Qualcomm’s New Snapdragon C Processors Herald Cheap Laptops With Big Compromises

“C” stands for “compute” in Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon C processor, which is aimed at low-cost laptops. (Acer mentioned a target price of around $300.) It appears to be a refreshed, possibly rebranded successor to the Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform. We’ll hopefully learn more once an announcement is made.

The 8cx Compute Platform was the generation before Qualcomm finally delivered its high-performing Snapdragon X series, which used the older Kryo CPU cores rather than new Oryon cores in the X.

Laptops incorporating the Snapdragon C are intended for people who need “everyday performance” for tasks such as streaming, web browsing, videoconferencing and whatever “productivity” means these days. 

Acer’s one of the first partners to debut a laptop incorporating the chip — the Aspire Go 15: a basic 15-inch model. There’s no price or availability information yet, so it remains to be seen whether Acer can even come close to Qualcomm’s low target prices for these systems. 

It looks like the Aspire Go hearkens back to earlier budget models in one particularly unwelcome way. Acer is clearly keeping the cost down by slashing the amount of memory to a maximum of 8GB. That’s barely enough to run Windows. Even the MacBook Neo chokes on its 8GB RAM, and MacOS uses it a lot more efficiently than Windows. 

Unsurprisingly, the Aspire has a plastic shell, as is common in these entry-level offerings. The rest of the specs look reasonable, though. They include a 512GB SSD, 1080p screen and 1080p webcam.

We expect to see Snapdragon C offerings from HP and Lenovo as well.

The Aspire’s configuration poses the same conundrum we faced during the pandemic, when laptops were in short supply and more expensive but were suddenly imperative for remote work and education: Do you buy a laptop that’s cheap but that you’ll likely outgrow fairly quickly?