Qualcomm and Microsoft go 'beyond the call of duty' to stop independent Copilot+ PC reviews

The "PC was reborn," said Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon upon the announcement of the company's new Arm-based Snapdragon X series processors inside of Microsoft's newly-announced Copilot+ PC family of AI-ready laptops.

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Qualcomm and Microsoft are in for a fight with Copilot+, which is being rocket-fueled by Charlie Demerjian, the founder of SemiAccurate. In a direct sniper headshot to both companies and especially the Arm-based Snapdragon X series processor -- Microsoft doesn't get out of this easily, either -- Charlie said: "Lets start out with a simple fact of product launches, when you have a good product, get it out there to everyone as early as possible".

"When you have a bad one, make sure no one can independently test it and therefor contradict your rosy messaging with hard facts. Qualcomm and Microsoft have gone far above and beyond the call of duty to make sure independent reviews of their new SoC in the AI/Copilot PCs can't happen. This isn't by chance".

Charlie hits the nail on the head here, with there not being many Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PC reviews out there, with Qualcomm nor Microsoft providing them to independent hardware review sites like TweakTown. Deeper into his piece, Charlie covers that the usual fleet of YouTubers and influencers got theirs, but they're not covering them in ways that would make the Arm-based Snapdragon X series chips look bad.

He continued: "We could regale with stories of launches past where companies intentionally broke parts of press samples they knew would not compare well vs the competition but we won't. To be fair, Qualcomm didn't do anything like this, physically, they just made sure no one could test what they wanted on their hardware at press events and no one could get samples in time for real testing".

• Read more: Qualcomm says 'the PC Reborn' with its Snapdragon X series and Copilot+ PCs

Charlie added: "Some people may have been offered samples to cover for the behavior but they were said to arrive a few days before the on sale date. This is akin to breaking ports in the sense that you have plausible deniability when comprehensive testing can't be done. In any case Qualcomm and Microsoft have a lot to hide and to be fair, they hid it quite well. We know the official excuses but, well, they simply don't add up".

Just to note: we haven't received any Copilot+ PC systems yet, but can't wait to get our hands on them to run through many of the things Charlie addressed in his lengthy teardown of the situation. Arm emulation and independent testing is something quite important when comparing these Copilot+ PCs against regular laptops, and even more so against Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake and AMD's upcoming Strix Point processors.

Both of them are based on the regular x86 architecture and will have zero problems running all games and software, versus the Arm-based Snapdragon X range of processors that can't run much at all (it's either native Arm, or emulated Arm).

You can read Charlie's entire "Qualcomm AI/Copilot+ PCs don't live up to the hype" article here.