Qualcomm: The Last Chipmaker Serving Consumers
CES 2026 has come and gone, and the consumer PC market is left wondering what they’ll get this year. Other than high prices, RAM shortages, expensive GPUs, and a few customary motherboard refreshes. I watched all the major keynotes, from chip manufacturers like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, and most of the OEM presentations, as I do every year.I’m normally excited afterward,because new technology will never not be captivating to me,but I can’t help feeling let down by the industry this year.
Laptops were already expensive, and now they’re several hundred dollars more each, because one company bought all the future RAM wafers. An AMD executive said they reckon people will make minor upgrades this year rather than build new PCs. it’s a bad year when Apple’s historically high RAM upgrade costs look competitive, but here we are. But with all the gloom out of CES, I’m genuinely excited about one chipmaker’s products, and that’s Qualcomm.
The chipmakers forgot what the “C” in CES stands for
Table of Contents
- The chipmakers forgot what the “C” in CES stands for
- Releasing datacenter GPUs that nobody can buy benefits is a slap to the face
- Discrete GPU support is neededThe big drawback of Qualcomm PCs right now is limited (or none) support for discrete graphics cards. Minisforum has one mini PC with an Arm-based processor that can run dGPUs in Linux, but support is flaky at best, and it won’t work with Windows on Arm because there are no drivers.
Which is a shame, because we know Nvidia’s GPU IP works on Arm. The Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 use that combination, as do Nvidia’s Grace supercomputers.It’ll take GPU makers to deliver working drivers for Arm for this to change, but I live in hope as the market share of Arm-based devices increases. - Qualcomm (and Arm) is going from strength to strength
Releasing datacenter GPUs that nobody can buy benefits is a slap to the face
All the major chipmakers had keynote presentations at CES 2026, and I can’t shake the feeling that most of them have forgotten what it’s like to sell to retail customers.And why would they? RAM orders are booked until 2030 or so, GPUs are pre-sold to datacenter customers, and large OEMs are taking the rest for laptops and prebuilt desktops.
