https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/qualcomms-new-8-core-snapdragon-chip-is-aimed-at-cheaper-arm-windows-pcs/

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.