Computex 2024 | Qualcomm CEO declares the PC Reborn thanks to Snapdragon X series PCs

Cristiano Amon has (somewhat inevitably) made Snapdragon X SoCs the focus of Qualcomm's Computex 2024 keynote today (June 3, 2024), thereby confirming the launch, availability and Microsoft Copilot+ support of the first PCs to be powered by the Plus and Elite variants of the series.

Their NPU was one of the stars of this show, now touted to deliver up to 5.4x the performance per watt compared to that of the Intel Core Ultra 7 series and up to 2.6x that of the M3.

The top-end X Elite's Oryon CPU is also now backed to achieve "peak performance" (in an internal March 2024 Geekbench v6.2 for Windows 11 multi-thread test) while using 65% of the power a rival platform might use to get to the same level based 

Accordingly, Amon backed the X series as the platform for developers to make their next generative AI apps, using tools such as Qualcomm's AI Hub, which can apparently deploy a model on a PC such as the HP Elitebook Ultra or Acer Swift 14 AI in as little as 5 minutes.

Then again, there will also be a Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows, hyped as an "ideal hardware platform for these developers", as it will feature an "accelerated" version of the X Elite chipset and come in a stackable form factor.

On the other hand, laptops such as the aforementioned inaugural "Copilot+ PCs" from Acer and HP, not to mention the Asus Vivobook S 15, Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, have now launched and should be available to pre-order from June 18, 2024.

In the meantime, the "RTX AI" Acer Swift X 14 with a 2.8K OLED display can be bought right now on Amazon.