Qualcomm, a major chipmaker known for its mobile processors, has been involved in the portable gaming console market on and off. It previously supplied its Snapdragon 720G chip to Lenovo for the Legion Play and partnered with Sony for the PlayStation Portal, which uses a Snapdragon 680. Now, Qualcomm is showing more interest in this space, with Kedar Kondap, General Manager of the Compute and Gaming division, suggesting the company could expand further. He mentioned that Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, which has 18 cores, could potentially be used in a portable gaming console. Kondap emphasized that Qualcomm’s chips work with multiple operating systems, including Android and Windows. This is a key advantage over x86 chips made by AMD and Intel, which are typically limited to Windows. However, Qualcomm’s new X2 Plus and X2 Elite chips use ARM architecture, which is different from the x86 architecture used in most Windows PCs. Because of this, they require a special software layer called Microsoft’s Prism to run Windows games, which can affect performance. Portable gaming consoles like the ROG Ally and MSI Claw avoid this issue by using x86 processors, which are compatible with Windows without the need for translation layers. Despite this challenge, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip still has strong graphics capabilities. It includes an integrated GPU called Adreno X2-90, which is competitive with Intel’s Arc G3 graphics solutions. This suggests that even with the limitations of ARM architecture, Qualcomm’s chips could still be a compelling option for portable gaming devices.