade 16 OLED screen.
I’m a computer gamer, technology obsessive, and probably a bit of a contrarian, too. And that’s perhaps why I’m always keen to support the underdog story when it comes to a new player entering the PC gaming arena. I mean, it could be a billion dollar underdog, but when it comes to silicon Windows PC proper, Qualcomm is still n00b, and I can’t wait to see how their new laptop CPUs create up finally.
There are a few different reasons why Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips are the silicon chips I’m most interested in getting my hands on this year. Mostly, it’s because we’re talking about a complete departure from Intel and AMD’s x86 dominance over the PC processing space from a Windows perspective. And there’s a lot of potential in that, especially after seeing what Apple did with its own chips when it got out of its Intel chip obligations.
But there is also a creeping negativity towards the so-called ‘big three’ so far this year when it comes to hardware releases in PC gaming land. Sure, Nvidia could start shipping its Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs this year, but even if we end up with the most powerful graphics card ever, it will only be at the hyper-expensive end of the market. That will only leave PC gamers with empty bank accounts or deep envy.
AMD could be launching new RDNA 4 cards this year, too, but they’ll reportedly be chasing the mid-range and unlikely to make a meaningful difference in price category. The Radeon RX 8000 series will only get our collective attention if it can dramatically change the performance we expect from that GPU series.
Then there is the potential for AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow and Lunar Lake CPUs, but who cares about boring ol’ x86 silicon when the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (and X Plus) chips are going to give us low power, slim laptops on our. dream?
This is the promise of the new ARM-based processors, using either 12 or 10 Qualcomm Oryon CPU cores, with an Adreno GPU capable of up to 4.6 TFLOPs of computing power inside them, the chips can scale from completely machines fanless 12 W to. Configurations 80 W. And they are thought to be super efficient, delivering either the same performance as 780M AMD for less power or higher performance in the same envelope.
And this won’t just be for boring office apps either, because Qualcomm has been—unnecessarily, in my opinion—talking about its gaming performance in the Windows world. Remember, we’re talking about an ARM-based chip, running an operating system where most of the software is designed for the x86 instruction set and we’re told games will run “just right.”
I’m sure it’s not as simple as that, and I fully expect times where the performance is slammed to the point of being unplayable simply because the drivers and real game code are not friends with each other. But, if Valve’s Proton taught me anything, it’s that sometimes things will actually work that shouldn’t be intuitive.
So, yes, I’m very impressed with the possibility of a slim 13-inch laptop, with all-day battery life, and the processing and gaming performance that will meet all reasonable demands on my laptop. If I can get the same frame rates as something like the iGPUs inside the latest handhelds and AMD’s top laptop chips, but with twice the battery life, then I’ll be a happy man.
But I’m old enough and ugly enough to know that we can’t have nice things. I’ve been burned often enough to know that the X Elite chips are likely to be a total mess for anyone trying to game on those machines. The silicon itself may be great, but Intel will tell you that it’s one thing to have efficient hardware and another entirely to make sure you’re able to regularly push out that performance across a rainbow spectrum of PC gaming good times.
Look at the patchy performance of Intel’s Arc GPUs – even after tons of patches – across a wide cross-section of PC games. Sometimes the frame rates are great, but there are also times when the performance is not there… or the game just doesn’t work.
So, it’s still hard to trust that Qualcomm will be able to nail down the drivers for its new hardware as well as manage the translation layers that allow it to run native x86 code on its 64-bit ARM cores. Especially when Charlie Demerjian is specifically calling out the company for its inimitable Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks.
It is true, that Qualcomm has not been particularly detailed about the technology or the benchmarks with the press so far, and Charlie calls BS on many of the numbers present after talking to OEMs working with the silicon, which is a matter concern.
One, because it has been confirmed that the promised performance may not be there in the final calculation, and two, because why did Qualcomm dig such a hole if the claims are not true? Nobody expected these ARM laptop chips to target real PC gaming performance, so the company had no reason to start making claims it doesn’t know to be true, which may prejudice the release of substitutes.
Until we actually get our hands on laptops sporting the Snapdragon silicon we can’t say if Charlie is wrong, or if Qualcomm is really pulling numbers out of thin air, but it has dampened my enthusiasm, it is that’s for sure.
The only other piece of technology I want to see as soon as possible – and especially I want to see really well – is Intel’s Battlemage graphics architecture. But after the Alchemist launch debacle I’m slower than getting too excited about Intel’s upcoming GPUs. More than anything it’s about whether Intel can ship on time this year, but also whether it has learned the lessons from Alchemist and can release a truly competitive line of discrete graphics cards to replace a proper third-party GPU. give us
I think it’s one of the reasons I want Qualcomm to succeed. Maybe it’s part of my contrarian tendencies, where I want fresh upstart new options in different sectors of computer gaming. Intel in graphics cards to enter the Nvidia (and a much smaller size) hegemony AMD, and Qualcomm in processors to disrupt the x86 monopoly.
And if not Qualcomm, then… who? Because the potential for ARM-based chips running x86 Windows apps has suddenly opened up the market, and we know that Nvidia has some history with Arm. Sure that ShieldBook is still the opportunity?
