Remember the hype earlier this year around Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X series SoCs that promises to take on the giants on the PC markets that is Intel and AMD? Microsoft even gave the chipmaker a special occasion to launch its new lineup of “Copilot+ PCs”, along with exclusive early access to the new Windows 11 features.
Turns out, all of that still didn’t help with Snapdragon’s sales.
Snapdragon Struggles
Market analyst firm Canalys reported that Qualcomm has only sold 720,000 units with its chips powering them during the first quarter since launch, making up just 0.8% of the total PCs shipped globally in the same period (the chipmaker currently accounts for less than 1.5% of all PCs). The brunt of the shipments belong to Microsoft, which has largely converted its entire lineup to Snapdragon-based, though other PC makers like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and ASUS contributed their parts.
That being said, AI PCs – as defined by laptops and systems with onboard neural processing units (NPUs) – has gained some solid traction in terms of sales, contributing to 20% overall in the last quarter. Still, the reason for AI PC’s adoption may not necessarily due to the features it may offer, but rather the push of upgrade cycles that was partly exacerbated by the phase-out of Windows 10 operating system in the coming year.
It’s still a question whether Qualcomm can truly break the duopoly in the PC market, given that decades of compatibility has given both Intel and AMD a leg up on software support. Unlike Apple and MacOS, Qualcomm doesn’t has as much power to dictate developers to write apps in its ARM-based platforms. As both Team Blue and Team Red are catching up on one of Snapdragon’s biggest selling point – battery life – it’s a long road ahead for the chipmaker that has long dominated the Android smartphone scene.
Source: TechRadar
Pokdepinion: It’s going to take a lot more than ‘local processing’ and generative AI to convince people that it’s a feature worth replacing their current system with.
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This article just throws out numbers with no context. 720,000 is 0.8% of 90,000,000. How many units were projected to be sold versus how many units were sold? How many of those sold filled orders that were placed before Snapdragon availability was announced?
Other than Microsoft, manufacturers had the vast majority of their models with Intel processor. AMD was a distant second. No one was expecting Snapdragon to overtake AMD in volume, let alone Intel.
You’re barking up the wrong tree there bruv.