Dave James once saw a laptop
This week I mainly: Playing with one of the most ridiculous handhelds… that I still love, and losing myself as I stare lovingly at the glorious OLED screen of the Razer Blade 16.
I’m a PC gamer, a tech obsessive, and probably a bit of a contrarian. That may be why I always like to support the underdog narrative when it comes to a new player entering the PC gaming arena. I mean, it may be a billion dollar underdog, but when it comes to the right Windows PC silicon, Qualcomm is still a n00b, and I can’t wait to see how the new laptop CPUs fare ultimately develop.
There are a few different reasons why Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips are the pieces of silicon I’m most interested in this year. This is mainly 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 inherent potential there, especially considering what Apple did with its own chips when it shed its Intel chip liabilities.
But there’s also a creeping negativity surrounding what the so-called ‘big three’ are planning 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 a deeply crushing feeling of jealousy.
AMD could also release new RDNA 4 cards this year, but they will reportedly be chasing the mid-range and are unlikely to meaningfully change this as a price category. Only if it can really dramatically change the performance we expect from that level of GPU will the Radeon RX 8000 series have our collective attention.
Then there’s the potential for AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow and Lunar Lake CPUs, but who cares about using boring old x86 silicon when Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon will give to our generation? to dream?
This is the promise of the new ARM-based processors, which use 12 or 10 Qualcomm Oryon CPU cores, with an Adreno GPU capable of delivering up to 4.6 TFLOPs of computing power. The chips can be scaled from completely fanless 12W machines to 80W configurations. And they’re supposedly super efficient, delivering the same performance as AMD’s 780M for much less power or higher performance in the same range.
And this won’t just apply to boring office apps either, as Qualcomm has – in my opinion unnecessarily – talked about its gaming achievements 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 an x86 instruction set, and we’re told that games will “just work.”
I’m sure it’s not that simple, and I absolutely expect moments where performance is beaten to an unplayable point simply because the drivers and the game code make absolutely no friends with each other. But if Valve’s Proton has taught me anything, it’s that things that intuitively shouldn’t work sometimes “just work.”
So yeah, I’m definitely excited about the potential of a sleek 13-inch laptop, with all-day battery life, and the processing and gaming performance that will meet all my reasonable laptop requests. If I can get the same frame rates as, say, the iGPUs in AMD’s latest handhelds and top laptop chips, but with twice the battery life, then I’ll be a happy man.
But I’m old and ugly enough to know we can’t have nice things. I’ve been burned enough times that I know there’s a good chance the X Elite chips will be an absolute mess for anyone who actually wants to game on those machines. The silicon itself may be fantastic, but Intel will tell you that it’s one thing to have effective hardware and quite another to ensure you can regularly squeeze that performance out of the rainbow spectrum of PC gaming enjoyment.
Just look at the patchy performance of Intel’s Arc GPUs (even after a ton of patches) in a wide cross-section of PC games. Sometimes the framerates are fantastic, but there are also times when the performance just isn’t there… or the game just doesn’t work.
So I still have a hard time trusting that Qualcomm will be able to control both the drivers for its new hardware and the translation layers that make it possible to run native x86 code on its 64-bit ARM cores. Especially when Charlie Demerjian specifically calls out the company for cheating in its seemingly unreplicable Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks.
It’s true that Qualcomm hasn’t been particularly detailed about the technology or the benchmarks with the press so far, and Charlie is calling BS on many of the numbers presented after talking to OEMs working with silicon, which is quite worrying.
First, because it’s bad, the promised performance may not figure in the final bill, and second, why on earth did Qualcomm dig itself such a hole if the claims aren’t true? At no point did anyone expect these ARM PC laptop chips to focus on true PC gaming performance, so the company had no reason to start claiming it wasn’t true, which could only hurt its reputation post-release.
Until we actually get our hands on laptops with the Snapdragon silicon, we can’t tell if Charlie is mistaken, or if Qualcomm is actually pulling numbers out of the air, but it has dampened my enthusiasm a bit, that’s for sure.
The only other piece of technology I want to see as soon as possible – and especially see that it’s actually good – is Intel’s Battlemage graphics architecture. But after Alchemist’s launch debacle, I’m more than a little hesitant to get too excited about Intel’s upcoming GPUs. The main point is whether Intel can launch on time this year, but also whether it has learned the lessons of Alchemist and can actually release a truly competitive suite of discrete graphics cards to give us a good third way for the GPU.
Which I think is one of the reasons I want Qualcomm to succeed. Maybe it’s part of my contrarian tendencies where I want fresh new alternatives in different sectors of PC gaming. Intel in graphics cards to upset Nvidia (and to a a lot of to a lesser extent) AMD hegemony and Qualcomm in processors to disrupt the x86 monopoly.
And if not Qualcomm, then… who? Because with the potential for ARM-based chips running Windows’ x86 apps, the market is suddenly wide open, and we know Nvidia has some history with Arm. A ShieldBook is still a possibility, right?