Qualcomm Highlights Key Snapdragon-powered Notebook Benefits With New Videos

As the first Snapdragon-powered “always on” notebooks begin to ship to customers, Qualcomm has decided to tackle some confusion that’s permeated through the market about Arm-based platforms, versus x86 ones. This isn’t about software compatibility (since these Snapdragon notebooks can run x86 applications just fine), but rather other benefits you may not have thought about.

First and foremost, battery-life is a concern of pretty much every notebook user, and since these Snapdragon-powered notebooks are being touted as “always-on”, we’d hope they’d boast good battery-life. In this first video, the Snapdragon notebook outlasted a (clearly) Intel platform by nearly 9 hours, suiting those who want to watch 22 hours of video a day at 100 nits.

The next video might highlight one of the most obvious advantages of such a mobile-focused platform. Like your smartphone, these Snapdragon notebooks wake up instantly, and unlike a Wi-Fi connection, the built-in LTE connection will always be available (assuming there’s service, of course).

There’s just no comparison between a standard notebook and the Snapdragon one here, but to be fair, the PC is clearly going through a full POST process (it wasn’t put to sleep), whereas the Snapdragon one, like a smartphone, isn’t fully powered off. For a regular notebook, idling like that would be problematic, but for this one, it’s designed inside and out to idle all day and be ready to go in an instant when you need it.

The final video highlights something I didn’t personally consider: temperatures. Mobile SoCs run much cooler than Intel’s regular notebook x86 chips that the notebook itself will run much cooler. No one likes typing around a hot spot, especially if it only takes 15 minutes of multi-tasking to reach that point.

For more detailed information behind what’s seen in these videos, you can hit-up the blog post linked to above. We hope to take a look at a Snapdragon notebook in the very near future, so stay tuned.