Details regarding a Qualcomm chip that it hopes would outperform Apple’s chips for Mac computers in particular tasks were revealed by the company this week. The chip is intended for laptops running Microsoft Windows.

Executives at Qualcomm announced that the company’s new Snapdragon Elite X CPU, which has been built to better handle artificial intelligence activities like composing prose, creating graphics, and summarising communications, will be available in laptops starting next year.

Qualcomm’s smartphone chips will also incorporate those AI features, as Alphabet’s Google and Meta both said on Tuesday that they intend to utilise them.

The news was made the day after rumours circulated that Microsoft had pushed Advanced Micro Devices, Qualcomm, and Nvidia to develop new CPUs to support a plethora of new artificial intelligence features in Windows, the most widely used PC operating system worldwide.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the chips would help bring in a new era of “AI PCs” for consumers and companies during a video appearance at Qualcomm’s event.

“The work we’re doing together, it’s going to bring together these experiences that cannot be done without a new system architecture,” Nadella said.

After the iPhone manufacturer released custom-designed chips in 2020, Apple’s market share for laptops and desktop computers has more than doubled. Qualcomm will be the first company to emerge with a chip to fight Apple.

Qualcomm asserted on Tuesday that the X Elite is more energy-efficient than PC chips from Apple and Intel and faster than Apple’s M2 Max chip for certain workloads. However, the most significant innovation, according to Qualcomm Senior Vice President Alex Katouzian, is the chip’s ability to process artificial intelligence models with 13 billion parameters—a rough gauge of complexity for AI systems that produce text or images.

The demand for laptops with AI capabilities will increase, according to Francis Sideco, an analyst with TIRIAS Research, as businesses like Adobe roll out the capacity to use AI to generate pictures for everything from beer can labels to real estate brochures.

“You’ve got a lot of smaller businesses and individual designers and creators using these devices. They need that kind of capability,” Sideco said.

(Adapted from MarketScreener.com)