Have you had enough of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips in 2024? At the beginning of 2025, the chipmaker known for finally bringing ARM to the PC—and available today—is now aiming to carve out a niche in the affordable laptop or mini-PC market. The new Snapdragon X platform is not extra and it is not elite, even if you want to get your mother a small ARM-based PC for nothing but browsing and streaming, it can’ g this is your first choice CPU.

The current staple of the Oryon-based Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips includes an 8-core variant. The Snapdragon X has the same number of cores, although it is dialed back to 3 GHz clock speed on the same 4nm processor node and a 30 MB cache. It has 135 mb/s memory bandwidth but maintains the same 45 TOPS neural processor as other Snapdragon PC CPUs.

Does the NPU really matter if it’s built for a PC with a limited amount of onboard RAM? Probably not. The Snapdragon X is more intended to compete against other, lower-end CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra 5 120U from early last year. Qualcomm claims that its new chip can perform almost 60% better benchmarks in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024, although for a low-end PC the most important thing is how it handles in browsing tasks with better power efficiency. Qualcomm claims that it should get 157% better power efficiency at ISO than the last generation Intel chip.

Intel released new CPUs for the Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake lineup, including the new U line. In the absence of benchmark comparisons, all we have to go on are the company’s specs. Otherwise, the Snapdragon X supports Bluetooth 5.4 and WiFi 7. Devices with this chip should be able to support 4K HDR video capture and HiFi audio.

There should be more OEMs debuting new Snapdragon X-based PCs during this year’s CES. Lenovo is first out of the gate with two mini-PCs, the ThinkCentre neo 50q QC and Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini x (1L, 10). Both include the Snapdragon X Plus, although the IdeaCentre is aimed more at creatives looking for a Mac mini alternative.