Apple’s next-generation M5 Pro and M5 Max are shaping up to be a major shift for portable Mac performance, with expectations that they’ll be the company’s first chips to use separate CPU and GPU blocks. This approach is reportedly made possible by TSMC’s “Small Outline Integrated Circuit” (SoIC) packaging, a technology designed to make advanced multi-part chip designs more practical at scale.
The move matters because chiplet-style designs can deliver multiple advantages at once. By splitting a processor into distinct blocks, companies can potentially improve manufacturing yields, reduce overall costs, and open the door to higher performance configurations that are harder to achieve when everything is built as one large piece of silicon. As chips continue getting more complex and physically larger, many in the industry see chiplets as the natural next step.
That raises a big question for Windows-on-ARM laptops: if Apple, AMD, and even Intel are leaning into chiplet strategies, why hasn’t Qualcomm followed the same path with its latest Snapdragon laptop processors?
One likely reason is that Qualcomm is still relatively early in its modern laptop SoC journey. It’s only on its second major iteration of ARM-based laptop chips, and chiplet architectures—especially those involving advanced stacking and packaging—require significant research and development, deep engineering expertise, and plenty of time spent iterating through design issues. Community discussions suggest the process can involve a lot of trial and error, meaning it may take years before Qualcomm ships a Snapdragon laptop chip that truly embraces chiplets.
But time may not be a luxury Qualcomm can count on for long. As laptop-class chips grow in size and ambition, staying purely monolithic can become increasingly limiting. If Qualcomm plans to keep scaling into future products—such as a hypothetical Snapdragon X3 Elite Extreme—it may need to move faster, or risk falling behind competitors for an entire generation.
Power draw is another practical obstacle. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme has been mentioned as capable of running above 100W when allowed to operate without tight constraints. Chiplet designs can introduce additional overhead because chiplets need to communicate with each other, which can increase power demands. Qualcomm has been positioning Snapdragon laptop platforms around efficiency and thermals, and a chiplet transition could complicate that story.
There’s also the hardware ecosystem to consider. If Qualcomm goes chiplet, laptop makers might need to redesign cooling solutions to accommodate different heat distribution patterns and potentially higher peak loads. That could lead to thicker and heavier designs—exactly what many Snapdragon-based laptops aim to avoid.
Still, Apple’s reported choice to bring chiplet-like separation to the M5 Pro and M5 Max puts pressure on these arguments. Apple’s advantage is that it has a long track record of extracting high performance while tightly controlling power consumption and heat. If Apple is comfortable moving forward with this packaging approach in performance-focused chips meant for thin laptops, it suggests the company believes the thermal and efficiency challenges are manageable.
Efficiency-focused engineering is central to why Apple’s approach looks so threatening. One example often cited is how Apple pushes performance improvements without proportionally increasing power requirements, reinforcing the idea that it can take on more complex chip designs while maintaining excellent battery life. If chiplet-style packaging is arriving in M5 Pro and M5 Max, it implies Apple is confident it can scale performance without breaking the thin-and-light laptop experience.
So, should Qualcomm switch to a chiplet design?
There’s a growing argument that it should—especially if it wants to close key gaps that show up outside pure CPU benchmarks. Early performance looks for the Snapdragon X2 Elite suggest strong CPU gains, even competing aggressively with Apple’s latest silicon in many tests. But gaming and graphics performance appear to be where Qualcomm’s current approach runs into trouble. The Snapdragon X2 Elite may be a large leap over the previous Snapdragon X Elite, yet Apple’s graphics performance is still described as being on another level. That points to the integrated GPU as a bottleneck, potentially constrained by current design limits.
Meanwhile, the broader x86 world is pushing forward quickly on graphics capabilities in thin laptops. Newer integrated graphics architectures are showing major gains, and that’s the direction Qualcomm will likely need to match to remain competitive—not just in productivity and battery life, but in gaming, creative workloads, and GPU-accelerated applications that increasingly define premium laptops.
If Qualcomm continues to ship higher-power “Extreme” variants and wants to scale GPU performance meaningfully, chiplets may become less of an optional experiment and more of a strategic requirement. The transition won’t be quick, but as chip size, complexity, and performance expectations climb, the pressure to adopt more modular designs will only get stronger.
