The PC OEMs really, really, REALLY want to get back to the 90s and 2000s, when the six-month obsolescence cycle reigned supreme and you couldn’t sit on the same Ivy Bridge machine for a decade.

That’s a large part of the push behind NPUs and AI: it’s the only way to get the cycle going again, because otherwise the PC OEMs are going to be looking at a market similar to automotive OEMs, mature, and where replacement happens at the customer’s discretion instead of the market’s.

Qualcomm lets them do this because ARM isn’t anywhere near as open and standardized as x86, and Qualcomm can–and will–sunset platforms whenever it suits them, resulting in millions of machines getting boat-anchored.

(side note: Apple doesn’t indulge in this despite selling ARM machines because Apple plays the long game, and would rather chase revenue from conquest sales than cannibalize their existing customers; it’s remarkably long-term thinking from an erstwhile hardware company)

Oh yeah… Qualcomm selling chips… and sunsetting support in 2-3 years, it will be great for desktops.

They’ve been hyping these up since forever. Aren’t the laptops supposed to release this month? When will the embargo be lifted so we can see real benchmarks?

Overhyped cpus, appealing to people who don’t understand cpu design.

I just don’t see Qualcomm competing on performance per watt any time soon, let alone on software compatibility.

So let’s see, I can buy a computer with a new architecture, which will wreck havoc with running my existing software, all for some half-baked AI version of Clippy. That’s gonna be a, “no”.

I really hope classic RISC-Vs will be economically successful & thrive … open sourceally

Can I now dunk on this for Microsoft not even caring enough to port any of their games to ARM now that desktop PCs are also the target or will apologists still claim that games is not a use case for “app PC form factors”?