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.
