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While I'm extremely skeptical, I hope they are. This will cause apple to try harder, maybe lower ssd and ram upgrade prices to remain competitive...
That's very unlikely. Apple does not compete with Windows machines. The main selling point for Macs was never performance – or a low price. I admit Apple is touting CPU performance ever since they have their own chips, but even so, that is not the reason people get Macs.
 
Laptops and computers are two different animals. I'll take a joint focus on performance AND efficiency all day long in my laptop. That said, even if Microsoft were beating Apple in both metrics, I'd still choose the Apple laptop, as I prefer the MacOS to Windows.
My point wasn't "is there a good reason to focus on processing unit efficiency as a key metric" ....of course that makes sense, as you said especially for a laptop. However, that doesn't mean it is the ONLY reason and that any other possible reason, as the previous poster said, is "who cares"....plenty of people needing laptops for a variety of uses cases care. The previous comment was dismissive and narrow minded and I was calling attention to the boarder use and scope of computers (laptops included) that exist outside the scope of what Apple focuses all of their marketing on.
 
And conveniently, not a single word regarding battery life. 🤔

Oh well, if people use their 21% faster Qualcomm-powered laptops while plugged in all the time, I guess poor battery life doesn't really matter...? :p
Perhaps more info is helpful.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite still has a very long road ahead of it, and there are definitely roadblocks along the way. Apple, Intel, and AMD are all going to announce new generations of their products between now and when the Snapdragon X Elite actually ships.
Also mention in a another related article
At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, The Verge attended a session hosted by Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil, where he assured the 30-odd people in attendance that their games should immediately work on the next wave of Snapdragon Windows laptops with no porting required thanks to x64 emulation improvements.
From that linked article
snapdragon_panel_1.jpg

As you can see in the slide above, there are a few caveats: games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat drivers (which have been growing in popularity, though some players now fear hacks) won’t work under emulation. For now, neither will games that use AVX instruction sets, where Khalil suggests developers use SIMDe to get a huge headstart on converting them to NEON code. Those things are true with ARM64EC as well.
So some limitation when comparing Rosetta 2 to the x64 emulation that these Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite based products would use.
 
The difference with Apple is that software developers are actually releasing Apple silicon versions of their apps. On Windows nobody is releasing Arm versions of their apps. Microsoft’s emulation isn’t quite to the level of Rosetta2 that Apple provides either. The net result is a mixed bag for Windows on Arm with few advantages to using it.
If history is any guide Apple will much to quickly EOL Rosetta2.
 
Competition is good. Apple introduced a superior chip and now MS/Qualcomm are trying to one up them. I wish WinQual, Wincomm (or whatever mashup replaces Wintel) success. Then I wish Apple success beating them again. And so forth, and so on, all the way to the singularity.
 
Can’t wait! I hope it has a decent GPU and decent battery life…

anything to have lighter laptop with decent GPU is good enough for now - my current Windows laptop is half computer, half hair dryer…
 
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Should of happened long ago, ARM was showing its power decades ago. Competition is good and will push Apple.
 
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I am curious about the decision to only use performance cores. I wonder if underclocking some of them would turn them into efficiency cores?

I am also curious about the cost. If the price of the chip is close to an M3 Pro, the comparison with an M3 wouldn't really be fair. I think Qualcom only wanted one SKU, so they targeted the mid-range of Apple's offerings. Something powerful enough for high-end pro laptops, but not so powerful it couldn't be used in cheaper models.
 
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🤣🤣🤣

By the time it comes out, it’ll already likely going to be outpaced by the M4 chip.
We're not getting M4 chips until end of 2025 or early 2026. These Microsoft Snapdragon-powered laptops are coming out later this year.

Microsoft plans to announce laptops powered by the Snapdragon X Elite later this year, including the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 on May 20.
Will Apple take the lead with M4? Probably. But we'll also see faster Snapdragon chips by then too. Such is the tech evolution cycle.
 
Well, I sure hope they are, otherwise it would be very embarrassing for Qualcomm. It's 12 performance cores vs. 4 performance + 4 efficiency cores after all. I already think it's a bit odd that they only claim 20% improvements on some niche workloads, the 12-core Elite should run circles around M3 in multi-core.
 
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