Qualcomm Has a Plan for Windows Laptops Half the Price of a MacBook Neo
Qualcomm has published new information about its upcoming Snapdragon C platform, designed to offer ultra-low-cost computing with credible performance, even on Windows. The new line of CPUs will be built around its Kryo CPU architecture, with low clock speeds, as well as a low-power GPU and NPU for graphics and AI workloads. Qualcomm claims this will enable new $300 laptops, potentially creating an entirely new class of Windows machines.
When the MacBook Neo launched earlier this year, it was a revelation: a $600 laptop that could last all day, deliver credible performance on demanding workloads, and still maintain the lightweight, premium-feel design Apple’s well known for. Memory price hikes have since pushed that laptop’s cost to $700; meanwhile, a few alternatives from Dell and the like have begun competing directly with it for that sub-$1,000 market.
But Qualcomm is looking to undercut it by half, pitching Snapdragon C processors that would enable $300 laptops. These wouldn’t be Chromebooks: They’d be full-on Windows machines. How Qualcomm plans to manage that amid skyrocketing memory and storage prices and rising Windows license fees will be interesting.
Credit: Qualcomm
It’s making the pitch anyway, though. The Qualcomm Kyro CPU will have up to eight cores, with clock speeds around 3GHz on a single core or 2GHz across all cores at once. The platform supports “up to” 16GB of LPDDR5X, but expect way less than that in the most affordable designs. It also supports LPDDR4X, which might help make these laptops more affordable.
Despite the ultra-budget framing, though, these chips will support Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 6. Storage will be limited to PCIe 3 SSDs and either UFS 2.2 or UFS 3.1.
Credit: Qualcomm
In terms of performance, it’s allegedly pretty good. Qualcomm’s internal benchmarks compared a Snapdragon C system with 8GB of RAM against an Intel N250, a quad-core CPU without hyperthreading that boosts up to 3.8GHz. The Snapdragon chip was reportedly up to 44% faster on Geekbench single-core and 24% faster on multithreaded tests.
More importantly, it was 2.1 times more efficient, potentially unlocking all-day battery life even on a super-low-end laptop design like this one.
Snapdragon C laptops from Asus, Acer, HP, and Lenovo are coming before the year is out. They could be set to shake up the budget laptop market like we haven’t seen in many years.
