Qualcomm had some interesting PC news on day 3 of its Snapdragon Tech Summit. The company announced new Snapdragon 7c and 8c chips designed for Windows 10 on ARM PCs, which should give PC OEMs other options than the company’s high-end 8cx SoC that Microsoft used as the base for the Surface Pro X’s SQ1 processor.
Qualcomm actually brought Microsoft on stage yesterday for some Windows 10 on ARM updates, and the Redmond giant used this opportunity to announce that Project xCloud will soon be available on Qualcomm-powered Windows 10 PCs.
Microsoft: Project xCloud will be ported to Qualcomm PCs in 2020. Well, that was unexpected. #Snapdragon #SnapdragonSummit pic.twitter.com/ivFLJISViw
— Mark Hachman (@markhachman) December 5, 2019
At X019 last month, Microsoft announced that Project xCloud, which is currently available in preview on Android phone on tablets, will soon make its way to iOS devices and Windows 10 PCs. The fact that it’s also coming to Windows 10 on ARM devices is a pretty big deal, especially since these devices are unable to run games that have not been compiled for the ARM64 architecture.
Having Project xCloud on Windows 10 on ARM should make these devices slightly better for entertainment purposes, but Microsoft still needs to convince more developers to release ARM64 versions of their most popular apps. It’s once again a chicken and egg problem, as there also needs to be more Windows 10 on ARM devices in the market to convince devs to port their apps and games. Hopefully, Qualcomm announcing the new Snapdragon 7c and 8c chips yesterday should help with that.
