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- Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips for Windows offer competitive performance, slightly surpassing Apple’s M3 but falling short of the M3 Pro. They also have improved power efficiency.
- These ARM-based chips dramatically reduce power consumption compared to x86 processors, potentially enhancing battery life and enabling sleeker laptop designs.
- Transitioning Windows from x86 to ARM faces app compatibility challenges, but Microsoft’s emulation efforts aim to mitigate these issues. Gaming remains a concern, but the chips show promise for general PC tasks.
Microsoft has been experimenting with ARM-powered Windows machines, like the Surface Pro X, since late 2019. Despite initial setbacks with the earlier products, the emergence of Apple Silicon has prompted a renewed interest among Windows-based companies.
The Promises
This section will go over everything that the new Snapdragon chips for Windows are set to be in terms of performance, power consumption, and pricing.
Performance
According to the advertising material, the Snapdragon X Elite was set to launch with performance 28% better than the Apple M3, while the lower-end Snapdragon X Plus was rated as being 10% faster than the M3 in synthetic benchmarks.
When compared to the M3 Pro, the X Elite comes up slightly short, though with slightly better power efficiency. This lands it above the Apple M3 but slightly under the Apple M3 Pro.
Power Consumption
A few short years ago, the XPS 13 Plus made waves of its excellent performance in a compact body, which was only possible because of the Core i7-1360P. Now, the new Snapdragon X Elite chip claims to draw less than half the power to achieve the same results.
Pricing
Dave 2D made an excellent point in his video about the new chips; he said that they were cheap enough to allow the rest of the laptop to have more top-end components.
With performance almost the same as M3 Pro and a price tag that starts at $1299 instead of $1999, it is safe to say that these Windows ARM-based laptops will deliver a better price-to-performance ratio than their Apple counterparts.
Problems And Their Solutions
Switching from x86 to ARM on Windows comes with certain issues that haven’t been faced before. This part of the article will highlight these issues and what Qualcomm and Microsoft intend to do to rectify them.
ARM Native Apps
Since Windows was originally designed for x86 architectures, transitioning to ARM requires new low-level coding. This shift necessitates a translation layer or emulation to run x86 programs on ARM chips.
Historically, ARM processors faced challenges with compatibility in the Windows app ecosystem, but Microsoft has made strides to improve x86 app translation on ARM.
Translation layers are nothing new; Apple did it themselves with their Rosetta translation layer, and there were some performance penalties with that as well, as is the case with these new chips.
If the translation is as good as it seems in the limited testing of these products thus far, and if developers jump onto making ARM versions of their apps, the shift from x86 to ARM should not be too painful.
The Lack Of “Smart” Features
Over the years, smartphones have advanced with smart features like live captions and creative photo/video effects, areas where PCs have lagged. New NPUs in Qualcomm chips now bring these AI capabilities to PCs.
They enable features like AI-driven image creation in Microsoft Paint, eye-tracking software, video background manipulation, and live captions.
However, this advancement raises privacy concerns, notably with features like Windows Recall, sparking community-wide debate. Cool in concept, sure, but it needs a reimagining to be something that people will look into.
Playing Games
A huge portion of the PC community is based around the fact that no other system can run games as well as Windows. The shift to this new architecture raises concerns for gamers, as games have opted for the CPU-GPU system paired with x86.
Unfortunately, Qualcomm’s new chips are only serviceable at playing games, and nothing more. This is something that can be improved in the future with more gaming-focused chips, but as of now, this is not the main concern for these systems.
Are They Good Enough?
If you temper your expectations, yes. The new Qualcomm chips perform excellently, considering the challenge they are tackling, and they are set to revolutionize the PC laptop industry.
This is to say, they will not be replacing their x86 counterparts, at least not anytime soon. For heavier workloads and gaming, the big-boy computers are not going anywhere.
Still, we are tremendously excited to see what the future has in store for us and what it brings to the PC industry!
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