GoKawiilQualcomm announced the Snapdragon C Platform on May 28th, ahead of Computex 2026 in Taipei, an entry-level Arm processor built to anchor Windows 11 laptops priced from $300. The chip abandons the Oryon CPU cores that define the Snapdragon X family in favor of an older Kryo design pulled from Qualcomm's smartphone parts, runs in machines carrying as little as 8GB of memory, and skips Microsoft's Copilot+ certification. We went hands-on with Snapdragon C at Computex 2026 today.
Meanwhile, analysts from TrendForce, Gartner, and IDC are all warning that a surge in memory prices is making the sub-$500 laptop market financially unviable, which could lead to its disappearance in its entirety.
Kryo cores, not Oryon
The "C" stands for Compute, and the new platform sits beneath every Snapdragon X and X2 part Qualcomm sells. Where those chips use the Nuvia-derived Oryon cores Qualcomm acquired in 2021, Snapdragon C reuses Kryo cores from its phone lineup, the architecture Qualcomm built laptop silicon on before the Oryon transition. Mandar Deshpande, senior director of product management at Qualcomm, told reporters at a pre-launch briefing that the platform "is not built to scale up to the Copilot+ requirements," meaning it clears neither Microsoft's 40 TOPS neural-engine floor nor the 16GB memory minimum tied to the Copilot+ PC program.
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Qualcomm has disclosed little else; core counts, clock speeds, neural-engine throughput, the manufacturing node, and the supported memory type were all absent from the announcement, with the company saying it would detail them during its Computex keynote this week. Reported leaks point to a 6nm-class part with eight cores, though none of that is confirmed.
The first machine is Acer's Aspire Go 15. Acer's specification sheet lists a 15.6-inch 1920 x 1080 display, up to 8GB of memory, up to 512GB of storage, a 53Wh battery, and Windows 11 with a Copilot key but no Copilot+ branding. Acer hasn’t given the laptop a price or a release date, and HP and Lenovo, both named as launch partners, have yet to unveil their own machines.
Memory prices dictate retail prices
Snapdragon C enters a market where memory has arguably become the deciding factor in what a laptop ultimately retails for. TrendForce projects that conventional DRAM contract prices rose 90% to 95% in the first quarter of 2026 and will climb a further 58% to 63% in the second, with mobile DRAM — the LPDDR type Snapdragon C depends on — rising as much as 93% to 98% quarter over quarter.
Meanwhile, Gartner expects combined DRAM and SSD pricing to increase 130% by the end of 2026, lifting average PC prices 17% and pushing memory from 16% to 23% of a typical laptop's bill of materials. Ranjit Atwal, senior director analyst at Gartner, said in a February forecast that the increases have removed vendors' ability to absorb the cost, and that "the sub-$500 entry-level PC segment will disappear by 2028." IDC reached a similar conclusion, cutting its 2026 global PC shipment forecast to a decline of 11.3% and warning that bargain-priced PCs are, for now, behind us.
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