Yesterday was the first day of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii, where the company brought its partners on stage for a range of announcements. AMD took to the stage to announce that its partners will be producing Always Connected PCs with AMD processors and Qualcomm modems, but HP and ASUS also announced the first Snapdragon 835-powered Windows 10 PCs.
Microsoft announced its plans to run full Windows on ARM chips almost exactly a year ago, and it said at the time that the first ARM PCs will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. Surprisingly though, it's not exactly the same Snapdragon 835 that you'll find in current flagship Android phones.
According to the specs that Qualcomm has listed for the Snapdragon 835 Mobile Platform and the Snapdragon 835 Mobile PC Platform, the latter drops a few features that you'll find on the former.
For one thing, there's no 802.11ad Wi-Fi support listed, which is a Wi-Fi standard that runs on the 60GHz spectrum, meaning that it's faster, but at short ranges. It's also missing Qualcomm's wireless charging solution, WiPower. This isn't exactly surprising either, given the lack of a need for PCs that can wirelessly charge. Finally, and this is a bit more surprising, but there's no Quick Charge 4 support.
The specs also don't show support for NFC, something that you'll find in many portable business PCs. Qualcomm has confirmed to Neowin, however, that NFC is still supported.
Other than those things, the two chipsets appear to be the same. They both include eight Kryo 280 cores that can be clocked at up to 2.45GHz, an Adreno 540 GPU, a Hexagon 682 DSP, and a Snapdragon X16 modem that supports gigabit LTE speeds.
The first two Snapdragon 835-powered PCs, the HP Envy x2 and ASUS NovaGo, are slated to arrive this spring.
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