Although MediaTek chips have a larger pie of the Android smartphone market these days, for most people in the West, Qualcomm is arguably the first name that comes to their minds when they think of smartphone chips. That said, Qualcomm has also been trying to make its presence felt in the Windows-powered laptops and notebooks space for a while now — albeit with very little success. The company’s most recent Windows-focused SoCs, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and the Microsoft SQ2 chips — the latter designed specifically for the Microsoft Surface Pro X — didn’t exactly sell all that well.
A major reason you do not hear about laptops powered by Qualcomm chips often is that they were notorious for compatibility and performance issues. This has to do with the fact that all chips designed by Qualcomm are based on the ARM architecture, which is markedly different from the x86 architecture used by Windows and Intel/AMD chips. This mismatch often meant poor optimization, and a barrage of various bugs and incompatibilities.
With Microsoft and Qualcomm working closely to iron out these issues, Microsoft’s latest operating system — Windows 11 — is claimed to be devoid of most compatibility issues that plagued older versions of Windows. With these issues ironed out, Qualcomm’s new ARM-based chips offer all the advantages offered by the ARM architecture — including greater efficiency and lower battery consumption, while still being very powerful.
