Can seven PC makers be wrong?

That’s arguably the biggest takeaway from Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon’s keynote on Monday, the day before the doors open for Computex, the annual PC trade show here in Taipei.

We all knew well ahead of the keynote that the only laptops running Microsoft’s generative AI platform you can buy in June – and for months afterward, for that matter – will be built around Qualcomm’s crowning PC market achievement: the Snapdragon X Series.

And we all knew ahead of time that Qualcomm snagged 22 design wins with the X Series. Even so, watching seven OEMs – executives from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and Samsung – all parade their new Snapdragon laptops on stage was impressive.

That’s never happened before. Previous generations of Snapdragon PC processors received lukewarm response, with fewer PC makers selling fewer systems. So it begs the question: what’s different now?

To be sure, Qualcomm has a time-to-market edge and a performance advantage today. But neither is built to last – at least, not long enough to merit PC makers to take a chance on a whole new processor platform. (The X Series chips are based on Arm, while the lion’s share of Windows PCs run x86 chips from AMD and Intel.)

AMD and Intel are both unveiling NPUs – optimized accelerators for Gen AI that are built into PC processors – that leapfrog the one inside X Series, if only by a bit. The X Series peaks at 45 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, the de facto metric for NPU performance. AMD’s third-gen Ryzen AI processors will hit 50 and Intel’s Lunar Lake family reaches 48.

X Series’ Copilot+ exclusivity could continue for a while after the new AMD and Intel chips are available. That’s because Qualcomm and Microsoft worked hard together to ensure that the Copilot+ platform is optimized for Snapdragon. The software giant is still preparing its Windows Gen AI package for AMD and Intel.

Eventually though, everybody will be making and selling laptop processors powerful enough and efficient enough to run Copilot+.

So why are PC makers leaning into the X Series? Ironically, the answer may lie in the low-power Snapdragon architecture, its smartphone roots and the design enhancements that came to Qualcomm when it bought Nuvia three years ago. PC makers are citing previously unseen power efficiency. During Amon’s keynote, some PC makers said their X Elite-Series laptops were topping 25 hours of battery life.

That, combined with zippy responsiveness, could finally give PC makers the one-two low-power performance punch they’ve been looking for to help them beat back encroaching Mac laptops built around Apple’s M-Series processors.

Of course, we won’t have to wait long to find out. I’ll be evaluating the X Series’ Mac-Killer capabilities shortly, and should have at least a preliminary answer later this month.

Stay tuned!