Qualcomm’s Computex 2024 keynote: powerful new chips, plus some jokes at Apple’s expense
I’m in Taiwan at Computex 2024 and just watched Qualcomm’s big keynote presentation, led by CEO Cristiano Amon – somewhat comically dressed in a Snapdragon T-shirt and Windows Copilot-branded sneakers. Naturally, the keynote opened with a promo video – proudly labeled ‘Shot on Snapdragon’, which is perhaps a cheeky swipe at Apple.
Unsurprisingly, the focus today has been on AI PCs – Qualcomm has already announced its new Snapdragon event. Today we got more insight into Qualcomm’s approach, along with some tidbits about what we can expect from Snapdragon in the near future.
Qualcomm is extremely confident in its fast-growing presence in the laptop market. The first round of laptops will come from a group of seven major manufacturing partners – more or less all the big names in computing, including Dell, Lenovo and HP. Amon is clearly proud: he claimed that “today is a graduation day for Qualcomm” when it comes to really breaking into the computer industry.
Amon went on to talk about the Hexagon NPU in the Snapdragon the Apple M3 and Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. He also showed a short thermal image capture that shows the superior thermal performance of a Snapdragon laptop over an Intel Core Ultra 7 laptop, demonstrating that the X Elite chip can perform better under long-term use.
The era of Copilot+
We then saw Microsoft’s Corporate VP Pavan Davuluri take the stage to reiterate the strength of the professional bond between Microsoft and Qualcomm. Ultimately, this didn’t give us anything particularly new and exciting, but that’s not surprising considering it’s only been a few weeks since Microsoft Build.
However, a short sizzle reel showing off the power of the new Copilot+ AI assistants was intriguing and gave us a further look at what the future of ‘everyday AI’ might look like.
In the video, we saw people talking casually to their PCs: they used Copilot to book a dishwasher repair, learn to play the guitar, and navigate a business meeting. Some of the things shown were impressive, including a video calling feature that translates speech into other languages in real time while also using AI to ‘lip-sync’ the translation to the speaker.
Laptops as far as the eye can see
We were also treated to a litany of onstage appearances from other executives from various laptop manufacturers, including Asus, Acer and HP, who were essentially just there to show off their new AI laptops and talk about how closely they all collaborate with Qualcomm. . Nothing we hadn’t seen already, really – although it was intriguing to hear HP’s CEO claim that Qualcomm’s systems would account for 50% of HP’s revenue in a few years.
Even more impressive was a time-lapse video demonstration of two laptops – one with a Snapdragon X Elite chip, the other with an Intel Core Ultra 7 – playing the same YouTube video on a loop. The Snapdragon laptop literally lasts twice as long, and since battery life is a key factor for many consumers when it comes to buying a laptop, the ball is in Intel’s court to deliver seriously impressive battery life available with the upcoming Lunar Lake processors.
The keynote also featured promotional clips demonstrating some of the apps recently optimized to run on Snapdragon hardware, such as popular video editing software DaVinci Resolve. Amon also talked about Qualcomm’s new ‘AI Hub’ for developers, which makes it easier to design apps that take advantage of AI features. One such app is Cefabel, a new AI-enhanced program that allows users with disabilities to control Windows with facial gestures and voice control – a truly amazing use of AI. The Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows will be available for pre-order later this month.
Amon was also keen to talk gaming – he considered Snapdragon X Elite “a real gaming platform”, and I can personally confirm that the performance of the integrated GPU is surprisingly good. Currently, over 1,200 games are optimized for use on Snapdragon, and Amon believes that “we are at the beginning of a revolution in AI gaming.”
The competition is fierce
Of course, many of the comparisons Amon makes today are not as meaningful as they seem. Qualcomm is comparing the just a day’s time.
In other words, despite all the big numbers being thrown around in this presentation (over 50% faster Edge browser speed! Wow!!), Qualcomm hasn’t just won the AI laptop race. Ultimately, we’ll have to wait until we can get our hands on these chips before we can properly test them ourselves. Remember folks, you can’t always trust a company’s performance numbers for its own product!
While Microsoft Build may have stolen Qualcomm’s power here, Amon had one last fun thing to show off: a tongue-in-cheek farewell shot at Apple with a short ad featuring Justin Long of “I’m a Mac” fame ordering a new Snapdragon . laptop on his MacBook and says, ‘What? Things change.”