Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Windows-on-Arm is finally just about good enough to serve as your main PC, thanks to a combination of long-awaited Snapdragon X-series silicon from Qualcomm, Arm-specific improvements in the Windows 11 24H2 update, and third-party software developers that are slowly but surely putting out Arm-native versions of their most popular apps.

So far, those Snapdragon X chips have been confined mostly to $1,000-and-up premium PCs like the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. But Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has said that he wants to get better hardware into midrange laptops in the $700 range, and today the company took a concrete step toward making that happen: a new version of the Snapdragon X with 8 CPU cores instead of 10, but the same Oryon CPU architecture (a neural processing unit [NPU] that still meets Microsoft’s requirements for Copilot+ PCs) and the same Snapdragon X Plus branding as the faster 10-core versions.

There are two separate versions of the 8-core Snapdragon X Plus. The X1P-46-100 version allows its CPU to boost up to 4.0 GHz for single-core tasks and has a GPU capable of 2.1 TFLOPS of performance (compared to 3.8 for the 10-core X plus, and 4.6 for the fastest Snapdragon X Elite variants). The X1P-42-100 version only boosts up to 3.4 GHz in single-core mode and has a 1.7 TFLOPS GPU. All of Qualcomm’s NPUs are the same, offering 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).