The topic These are the specs of the Qualcomm Snapdragon C, its chip for budget Windows laptops is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
This week at Computex in Taipei, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon C, a new chip aimed at laptops starting at just $300. With just one laptop announced and two additional OEM partners, details are scarce.
The company won’t share any specs of the chipset, other than that it doesn’t use the custom Oryon cores that are found in the Snapdragon X series. That made it my job to find out the specs, of course.
We knew that the Snapdragon C is a repurposed older chip, and that turned out to be the QCS6490, a long-term servicing chip that Qualcomm will be keeping around for a while, and frankly has tons of. Right now, it’s inside the same Dragonwing chip that’s used in the NexPhone (that really cool phone from CES that dual-boots Windows and Android), and it was also under the hood of the Snapdragon 778G.
Here are the key specs, although you can find a full breakdown of the QCS6490 online:
I wouldn’t get too deep in the weeds with the specs, beyond the CPU, GPU, and NPU. Anything else could have been modified, as could the clock speed.
Again, Qualcomm isn’t saying any of this. It won’t even confirm if the NPU supports Copilot+, although even without knowing the specs of the CPU, it’s pretty obvious that it wouldn’t. This is not a custom chip like Snapdragon X, where the entire stack would be expected to have the same NPU.
New Snapdragon PC chipsets tend to come with an attached price point that the company is targeting. Snapdragon X was aimed at $600 devices, Snapdragon X Plus was $800. Snapdragon C is targeted at $300 laptops.
Except it’s really not. It’s aimed at $300 laptops in a perfect world where there’s no memory shortage, while also acknowledging that there’s a memory shortage the day that the product is announced. The point is, we don’t know what the price of these laptops will be. Only the Acer Aspire Go was announced, the release date is months out, and pricing is unconfirmed. HP and Lenovo will be announcing their own Snapdragon C products as well.
We’ll have to wait and see how much these things cost, and if they end up costing twice that, we’ll have to see how they stack up to their real competitors, like the MacBook Neo and Dell XPS 13.