Qualcomm
When I first heard that Apple was incorporating ARM into its MacBook lineup, I was more than a little skeptical. There’s no chance, I thought, that smartphone chips could compete with Intel processors, despite Geekbench scores to the contrary. Since then, all my assumptions have proven to be wrong.
And there’s a reason: ARM can be incredibly fast when built correctly and integrated with the operating system, and it’s also remarkably efficient. My MacBook Pro 16 with the M3 Max chipset is incredibly fast and holds up to two days without charging. With this in mind, my hopes are sky-high for the next generation of ARM laptops running Windows.
Nothing so special so far
Mark Cukook / Digital Trends
Windows on ARM already has an embedded past, best case. The last Windows laptop we surveyed with an ARM chip was the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s in 2022. It was a laptop built around Qualcomm’s latest SoC, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. The ThinkPad X13s runs Windows 11 ARM and is still available from Lenovo’s website.
I didn’t like the laptop when I reviewed it. It delivered very good battery life, ran cool and quiet, and was slim at 0.53 inches thick and light at 2.53 inches, but it was slow and suffered from app incompatibility. The latter is particularly important as Windows on ARM runs previous generation apps in emulation unless specific ARM versions have been written. These apps are few and far between, and mainly limited to a Microsoft suite. I was able to run some of our benchmarks on the ThinkPad X13s, but they ran very slowly and suffered from emulation engine optimization or hiccuping.
Compare this to Apple silicon, which has an abundance of original applications. And the latest M3 chips are incredibly fast. When looking at benchmarks, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 just doesn’t cut it. This is also evident when comparing it to Intel’s latest 14th generation Meteor Lake.
Geekbench 5
(Single/Multi-Core)
Web Browsing
(Seconds)
Cinebench R23
(Single/Multi-Core)
Lenovo ThinkPad X13s
(Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3) 1,087 / 5,643 505 594 / 2,506
Apple MacBook Air
(M2) 1,925 / 8,973 151 1,600 / 7,938
iMac
(M3) N/A 112 1,905 / 9,754
Asus Zenbook 14 OLED 2024
(Core Ultra 7 155H) 1,721 / 12,575 80 1,793 / 12,745
The point is that while the performance of the ThinkPad X13s lags behind, battery life was very respectable. The Snapdragon chipset provided good, if not great, battery life, lagging behind the M2 MacBook Air and earlier, slower Snapdragon models like the original Snapdragon 8cx.
Even the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED with the Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H managed to hold on for almost the same time in our battery loop video, but its internet browsing time was much shorter. Other Intel chips are still faster, perform much longer at this test and compete with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.
Internet Browsing Video (hours)
Lenovo ThinkPad X13s
(Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3) 11 hours, 48 minutes 19 hours, 39 minutes
Apple MacBook Air M2
(Apple M2) 17 hours, 59 minutes 21 hours, 9 minutes
Lenovo Flex 5G
(Snapdragon 8cx) 17 hours, 17 minutes 27 hours, 57 minutes
Asus Zenbook 14 OLED
(Core Ultra 7 155H) 7 hours, 9 minutes 19 hours, 5 minutes
What’s so special this time?
Fionna Agomuoh / Digital Trends
So given this experience, why am I more excited this time?
First of all, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite promises much more competitive performances. The SoC pairs the company’s 12-core Oryon CPU with its latest Adreno GPU, which Qualcomm guarantees will deliver significantly faster performance. In addition, the Snapdragon X Elite uses Qualcomm’s AI engine with its neural processing unit (NPU), comparable to Intel’s Meteor Lake NPU and Apple Silicon’s neural engine. When AI on chip is involved, all three chipsets will be well-positioned.
It’s still early, but Qualcomm promises single-core CPU performance faster than Apple M3, and 21% faster multi-core performance. This is quite a claim. Qualcomm also says its Oryon CPU is faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs, and as of October 2023, it has declared that its SoC uses 30% less power than Apple’s M2.
Perhaps no less important, the first laptops using Snapdragon X Elite will come with the next version of Windows, code-named Germanium. This aligns with rumors that Microsoft’s next version of Windows for Surface laptops, which will include Qualcomm chipsets, will be released in parallel.
We don’t have specific details, but it’s reasonable to assume that Microsoft will include improvements in Windows on ARM to ensure that its Surface devices have strong performance. And this combination will be key; one of Apple’s biggest advantages is that it controls both hardware and software and can thus optimize both.
Andrew Martonik / Digital Trends
We don’t know how well the Snapdragon X Elite’s GPU will perform. The base M3 includes improvements to the GPU of this SoC with a dynamic cache, network shadowing, and hardware ray tracing, while Intel’s Arc integrated graphics offers roughly twice the performance of its former Iris Xe graphics. Neither of them offer the speeds of separate Nvidia and AMD GPUs, and neither does the Apple M3 Max with its 30 or 40 GPU cores. But again, they’re mainly geared towards productivity users and media consumers, not gamers or creative professionals.
I hope that Qualcomm and Microsoft will finally manage to build an ARM Windows hardware and software platform that can provide enough performance and battery life to be viable competitors, while running without tons of heat and noise-making fans. If so, they should be able to attract developers and fill in the platform’s app gap. Such machines won’t offer the outrageous performance of Intel’s faster chipsets or Apple’s M3 Pro and Max. But they don’t need to in order to succeed.
I’d like to see Windows laptops that offer more than a full day’s worth of battery life while meeting demanding productivity needs. The next step will be a Windows on ARM platform that can compete with the fastest chipsets from Apple, the Pro and Max models – remember that Apple will not stand still. Challenges remain, but that’s always a good thing, right?
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