(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
WAILEA, Hawaii—While the main course of the 2.5-hour keynote that opened Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit here on Monday was a prolonged sales pitch for the Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile processor, it came with a side order of updates about Qualcomm’s efforts to push its Snapdragon X laptop chips further into the Windows laptop mainstream.
Translation: Qualcomm and Microsoft are trying to push aside worries about apps or drivers not working on Qualcomm’s Arm-based processors. That’s historically been a hole in Windows on Arm, even as recently as last year, and Intel highlighted that concern in launching its Lunar Lake laptop processors at IFA in September.
On Monday, Qualcomm and Microsoft executives emphasized continued progress and called out some notable new steps.
"More and more developers are bringing their apps to Windows on Snapdragon," said Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm's group general manager for mobile, compute, and extended reality. "PC users spend 90% of the time—90% of the time—using apps that are already native on Snapdragon X series."
One app popular among 3D animators is now on that list: Blender. Nicole Qaqundah, Qualcomm’s global consumer channel head, broke the news in her slice of the keynote, adding that Qualcomm has joined the Dutch foundation that helps underwrite the development of that open-source app.
Microsoft’s Prism emulation has made remarkable progress in smoothing over the experience of running apps written for Intel’s family of processors on Qualcomm’s chips, but it doesn’t touch device drivers. So the layer of Windows that people usually don’t think about until something breaks got extra attention in Qualcomm’s keynote.
Musicians, podcasters, and other audio content creators may want to turn up the volume when playing back Qualcomm’s stream of the keynote: Microsoft will soon ship a series of driver and software updates that should ease connecting instruments to PCs.
"Microsoft has rewritten the MIDI stack from the ground up,” Katouzian said, with this update of the MIDI 2.0 standard arriving first to members of Microsoft’s Windows insider program.
Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Yamaha are also writing a new ASIO driver that will allow low-latency communications between a PC and an audio device. Katouzian’s pitch is: "Plug in your audio interface, and it will just work."
A video clip featured a guitarist shredding a few chords through Steinberg’s Cubase 13 app through an array of tone presets.
Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, also showed up onstage to give his own endorsement to Copilot+ PCs built on Qualcomm’s chips. He shared a quieter metric of victory that he said Snapdragon has already met: “More than 90% of consumer printers, as an example, just working seamlessly out of the box."
Disclosure: Qualcomm covered my airfare and lodging, along with that of many invited attendees to this event.