The new Qualcomm chip for PC is a declaration of intent: more intelligence than power

Qualcomm has taken advantage of the CES 2026 to present the Snapdragon

NPU reaches 80 TOPS and it proclaims itself as the world’s fastest for laptops.

Why is it important. This launch does not specifically confront anything that Intel or AMD have, but rather it is a positioning play: Qualcomm is betting on energy efficiency and integrated AI as its differential weapons, not on dethroning anyone in benchmarks.

This is the chip that wants to colonize the mid-high range of Windows laptops, not the 17-inch clunkers for gamers.

Between the lines. The figures are curiously contradictory: Qualcomm talks about a 35% jump in CPU but a 78% improvement in the NPU. There is the implicit message: Qualcomm knows that part of the future does not involve winning in traditional processing, but rather mastering computing. Local AI.

In other words, Qualcomm has decided that one of the next PC battles will not be fought in Photoshop, but in applications that run LLMs or generate images offline.

• The 3nm node and memory LPDDR5X up to 152 GB reinforce this narrative: Qualcomm is building machines to work all day without a plug, not sedentary workstations, so to speak.
• It is an explicit commitment to the user profile that values ​​autonomy and instant response over sustained power.

Yes, but. The problem continues to be the ecosystem:

1. Windows on ARM It has improved, but it still has incompatibilities with professional software. Adobe works, yes, but the market goes further.
2. Qualcomm can have the best chip on the market for efficiency… and still be irrelevant if developers don’t optimize for its architecture.

Apple managed to overcome the latter in 2020 because it controls the silicon, the operating system and the hardware: without transition there was no business with the new Macs. Qualcomm has to convince third parties.

The context. This release arrives while Intel tries to recover lost ground and AMD consolidates its dominance in high-performance laptops. But neither has the mobile DNA that Qualcomm does.

It is a company that comes from the world of the smartphone, where efficiency is not optional but existential. That background is their advantage: they have been making powerful chips that don’t fry eggs in your pocket for decades, not to mention modifying the phrase slightly and making it sound worse.

The threat. For Intel and AMD, the danger is not that Qualcomm will take market share from them tomorrow, but that it will normalize ARM on Windows. If the average user begins to associate “laptop with a good battery” with “it has a Qualcomm chip”, the x86 architecture is at risk of losing its last stronghold of absolute dominion.

And that is a structural change, not a temporary one.

In Xataka | The amazing history of ARM, the architecture that triumphs in mobile phones and that was born more than 30 years ago at Acorn Computer

Featured image | Qualcomm