After coming back from Snapdragon Summit 2025, I was left with some questions. These weren’t about the impressive performance we were seeing on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 or what kind of insane battery life we might see with the Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. I have no doubts about Qualcomm or their quality of products. My questions fall more in line with where the company is heading, more specifically, how they intend to compete in the computing market against major players like Intel and AMD.
Sometimes in tech, just proving a device’s performance capabilities isn’t enough. You can speak to the tech experts with benchmarks, but the general public may not understand. Whether or not the Snapdragon X2 Elite chips can perform is only one hurdle. What you need is a household name, and we just aren’t there yet.
So what do I mean by that? I think it might be silly to some to see me on a tech website saying we should forget about the tech for a minute, but in Qualcomm’s case, this might be true. Throwing a bunch of graphs and numbers up in a commercial is going to push your non-technically inclined people away. Talking about things they don’t understand won’t pull them in and make them remember the Snapdragon name. To prove your performance, you need people to try the product. To get people to try the product, you need them to know the brand.
It’s a difficult balance, one that Intel has mastered, making it hard for people to break into. Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer Don McGuire, who coincidentally worked as a senior leader at Intel, spoke at the Snapdragon Summit about the current market landscape, particularly regarding Intel. “They didn’t really have a lot of competition for a long time, but then AMD started gaining share. It took them ten years, but they started gaining share. The products were competitive, so Intel had to start waking up and saying, ‘Oh, we’ve got competition.’”
“Whether or not the Snapdragon X2 Elite chips can perform is only one hurdle — what you need is a household name, and we just aren’t there yet.”
It took another player in the game to shake things up. Intel held that household name for a long time. Much like Microsoft does with their operating system. Sure, there are other players out there, but for ages, this was all people knew. Cut to 2025, Intel has competition, but we are only really seeing AMD mentioned in those conversations. Talks about Qualcomm and Snapdragon are still just whispers outside of the tech community.
There is one place where McGuire had it wrong, though: “Intel has not done awareness-building marketing for a long time. They’ve relied on owning the value chain. They’re like the Mafia. They pay their channel partners a lot of money. They pay their partners a whole lot of money, but they haven’t, since the Jim Parsons days…they haven’t done mass awareness building, marketing for the brand or for their products.”
He implies that people know Intel, and that’s why Intel succeeds, which I suppose I am arguing as well, but I wouldn’t say they aren’t trying. Intel is investing to break into the gaming market, and they are spending big. Esports is one of the fastest-growing markets on the planet, and one of the biggest events in that industry is called what? The Intel Extreme Masters.
This past April, IEM Katowice reached a peak viewership of 1.3 million people and put 56,000 fans in seats in the Spodek Arena, selling out the venue. IEM Cologne took place in July/August 2025, with nearly 1.1 million peak viewers and 41,000 attendees at the LANXESS arena. These are major events in gaming with Intel slapped all over them. With multiple events per year, Intel is certainly getting its branding out there, at least in the gaming world.
“Snapdragon is using passion to really amplify the brand and make users care about what it can do.”
Gaming is synonymous with PCs. Hell, even Xbox is getting in on that. PC Game Pass is a major push for the formerly console-only company. The ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X are on their way, and though they are handheld devices, they are just small PCs, with AMD at the forefront, not Intel, and certainly not Qualcomm. MSI is one of the very few using that ever-so-famous Intel—and even they have started making AMD-powered devices—making AMD the more prominent choice for gaming. AMD managed to take on Intel, McGuire said it himself, “It took them 10 years.” So why isn’t Snapdragon making that same push?
When talking with Qualcomm Sr. Vice President & General Manager, Compute and Gaming, Kedar Kondap, at Snapdragon Summit, he was pretty clear that Snapdragon’s focus is elsewhere, especially when talking about discrete GPUs and other features that would be coveted by gamers, “That is very much a gaming market, a high-end gaming market. And our focus right now is more with the integrated GPUs and driving the consumer.”
Of course, that “right now” stood out to me, a gamer, and meant I had to ask, “Does that mean that’s going to be a focus later to try and get into the high-end gaming market? To try and compete?” Here is where this all started to make a bit more sense. Qualcomm has a plan. Kondap said, “The market is pretty big. The dam is pretty big overall. So I think we have to be maniacally focused on getting these experiences done. And like I said, we have to be careful about how fast we’re entering each and every segment.”
So if gaming, Intel’s big push to market to the masses in 2025, is out, what does Qualcomm have in store to make Snapdragon a household name? Well, it turns out, a lot. AI and the “Ecosystem of You” are a major part of their long-term plan. Snapdragon isn’t just in your smartphone or your laptop. It’s in your smart glasses, your earbuds, your car, your watch. But it’s a tiny piece of tech. Non-techies don’t know what audio drivers are in there either. So, they are no closer to becoming that household name. They are closer to being in every household, but an invisible partner, and that isn’t enough to compete in the PC market.
The PC market is old-school, and I think Qualcomm’s approach is fascinating. I think it is young and fresh, and puts out different priorities than companies like Intel and AMD. Snapdragon is building its brand beyond its devices, getting its name on the map first before it can really spend time showing consumers what it can do. McGuire mentioned that Intel is paying its partners well for brand deals, but Snapdragon has gone above and beyond, making some of the biggest moves in marketing today.
I loved the words that he used when discussing how Snapdragon is going to position itself. Snapdragon is using “passion” to really amplify the brand and make users care about what it can do. He talked to us about art, gaming, and music, and how passion is how they will get through to consumers. “What are people passionate about? Sports teams. Players. Cars. Write. Go fast. Crashes. Fires. Whatever. Art. People are passionate about art. They’re passionate about photography, music. These are what people are passionate about. Well, it just so happens that we enable those passions through the experiences that we power.”
He went on to explain how that works on a literal level, “So how do we do that? We talk about Snapdragon in the context of the experiences that it enables through your device experience. We make your photographs better. We make your music sound amazing. We make your gaming experience better.” However, it works on a surface level far better than any demo, proof, or benchmark you can give consumers.
Snapdragon partnered with Manchester United, and some of the stats behind that brand deal are absolutely insane. Of course, any marketer worth his weight will make it sound impressive and exciting, but the proof is there. McGuire gave out some numbers, and Snapdragon’s Manchester United partnership has garnered 19.5 BILLION impressions in a single season, plus, “Almost a half a billion engagements on with video content and social and the gravity of those numbers…182 Super Bowl AD equivalent.”
And it works. In my house alone, my partner and my son watch soccer, play soccer, game soccer. Man U is our team. So, what does that mean? We see that Snapdragon logo front and centre regularly. That doesn’t mean that everyone who sees it knows what Snapdragon is. That is brand recognition. Of course, they can use team members to push and demo their products; companies have been using celebrities to do that for years. Snapdragon is also doing it with Mercedes AMG F1. Another market, another deal, more brand recognition.
That brings them onto part two of their plan, where they need to play ball with the older companies and come down to their level. To play the game their way. McGuire explained:
“We have to drive our own poll because guess what? Intel set up the game that way. So we have to play it that way. So we have to build things like retail displays inside of Croma in India and Currys in the UK, and Media Market, and Best Buy. We have to put people in there that understand our story and know why we’re better and can tell that story. We have to play the game just like any other consumer brand, and that’s what we’re doing right now. But we’re just getting started.”
“There is no doubt in my mind that in significantly less than 10 years, we will be having the same conversations about Snapdragon stealing shares from Intel and AMD too.”
Kondap reiterated this, too, “If you ask me a few years back, would Qualcomm ever have its own table at a Costco or stuff? I would have said probably not. But we do. And we recognize the fact that we want to be relatable with the consumer. We want to be able to make sure that as we look at these next-gen experiences, we’re able to find the right place for us to communicate our message to consumers.”
Normally, that message would likely fall on deaf ears. Ad campaigns are running constantly. But what is going to bring people to those tables in Costco isn’t the best battery life, benchmarks, or fancy charts that imply Snapdragon is the way of the future. What is going to get a 17-year-old who needs a laptop for school, or a husband picking one up for his wife for Christmas, to look into a Snapdragon device is going to be the logo that has been drilled into their heads every time they watch the game.
That split-second decision where they see the Snapdragon logo and they wander over to the table is what is going to make or break Snapdragon in the laptop market. Get ‘em to the table and THEN you can blow them away with specs and promises, even if they don’t know what it all means. That is the magic of marketing, and that is how Qualcomm and Snapdragon are going to succeed in the old-school PC market.
The next big hurdle for the company will be making that same push into the gaming market. Even with partnerships with Razer, announcements on stage about hundreds of games being optimized for Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, and voice-changing audio, too (I guess?), the company still isn’t ready to take the gaming world head-on. Hopefully, these partnerships between Snapdragon and Manchester United and Mercedes AMG F1 and even content creators are laying the foundation for the future of Snapdragon in gaming. They just need time.
Like McGuire said, it took AMD 10 years, but with a brand that is marketing the way that is needed in 2025, to Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and even some of us millennials, there is no doubt in my mind that in significantly less than 10 years, we will be having the same conversations about Snapdragon stealing shares from Intel and AMD too.
