Qualcomm Plans Snapdragon SoCs To Support Less Expensive “Windows on Snapdragon” Notebooks

During last week’s Computex, Qualcomm revealed lots about its upcoming Snapdragon 8cx mobile platform, which should see the first notebook models being introduced in the months ahead. We’ve already gone over the numerous bullet-points for 8cx in a dedicated article and video, but after we were done taking a look at 8cx, the question of what else was next remained.

Well, after joining as a guest on the Mobile Tech Podcast, Qualcomm’s VP of Global Product Marketing Don McGuire let loose some additional details to host Myriam Joire.

Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS Snapdragon Notebook

At around the 20 minute mark of the latest episode, McGuire alludes to future chips that will help power ACPCs (always-connected PCs) at lower price points. We’re talking prices ideally as low as $300, which is an area dominated by Google with its Chromebooks. Naturally, any $300 notebook is going to have to include a Windows license, which soaks up some of the cost, whereas Chromebooks include the free (of cost) Chrome OS.

7cx is name-dropped during the podcast, but it’s not clear if that’s official naming, or just an example. That naming would actually work, but given the regular Snapdragon series naming, it seems likely 7cx would be used on notebooks a few hundred dollars less than 8cx, where as “6cx” (not mentioned) would cater to the least-expensive models.

There’s also such thing as a 400-series which Qualcomm uses to equip some of the bottom-rung smartphones out there, but it seems likely that the company wouldn’t want to skimp too much on chips that are destined for notebooks people are meant to do actual work on all day. It could be that only two series of “cx” chips of a certain generation will ever exist in order to enforce a certain performance profile. Fortunately, Qualcomm has already made huge progress on its ACPC-bound chips since the introduction two years ago, so the situation should only improve from here-on-out.