Snapdragon X PCs might finally work like they should

For too long, PCs with Snapdragon Arm chips inside of them have been a mixed bag: some native apps run well, but others have stuttered and hung if they weren’t coded correctly. Those days may be over: the man in charge of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus says Qualcomm has addressed the compatibility issues.

I interviewed Kedar Kondap, the senior vice president and general manager of Compute and Gaming for Qualcomm, a few weeks ago. At the time, Qualcomm was showing off how the Snapdragon X Elite compared to Intel’s latest Core Ultra chips. Kondap also gave us a sneak peek of the Snapdragon X Plus, the X Elite’s younger cousin. What we didn’t have then was the awkward model numbers Qualcomm is using to describe the speeds and feeds of the new chips.

Kondap also addressed the compatibility topic, after I noted that many people just want Snapdragon PCs to, well, just work. Kondap stopped short of an absolute commitment, but the future seems brighter than before. (Of course, some of the weight has to be borne by Microsoft, which architects the Windows on Arm operating system.)

“I’ll tell you, Mark, I am using a Snapdragon PC right now and I am not running into any of those issues,” Kondap told me. “We’ve definitely put in a lot of focus for the consumers that we’re targeting, so the applications run. We’ve solved a lot of issues with enterprise applications, so we feel very good.”

Hear Kondap’s full answer, and our discussion of many other Snapdragon topics, in the interview below.

CPUs and Processors