Sometimes it feels like our gadgets have a magical sense as to when they’ll run out of power at the most inopportune time — and for that matter, even sending us alerts about their impending battery drain. You’re in an airport, you’ve got the final countdown on a deadline project, and all of a sudden you’re rolling around the terminal on a wild-goose-chase hunt for the open outlet or empty charging bank.
Or you’re already on the plane and suddenly realize you budgeted a few hours’ work time just as the flight attendant announces that the plugs in your row are out of order. Out and about, you confine yourself to workspaces with convenient access to a power plug or to apps and features that won’t fry your laptop. We all know battery anxiety all too well: that bitter stress of scrambling to get everything done before the percentage sinks so low we have no choice but to plug in.
Now that much of the professional world operates in hybrid spaces, robust mobile features have become a necessity for those trying to keep pace. And they can’t all hold up at the length of a charging cord; travel, events and remote work will inexorably pull one away from the nearest outlet every day, yet getting things done and staying in touch is still paramount.
Qualcomm has made this a prime focus through its move to the Windows on Snapdragon, the next generation of personal computing. With lightning fast CPU performance, up to 2TB of expandable storage and an AI-empowered user experience, multitasking on the go is a breeze with all new Windows on Snapdragon devices! It’s the start of a whole new way of thinking about the habits and rhythms of how work works.
Zeeshan Sabir, VP Information Technology at Qualcomm has seen for himself the impact of Windows on Snapdragon when it comes to enterprise computing, especially in a workplace where upwards of 75% of the workforce is engineers. “IT is customer zero for Qualcomm Technologies’ products, and we are the first to know if things are not working,” says Sabir.
For our teams, two of the most frequent complaints we hear are about having to always carry around a bunch of power adapters for it and … having fan noise that even though it’s subtle is counter to their expectations of how they want to psychologically feel, he added.
He would constantly get bug reports of blue-screen crashes when users removed their devices or returned to work on a Monday morning with their laptop plugged in and fully charged, only to have lost 80% due to Windows’ weirdness over the weekend.
His teams found that while low-demand tasks like spreadsheets and presentations performed well on battery power, programming workloads led to rapid drain. The computational demands of software development required a processing foundation that could help ensure peak operating power at all times and everywhere.
“Walk into any Qualcomm conference room today and you will see something odd: people are using their laptops without power cables,” Sabir says. “That’s the easiest way to know who’s running Windows on Snapdragon and who is still sitting on x86.”
Powering the best unplugged experience of Windows on Snapdragon is its NPU: custom-designed to harness the power of AI with a critical increase in efficiency. The use cases range from video-chat noise cancellation to DJ apps, but on the enterprise side of things, it’s the Qualcomm NPU that’s also a big factor in your higher-level tasks not causing overheating.
A developer’s workload will max out a single CPU, wake the fan, and quickly deplete any battery. With the NPU-aware design of Windows on Snapdragon, extensive teams can utilize LLMs for ideation, debugging, and everything in between, knowing that performance won’t degrade – even when they’re remote.
This advantage applies across the entire spectrum of price points for PCs running Windows on Snapdragon, every one powered by next-generation NPU.
The Snapdragon focus on battery and yetkos games performance unplugged also carries over in how it handles apps. Rather than merely work to make Windows users’ all time favorite apps compatible with Windows on Snapdragon, Qualcomm Technologies has been reengineering from the ground up for awesome performance.
Engineering, sales and program management teams have worked with thousands of indie developers around the world, to educate on what is possible using our new platform capabilities, build native versions of their apps and get the best out of NPU. The favorite apps provide a smooth transition, so wherever students and educators are working, they won’t have to come up with new routines.
Some other processors can match the high bar set for performance by Windows on Snapdragon—and then some, but only when plugged in. (Performance drops as much as 45% with Intel processors when off power.) Real performance is performing to those standards outside the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., beyond the walls of your office. “A laptop is a four-year investment,” Sabir says.
“You need one that’s ready for everything on the horizon. And the LLMs are only going to grow, and we’re going to need stable devices with good processing that doesn’t impede on the final UX. Therefore, even if your employees simply don’t know about Windows on Snapdragon today, eventually they will. Soon enough, the annoying race to plug in before losing power will be as distant a memory as hunting for a pay phone.
