As you well know, Qualcomm, known for its smartphone chips, has officially entered the laptop market with the Snapdragon and yesterday, Tuesday 18 June 2024, the first devices powered by 4nm ARM processors with 12 cores and integrated Adreno GPU arrived, promising high performance and long battery life. The real news, however, is the support for Copilot+, the Microsoft program that integrates artificial intelligence into the Windows experience.
The Snapdragon This AI-dedicated computing power enables advanced capabilities such as speech recognition, image processing, and machine learning. However, it will soon face competition from AMD Strix Point and Intel Lunar Lake, which are as fast or faster than the Qualcomm chip.
First impressions, also on gaming
With the arrival in stores, the first reviews of the Snapdragon X laptops also arrived, in particular theASUS Vivobook S 15. These highlight good general performance and excellent battery life, even with x86 software emulation. However, the graphics performance does not seem satisfactory, despite the Adreno GPU. Qualcomm did not emphasize the gaming aspect in the presentation, which could explain this shortcoming.
Unfortunately, some games do not allow users to change the resolution to fit the screen or display lower than expected framerates, even when upscaling is used. But some of these problems may be sins of youth.
Snapdragon X laptops also support Copilot+, a set of AI-powered features that aim to improve productivity. These include Cocreator, Live Captions and Audio and Video Effects. The Recall function has been postponed, while some technologies such as Automatic Super Resolution are exclusive to Qualcomm hardware, but only for the moment.
The launch of the Snapdragon Despite this, the potential of these devices is evident, especially thanks to the integration with Copilot+ and the power of the NPU. It will be interesting to see how Qualcomm improves graphics performance and how Microsoft evolves Copilot+ to make the most of AI hardware. What do you think about it?
