Ask Paul: January 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This was a big week to start what promises to be a big year, and I'm again exhausted. So let's kick back, and kick this off.
? Oh, Snap
gg1 asks:

Following the new PC announcements from CES, I saw much fewer new Snapdragon X PCs than I expected. Most were Intel with a palpable increase in AMD as an option. First off, is my perception correct here? And if so, what do you believe may be impacting adoption of Snapdragon X as an option in more devices?

I wouldn't read anything into that. Aside from the fact that PC makers will offer far more x86 options than Arm for the foreseeable future, remember that these respective chip families are all on different schedules, and AMD and Intel always have new generation chips that appear in new PCs at CES. As they did this year.

Qualcomm is on its own schedule. And it's still new to the PC market in the sense that it never needed a broad family of PC-centric chips, it just needed one chip that actually worked. And now that it nailed that, finally, it's still ramping up from a first-gen product with a clear aim (mainstream thin and light laptops) for gen-two, which will focus on the GPU. So short term, Snapdragon X is in a bit of a holding pattern, and what Qualcomm can do to meet additional PC maker needs in the short term is what it did, by releasing a lower-cost version of the chip. This isn't particularly exciting (to me), but it does need to happen.

Tied to Qualcomm's slow expansion into other parts of the market, the big thing for Snapdragon X at CES was the first desktop PCs, which are all NUC or SFF PCs because of the chipset's mobile focus. I assume that will be it until the second generation chips arrive, and then we'll see Snapdragon X expand its footprint into other form factors and market segments. Right now, Qualcomm's offerings in the PC space are incredibly limited compared to what AMD and Intel offer. It's starting from scratch. These things take time to spin up.

AMD, to me, was the star of CES from a PC perspective. I had briefings with AMD and several PC makers in December, and the message from all of them was clear: The new Max and Max Pro variants of the new generation AMD Ryzen chips blew everyone away early on, and PC makers are embracing AMD like never before. With Intel hobbled, AMD has a real opening. But so does Qualcomm, of course. It has to scale out first.
?️ Desktop PCs
lvthunder asks:

Why do you think that neither Intel nor AMD has announced a desktop CPU that meets the requirements of being a Copilot+PC?

I think it's just a timing issue. Hardware is difficult, especially chips, because these companies are trying to meet the needs of tomorrow, and that's no longer as easy to predict. Thanks to AI, our understanding of which factors are most important to chip design have been upended. You can see the churn on the software and services side clearly because that's easy to update and release, and it's chaos. But hardware requires multi-year...