Snapdragons have mostly been reference ARM designs with Adreno bolted on being the big selling point, since it blows away Mali or whatever the reference design is today. They got that from AMD of all places, hence the name being an anagram of Radeon.

> The Snapdragon 8 series

They "just" are just using standard ARM cores which is hardly comparable to what Intel and Apple are doing (and they have been lagging behind Apple by a few years since forever; arguably Intel is closer to the M series than Qualcomm is to A series).

> Snapdragon X

I thought it's because they finally designed their own core, since ARM has been completely ignoring the laptop market and couldn't really offer anything?