Snapdragon X-powered laptops are available for viewing by journalists and influencers at the Snapdragon Southeast Asia Summit in Singapore. Benise Balaoing, ABS-CBN News

SINGAPORE -- Chipmaker Qualcomm is looking to get even more PC apps to run natively on its Snapdragon platform.

Qualcomm gathered tech journalists and influencers from Southeast Asia in Singapore on Wednesday to showcase the gains made by the ARM-based chipmaker in the PC industry after dominating the mobile phone market.

The company introduced its Snapdragon X series of chips last year in a bid to extend its market to laptops. While reviewers raved about how the new ARM-based laptops almost doubled the battery life of laptops, app compatibility became a concern. They pointed out that many apps compiled for the Intel/AMD x86 platform had yet to get ARM versions.

Qualcomm Technologies Senior Director for Product Management Nitin Kumar however said they are working with developers to make more apps compatible with, and run natively on the Snapdragon platform.

"A large number of key apps that are used like Google Chrome browser, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, these applications are all native," he said.

Qualcomm Technologies Vice President for Product Management Nitin Kumar speaks at the Snapdragon Southeast Asia Summit at the W Singapore Sentosa Cove. Benise Balaoing, ABS-CBN News

"We’ve also made tremendous progress in commercial applications—Nord VPN is an example, a bunch of other VPN applications, security applications, manageability applications, are all natively available," he added.

Kumar also said they have built an emulation engine called Prism, which the company claims emulates x86 apps seamlessly on Snapdragon X architecture.

Emulation is needed so that apps native on x86 can run properly on Snapdragon laptops. Kumar said Qualcomm has made significant progress on this front.

"That emulator is extremely, extremely efficient," Kumar said of Prism, which was developed by Microsoft and Qualcomm.

REVIEW: ASUS Vivobook S15 with Snapdragon X Elite gets great battery life

He added that Qualcomm's emulator is now even better than Apple's, which has its own M-series architecture.

"We have better efficiency against Apple in emulation engine, number one. And second, because of the raw performance that we have, when you look at some of the applications that are even running in emulation mode, they actually outperform than running them native on x86 application," he said.

EFFICIENT BUT EXPENSIVE?

Kumar also noted that they are working to bring down the cost of Snapdragon X laptops. He noted that their Snapdragon X Elite costs about $1000, but their 8-core Snapdragon X now costs about $600.

"Of course, with promotions and different specs the price point may vary, but we are really bringing that top-level AI capability, that premium AI experience to device laptops in the $600 range," he said.

"With promotion, it can be a little bit lower, each (original equipment manufacturer) is unique but we are the only ones that have this level of scale where we’re bringing this AI capability to a large portfolio of devices," he stressed.

After Qualcomm's foray into the PC market last year, chip giants Intel and AMD unveiled their own lines of power-efficient chips which they said match up to, or were even more battery-friendly than Snapdragon.