Qualcomm is pushing into a new market segment with the Arm-based Snapdragon C, an entry-level processor designed for laptops priced from around $300 but offering longer battery life and modern computing capabilities at an entry-level price.
The company first announced Snapdragon C in May, positioning it for students, families and small businesses that primarily need a machine for web browsing, productivity, video streaming and video calls. Its big brother is the Snapdragon X, which targets mainstream and premium Windows PCs.
Snapdragon C is built around an eight-core Qualcomm Kryo CPU manufactured on a 6nm process. The processor can reach 3.0GHz in single-core workloads and up to 2.0GHz when operating across its cores, with 2MB of total cache.
Graphics are provided by an integrated Adreno GPU running at up to 900MHz. The platform also incorporates a Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) specifically for AI workloads. Qualcomm has not disclosed a TOPS rating for the NPU.
The processor supports up to 16GB of LPDDR4X, LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X memory, while storage options include PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs and UFS storage. Connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6/6E and Bluetooth 6.0.
These specs put Snapdragon C in direct competition against Intel’s N250, a low-power processor also used in inexpensive Windows notebooks. On battery power, Qualcomm says Snapdragon C delivered up to 44% higher single-core performance and 24% higher multi-core performance in Geekbench.
The advantage increased to 50% in single-threaded Cinebench and 67% in multi-threaded Cinebench. Qualcomm also reported a 39% advantage in Speedometer 3.1.
Power efficiency is the other part of Qualcomm’s pitch. The company claims Snapdragon C can achieve up to 2.1 times the power efficiency of Intel’s N250, with particularly large advantages in common workloads such as Netflix playback, web browsing and Microsoft Teams calls.
These are all vendor-provided benchmarks and should be taken with a grain of salt because they are going to look for the best possible outcome without outright lying. In time, independent, third party players will get review units and see how well the numbers hold up. But if they do hold up, it makes for a very competitive platform.
We already have one OEM lining up to provide a Snapdragon C machine, and not surprisingly, it is Acer, which specializes in low-end, affordable hardware. It has announced the Aspire Go 15.
The 15.6-inch Windows 11 laptop is configured with up to 8GB of memory and 512GB of storage. It includes a Full HD display, two full-function USB-C ports, USB-A, HDMI and Wi-Fi 6E. Acer is positioning the machine as an affordable system for everyday productivity, browsing and streaming.
Acer has not yet announced final pricing or availability for the Aspire Go 15, but it should be around $300. However, given the astronomical pricing of memory and storage these days, getting the price point down to $300 could mean a significantly under equipped laptop through no fault of Acer.
