Qualcomm wants to supply Snapdragon socs for budget laptops

Qualcomm will publish a roadmap this year for a wide range of laptop chips. The company not only wants to release Snapdragon processors for expensive laptops, but also socs for cheaper models.

Qualcomm Vice President Don McGuire told Mobile Tech that his company is completing the laptop chip roadmap to serve a wide variety of laptops, from $800 models and more expensive to cheaper $300 machines. Following him, Qualcomm will soon be publishing more information about new laptop platforms.

McGuire is cautious about the arrival of Chromebooks with Qualcomm-socs. He expects that they will eventually come, but so far there is no good cooperation with Google’s Chrome team. The CEO emphasizes the close cooperation with Microsoft and says that it is necessary to realize Chromebooks with Snapdragons. According to him, however, Google seems busy with other things.

Qualcomm introduced its Snapdragon 8cx 5G Compute Platform for laptops at the end of last year and Lenovo showed last week the first laptop that should come out with the combination of soc and modem. That should happen next year. The Snapdragon 8cx is an octacore specially developed for laptops and produced at 7nm that would perform equivalent to an Intel Core CPU in the U-series. Qualcomm wants to distinguish itself with long battery life and continuous connectivity. PCs with the Snapdragon 850 do not seem to be a success so far, where performance and the starting price of $600 could be obstacles.