What Qualcomm’s Pivots Mean for Desktop Computing ⭐

I was excited when Microsoft announced its partnership with Qualcomm to develop microprocessors for a new generation of Windows on Arm-based PCs in late 2016. But I also had questions, most notably why Qualcomm would even bother.

After all, PC makers would go on, collectively, to sell 265 million PCs in 2016, but phone makers, largely powered by Qualcomm processors, would sell almost 1.5 billion units. Qualcomm was always going to face an uphill battle in a PC market dominated by Intel and the x86 chip architecture, but even a miraculous showing in this market would barely move the needle on Qualcomm's revenues.

I was likewise excited when Qualcomm announced in mid-2021 that it would acquire Nuvia to create a new class of Arm-based desktop PC chips because its first several generations of Snapdragon PC chips had been such disappointments. And even more excited still when my first hands-on experience with the resulting Snapdragon X family of chips and later, broader experiences with shipping Copilot+ PCs proved that Qualcomm and Microsoft had done the impossible.

But I still had the same question: Why? Qualcomm spent $1.4 billion on Nuvia and earning back that investment through chip sales will take a lot of time. If Qualcomm somehow accounted for 10 percent of all Windows PCs shipped in 2025, and that feels like a stretch, then it only sold about 29 million chips to PC makers, given that the entire market accounted for 285 million units that year. But smartphone makers sold over 1 billion units last year, and there were Qualcomm chips of some kind in almost all of them.

One obvious answer is that Qualcomm has been propped up financially by Microsoft, and that it was the software giant that instigated Qualcomm's Nuvia acquisition to ensure that it had a viable alternative processor architecture for Windows. Qualcomm's well understood but never explicitly proven agreement with Microsoft to be the sole provider of Arm-based chips for whatever number of years seems to support this notion, too. After all, companies as diverse as AMD, MediaTek, and Samsung were all rumored to be interested in shipping Arm-based PC chips, but we didn't see our first competition in this space, from Nvidia, go figure, until this year.

And that's a problem. For Qualcomm, at least, as Microsoft is seemingly jettisoning it along with the Copilot+ PC brand that no one liked in favor of a far more powerful new kind of Arm-based PC architecture that's custom-built for its AI and agent aspirations. Qualcomm, long the darling of the Windows on Arm world, appears to be on the outs in Redmond. Now what?

Fortunately, there are other ways forward for Qualcomm, including a new datacenter push that could deliver the volume sales the PC market was never going to have. But I don't care about datacenters at all, whereas I do very much care about desktop computing. And I've seen how Snapdragon X/X2 has transformed Windows 11 on Arm. And on that note, there are two...