The second major Computex keynote for the day comes from Qualcomm, who is quickly becoming a regular presenter at the show.
This year’s keynote is being presented by company CEO Cristiano Amon, and the theme is “The heart of your PC.” Qualcomm is making it clear from the start that this year’s keynote is going to be all about the PC and local AI inference.
Qualcomm Computex 2025 Keynote Preview
At last year’s show, Qualcomm released their eagerly-anticipated (and somewhat delayed) Snapdragon X platform, which was a series of Arm-based SoCs for use in PCs. While no stranger to Arm-based PC processors, Snapdragon X was Qualcomm’s most ambitious effort to date, aiming for far higher performance using their in-house Oryon CPU cores. Qualcomm achieved most of their performance goals with Snapdragon X, though on reflection, they didn’t seem to move the needle in the PC market by as much as they were hoping for – Intel’s Lunar Lake in particular seems to have knocked some wind out of their sails.
Still, the Snapdragon X platform is a multi-year effort. And we’ve already seen significant improvements in the CPU core design with the newer Oryon cores used in Qualcomm’s latest smartphone SoCs, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. So Qualcomm is iterating quickly, and those iterations are due to land back in to their PC SoCs soon enough.
Along with the focus on CPU performance and power efficiency, Qualcomm’s other major push continues to be on-device AI performance using their Hexagon NPUs. While the market for on-device (and on-Windows) AI usage is still finding its footing, Qualcomm continues to believe that their significant experience in developing NPUs, going back to their earliest use in smartphones before the term “NPU” was even coined, will ultimately prove to their advantage. So I expect we’ll see a fresh look at some new and updated use cases for on-device AI, to drum up user interest.
Qualcomm’s keynote is scheduled to run for 60 minutes, and will kick off at 11pm PT/2am ET/2pm CST/06:00 UTC.
Qualcomm Computex 2025 Keynote Coverage Live
Greetings to all the night owls in the US joining us! At this point we are just waiting for Qualcomm’s keynote to kick off. It’s scheduled to start in just under two minutes, at 2pm local time (2am Eastern).
As with NVIDIA’s keynote a bit earlier, expect a lot of promotion of Qualcomm’s Taiwanese partners and Taiwan in general mixed in with product announcements and development discussions. It’s the nature of the beast, especially as Computex is only now experiencing a resurgence after getting absolutely walloped by COVID (the second time that’s happened, too, the first being the SARS coronavirus in the early 2000s).
6 minutes past the hour and we’re still waiting. The good news for Qualcomm, at least, is that they’re the final major keynote of the day. So if they run late it won’t screw up other presentations. The attendees are another matter.
And here we go!
As this is an official Taitra keynote, it’s being opened by a Taitra representative.
Now rolling a short video.
The screen at this venue is ridiculously large.
And here’s Cristiano.
Cristiano is going over Qualcomm’s history and how special and important it is to be talking about computing here at Computex.
This is apparently going to be a very different kind of presentation. Amon isn’t going to be making a bunch of chip announcements.
Instead, the focus is going to be about how AI is going to fundamentally change things for client PCs.
Qualcomm has been busy for the past year. Rolling a short video of what they’ve been up to.
Recapping all of the press the Snapdragon X Elite garnered last year.
Last year was the first step in Qualcomm’s new journey.
“We’re going to be in the PC market forever”
Now talking about the importance of partnerships. Partnerships with Taiwanese companies. Qualcomm’s big Arm partnership with Microsoft.
And on that note, here’s a message from Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella.
“The Snapdragon AI stack is powering some of our most important innovations”
Now for some updates from Cristiano.
750 native Arm64 applications today.
And 93% of the time that Snapdragon X users are on their machines, they’re using native applications. And that percentage is growing over time.
QC has spent the last year working on games, as well.
1400+ games working on Snapdragon X (most are still using CPU emulation, I’d imagine)
QC will continue to be busy working with Microsoft and game developers to improve those experiences.
And Fortnite is finally coming to Snapdragon X PCs as well. It’s unclear if this is native or not, but for this announcement I’d sure think it is. QC is working with Epic to get Easy Anti Cheat working on Snapdragon PCs as well.
“And on Windows, there is no drama with Epic” – Referring to Epic’s epic fight with Apple over iOS store royalties.
Now for more on recognizing Qualcomm’s partners. Starting with an on-stage appearance from ASUS.
Talking about how great Snapdragon X processors are, and how ASUS is so excited to be bringing various SDX-based products to the market.
“ASUS now offers the most comprehensive lineup of Snapdragon-powered laptops.”
And that’s ASUS. Back to Cristiano.
Qualcomm is very happy with their progress thus far. They’re expecting 100+ designs as they get to next year.
Last quarter, Qualcomm is at about 9% market share for the US and top-5 European markets.
And there are some new SDX laptops being announced at Computex 2025 as well.
Now on to AI. “What can we do with AI?”
Qualcomm wants to prepare the market for what they believe will be a big shift for personal computing. i.e. the next-generation AI PC.
For that you need high-performance processing and efficiency. Things Snapdragon does well.
“The goal is to revolutionize what we do with creativity and productivity”
Qualcomm needs to bring an entire ecosystem together to make this happen.
Time for another partner showcase: HP.
Alex Cho, president of personal systems.
HP’s theme: making AI real.
Cho says that HP has the largest portfolio of Copilot+ PCs.
HP wants to change how people work. Bringing the entirety of HP’s assets together to change how people work.
Cho didn’t come empty-handed either. HP is announcing their OmniBook 5 series today, which of course is SDX-powered.
“Thinnest 16-inch notebook out there for the mainstream”
“Bringing beautiful OLED to the mainstream”
And that’s HP.
Now for a chat on how AI is going to change the PC experience.
The focus here will be on commercial and enterprise, rather than the consumer-centric chat.
“Eventually we’re going to change our view and mindset about what an OS is”
Amon thinks that AI will be a type of an OS on its own.
Future systems will do everything from ingest image and audio to ingesting files and other existing personal information to better understand the user.
And Amon doesn’t want to just make this abstract. He’s going to walk the audience through scenarios.
The focus is on adopting to the context of the situation and who is making the request.
“This will change even how we think about enterprise software”
AI agents aren’t just AI processors.
Amon believes that this will increase productivity.
“This is going to fundamentally change how we do work” “For many different industries”
“It’s about making the AI PC truly an AI PC”
And now for another partnership plug: Lenovo.
Luca Rossi, President of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group.
The Rise of AI PCs
Lenovo believes AI should be accessible to everyone.
“AI should adapt to your needs”
“Lenovo has the widest lineup of Snapdragon-based AI PCs”
(At this point all three PC vendors so far have claimed they have the most PCs, using slightly different metrics)
Switching gears to Lenovo AI Now, the company’s on-device AI agent.
“The AI PC revolution is here” and “Lenovo is proud to be leading it along with Qualcomm”
And that’s Lenovo
Back to Amon. The use cases he envisions are starting to be developed.
But first, a story about the early days of the smartphone at Qualcomm, and how it displaced feature-phones. And how third-party app development finally made the feature-phone redundant.
AI will be similar. It won’t just be first-party features from the OS vendor. It’s going to take third-party developers making use of the technology to bring about a bigger change.
Another partner plug: Kevin Chung of Writer.
“Tens-of-thousands of workloads transformed by AI”
Writer is seeing a 9x Return-on-Investment.
“Writer is the first to bring a complete and scalable solution to AI”
Companies are having a hard time keeping up. But Writer believes that the technology is legit.
And that’s Writer.
Now Cristiano is focusing on edge AI.
On-device AI is still in its early days.
Now rolling a short video about on-device AI. Context, an agentic AI model.
Context is entirely on-device, so no user data is sent off-device for processing in the cloud.
“All made possible by Snapdragon’s NPU”
“At the end of the day, this is why we’re investing so much into the NPU”
And firing some shots at Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 7 256V)
Now rolling another video, this time for Adobe Premiere Pro.
(No joke, this video sounds like it’s written by AI)
Emphasizing how moving some work to the NPU frees up other system resources for other tasks.
Back to Amon.
“We’re at the beginning of on-device AI models”
Amon is underscoring how quickly progress has been made in AI. Especially in bringing down the computational costs with things such as mixture-of-expert systems.
“We want developers to accelerate their AI experiences on Snapdragon”
Outlining all the computing resources offered: frameworks and runtimes, AI tool hubs, and of course, the hardware itself.
Time for another video. This time from Docker’s Mark Cavage.
Docker has seen a major increase in the number of AI-driven Docker containers downloaded.
Docker Model Runner now runs on SDX processors.
And now back to Cristiano.
“I’m going to leave you with a thought: what’s happened with smartglasses is unique”
Smartglasses are already heavily tied to AI.
Qualcomm also has a hand in the industrial PC industry. And they want to help bring AI to that market segment as well. An announcement related to it will be going out in about an hour.
“Now, let’s do something fun”
SDX Series AI Q&A
A SDX PC loaded up with models from OpenAI and others to answer questions. All running on the NPU in real-time.
A synth voice is summarizing (presumably human-picked) questions for Cristiano.
e.g. how will AI improve productivity? How does QC see the merger of PC, IoT, and automotive tech changing things? What features appeal to customers?
Cristiano is incredibly bullish on smartglasses.
(Someone has been training this thing on marketing-speak – it’s a lot of nothing)
“With AI, PCs will get better over time”
(The fact that an AI agent is doing even this is legitimately impressive at a technical level. It’s just not proving very useful.)
“I’m actually very relieved that this went better than I expected”
Two closing thoughts:
1) Please stay tuned for what QC will do at Snapdragon Summit 2025
Snapdragon Summit 2025 will be even bigger for PCs. They’ll introduce the next PC SoC, proving another breakthrough in performance. “I promise you that you will be impressed”
2) Qualcomm could not do any of this without its partners. “Our job is to make sure our partners are successful”
Finally, Qualcomm is briefly talking about how they’re going to expanding into the data center.
(Which is what their CPU acquisition, Nuvia, was trying to do from the beginning.)
Amon is telling everyone to stay tuned for further news on their data center efforts.
And that’s a wrap!
I noticed that, once again, Qualcomm either didn’t mention or sidestepped any questions about using their SoCs/CPUs with a dedicated GPU. At least for consumer and prosumer laptops, that has really hurt them, possible as much as issues with x86 emulation. Trashtalking about x86 isn’t really a substitute for solving either problem. And while I know that STH is not a site about gaming, I also wondered if QC had any news about Steam OS maybe running natively on Snapdragon Elites anytime soon? Are they (QC) working with Valve? If not, they might want to.