• Qualcomm says that its upcoming PC processors will be in the Snapdragon X series.
• These chips will feature reportedly feature better battery efficiency and performance, ready to power the latest in generative AI.
• There is still no information on when we will start seeing the first Snapdragon X chips.

Maker of processors for smartphones and PCs, Qualcomm Technologies has today introduced a new naming architecture for its upcoming notebook chips.

According to Qualcomm SVP and marketing chief Don McGuire, the manufacturer’s next-generation PC processors will be in the Snapdragon X Series.

“Snapdragon X series platforms build on our years of experience engineering heterogeneous compute architectures across the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU) and NPU,” writes McGuire in an official blog post.

The “X” identifier is no dig at the former Twitter, instead, the company says the name will help distinguish the new chips from previous Snapdragon products, like the Snapdragon 8cx.

According to the marketing chief, the new X series of chips will use the company’s custom Qualcomm Oryon CPU for the utmost performance and battery efficiency that the company says it can offer. The new chips will be ready for future on-device applications of generative AI.

This focus is shared by competitor Intel, which announced in September a new “AI PC” – a notebook that is focused on running generative AI applications with enough performance power that it could run these platforms without needing an internet connection. The processor that Intel designed for these AI-focused PCs is called “Meteor Lake.”

“We see the AI PC as a sea change moment in tech innovation,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger at the time.

Qualcomm believes that 2024 will be an “inflection point” for the PC industry, one that has been struggling with sales worldwide amid an economic downturn. Companies are seemingly following the lead of NVIDIA, which despite crumbling sales of PC parts, has made record profits on the back of AI-minded chips.

The new Snapdragon X chips will vie for a spot in a competative market, one which includes Apple and its own in-house M-series chips found powering its MacBooks, specifically the MacBook Air.

Like the Snapdragon 8cx platform before it, the Snapdragon X series will also reportedly feature 5G connectivity. No information has yet been revealed about when the market will start seeing chips in the range.