Microsoft Preparing New Push for ARM-Powered Windows Laptops
Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge:
Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for “AI
PCs” next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar
with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is
confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will
beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and
AI-accelerated tasks.
Keep in mind when this event takes place that raw CPU performance isn’t what makes Apple silicon great. It’s performance-per-watt, along with the efficiencies of the entire OSes being optimized for the architecture.
After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes
the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the
performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much
more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm’s
upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a
variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft’s latest
consumer-focused Surface hardware.
And the next version of Bluetooth might offer rock-solid reliability.
Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s
planning a number of demos that will show how these processors
will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI
acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in
internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI
PCs will have “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2” — the
application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple
Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel
processors to Apple’s own processors.
Faster x86 emulation than Rosetta 2 would be quite the achievement, but is it really a bragging point? Three-and-a-half years into the Mac’s Apple silicon era, we’re so far into the transition that almost every app is now native. Are there any remaining pro Mac apps, where performance matters, that still only run under Rosetta?
Whereas on Windows, there’s relatively little ARM-native software, despite the fact that Microsoft started pushing ARM-based Surface devices back in 2012 — 12 years ago. Rosetta emulation is already a non-issue for Mac users in 2024, but x86 emulation might remain forever a problem for Windows. Windows laptop users would surely agree that they’d like longer battery life and quiet fans (if not fanless laptops, like the MacBook Air), but they seemingly have no desire to buy ARM-based machines.
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Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge:
Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for “AI
PCs” next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar
with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is
confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will
beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and
AI-accelerated tasks.
Keep in mind when this event takes place that raw CPU performance isn’t what makes Apple silicon great. It’s performance-per-watt, along with the efficiencies of the entire OSes being optimized for the architecture.
After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes
the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the
performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much
more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm’s
upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a
variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft’s latest
consumer-focused Surface hardware.
And the next version of Bluetooth might offer rock-solid reliability.
Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s
planning a number of demos that will show how these processors
will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI
acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in
internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI
PCs will have “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2” — the
application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple
Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel
processors to Apple’s own processors.
Faster x86 emulation than Rosetta 2 would be quite the achievement, but is it really a bragging point? Three-and-a-half years into the Mac’s Apple silicon era, we’re so far into the transition that almost every app is now native. Are there any remaining pro Mac apps, where performance matters, that still only run under Rosetta?
Whereas on Windows, there’s relatively little ARM-native software, despite the fact that Microsoft started pushing ARM-based Surface devices back in 2012 — 12 years ago. Rosetta emulation is already a non-issue for Mac users in 2024, but x86 emulation might remain forever a problem for Windows. Windows laptop users would surely agree that they’d like longer battery life and quiet fans (if not fanless laptops, like the MacBook Air), but they seemingly have no desire to buy ARM-based machines.