I’ve been spending time with Qualcomm at Computex 2026, and if, like me, you were wondering how the company — which once had the Windows on Arm market pretty much all to itself — will respond to Nvidia’s announcement of a rival Arm-based RTX Spark chip for Windows 11 laptops and desktop PCs, then I have good news.
Responding to a question about what Qualcomm would like to say to Nvidia regarding the RTX Spark, Kedar Kondap, SVP and GM of Compute and Gaming, gave a simple answer: “Welcome to the family.” Rather than identifying Nvidia’s upcoming Arm chip as a threat, it seems Qualcomm is viewing it as an opportunity that will expand Windows on Arm adoption.
“We advanced the ecosystem,” Kondap continued, pointing out how Qualcomm has worked with games and app developers to boost the amount of software that can work natively with Arm hardware, as well as the more traditional x86 architecture (which Intel and AMD use). It’s a good point — if Nvidia’s RTX Spark is a success, it could see more apps and games ported to run natively on Arm, rather than having to use an emulator, and this will benefit laptops running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon hardware.
The company doesn’t seem phased with Nvidia and Microsoft’s close partnership regarding the RTX Spark, either (Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, will appear on stage at Microsoft’s Build conference to talk more about this, and Microsoft will launch one of the first RTX Spark-powered laptops with the Surface Ultra later this year). “We launched the first Copilot+ PCs with Microsoft,” Kondap reminded the audience, with Microsoft and Qualcomm having a long history working together.
While there’s a lot of hype about RTX Spark, there are also a lot of unanswered questions surrounding Nvidia’s chip, especially when it comes to the price of RTX Spark-powered laptops. Going by the design and specs, it seems these laptops will be premium devices with correspondingly high prices.
The price is right
It’s a risky move, especially in the current market conditions where the cost of living is rising for most people, making consumers less keen to spend lots of money on laptops.
That’s why I’m much more interested in Qualcomm’s upcoming Arm chip, the Snapdragon C, which is being designed for much more affordable laptops — around $500 and below. While the Snapdragon C won’t be as powerful as Qualcomm’s high-end Snapdragon Elite chips, the company assures me the Snapdragon C will be affordable, but won’t compromise too much on performance or features, especially when it comes to on-device AI.
“OEMs are anxious to bring Snapdragon C to the market, and Qualcomm is as well… We wanted a product that could offer price points we’ve not been able to in the past,” Kondap told us.
More affordable Windows on Arm laptops are what we need right now, and it’s Qualcomm, not Nvidia, that will be providing that.
- Check out our Computex 2026 hub for all the latest news out of Taipei.
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matthew.hanson@futurenet.com (Matt Hanson)
