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Microsoft Says Windows Laptops With Snapdragon X Elite Will Be Faster Than M3 MacBook Air
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I haven't used Edge in years, only Firefox. But I get what you're saying, some might say this might even be anti-trust behavior similar to IE in the 90s the way Edge is pushed onto consumers.
Glad they are back in the game, a between the lines reading is an admission that Apple's strategy is better than the Win/Intel one. I still wish I understand why Apple has squandered their 7 year (aka a lifetime) lead on ML/AI hardware with the Neural Engine.
I use a Surface laptop. I use a MacBook Air. I use an Intel I9 desktop. They all do the job, some better than others.
Windows is the preferred OS for the vast majority of people, so Windows is an advantage.
I had meant wait for the comments of why a Windows user should opine on Apple forums, there was already one comment that asked this.
The absolute dumbest remarks I've read are, "People who use Windows, won't go Mac and vice versa."
I suppose when Apple advertises Migration Assistant or says MacBook Air is faster than a PC notebook, they must be stupid.
Not if every year Apple keeps recycling the old year chip and adding a +1 to the name as it’s being doing since M1.
The M3 has an entirely new micro architecture amongst other things.
Maybe you’re not technically inclined enough to see that Apple continues to improve their offerings at a deep level beyond the marketing number? Apple is not standing still by any measure in their SoC lineup.
While per-clock performance hasn't changed, effective performance has increased a fair bit, due to clock increases, core count increases, faster e-cores, etc. So I don't think that's a fair characterization.
Well, per-clock performance has indeed stood still for a while.
So for the first time Windows ARM will work better on non-Mac than on Macs? 
What is another option if you want a fanless laptop? Apple knows the limits of its own SoCs they aren't going to let heat damage the laptop. Also, the actual temperatures you are reading from the various status utilities are showing an average or a peak of spot temps on various temperature sensors on the SoC. That doesn't necessarily mean much and you certainly can't reliably compare one SoC variant to another since the location of the sensors could be completely different.
I've seen upwards of 110 °C on spot temperatures on my M3 MacBook Air and then it usually drops down quite quickly and more or less stabilizes around 90 °C. But the normal idle temps are still about 38 °C to 42 °C.
I will believe it when I see it...MSFT has making these claims for so long now...give me the device and I will test it myself and let you know...
The beneficiaries of competition will be us, the consumer. Qualcomm’s success will inspire Apple to make better chips.
Intel had better be careful because the ARM architecture is much more open to other vendors than x86 is. Arrow lake needs to be good!
Qualcomm’s success may also Inspire other vendors like nvidia to enter the arena. Windows on ARM will only get better over time. Apple may even bring back bootcamp for windows on ARM!
Intel had better be careful because the ARM architecture is much more open to other vendors than x86 is. Arrow lake needs to be good!
Qualcomm’s success may also Inspire other vendors like nvidia to enter the arena. Windows on ARM will only get better over time. Apple may even bring back bootcamp for windows on ARM!
We’re 3 generations in and people are still ignorant to the fact that Apple has chosen thermals to be their differentiating factor across product lines. I don’t know why you even bothered to respond to that comment.
The idea that the M3 air “runs hot” is nonsense. It CAN get hot, when purposely stress testing it, as common sense would dictate. But the workload that device is designed for makes the device warm, at best.
Something about the Apple Silicon transition seemed to break brains around here. Everyone got so used to the industry artificially segmenting chips the way Intel does it, that they can’t recognize that Apple has chosen to do it a different way. Apples way has made their BOTTOM end of performance such a serious threat to Intel/AMD’s highest end laptop chips that I think posters here are willfully misunderstanding the situation to cope 🤷♂️
AMD is likely, but Intel might not venture into it. The long rumor is they would double down into their foundry business. They have an Arm license, but so other chip makers like Nvidia and Samsung, whom are making SOCs for Windows. Not saying it won’t happen, but I suspect AMD might not jump into the consumer market and Intel might have a hard time winning the hardware manufacturers over. Dell and HP are rumored to be building their own SOCs too.
Apples next 3 chip generations are already well into (varying stages of) development. Whatever Qualcomm is releasing later this year (or 2025) will have literally no bearing on Apple’s chips for at least a few years to come. Chip design and production simply takes too long for that to be a thing.
The M3 was already done from a design perspective (not manufacturing) before the rest of the industry realized they had a perf/watt issue that x86 is just not going to be able to compete in.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my current work machine (x13 gen2 with an AMD Ryzen), but I think the vast majority of regular consumers care more about absurd battery life than they do artificial benchmarks that are done to give Intel the “performance crown”. IF the consumer Windows world is going to move to ARM then we’re going to see a rising of all tides in that regard.
Computing the area of a square knowing the length of only one side.
Who cares? You still have to slog through that kludged together UI and dreadful UX.
Microsoft will advertise that its upcoming Windows laptops with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processor are faster than the MacBook Air with Apple's latest M3 chip, according to internal documents obtained by The Verge.
"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," the report says. Microsoft believes its laptops will offer "faster app emulation" than Apple's Rosetta 2.
Introduced in October, the Snapdragon X Elite has Arm-based architecture like Apple silicon. Qualcomm last year claimed that the processor achieved 21% faster multi-core CPU performance than the M3 chip, based on the Geekbench 6 benchmark tool.
There are a few caveats here, including that Microsoft and Qualcomm are comparing to Apple's lower-end M3 chip instead of its higher-end M3 Pro and M3 Max chips. MacBooks with Apple silicon also offer industry-leading performance-per-watt, while the Snapdragon X Elite will likely run hotter and require laptops with fans. Since being updated with the M1 chip in 2020, the MacBook Air has featured a fanless design. Apple can also optimize the performance of MacBooks since it controls both the hardware and macOS software.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Apple's competitors are making progress with Arm-based laptops. 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.
Article Link: Microsoft Says Windows Laptops With Snapdragon X Elite Will Be Faster Than M3 MacBook Air
Apple develops SoC’s for a reason. The inclusion of beefed up media engines with new encoders take over jobs that were previously CPU bound.
Example:
The end result is the job gets done quicker, in some cases dramatically so. If your video conversion is done quicker on an M2 vs an M1, are we to care whether it’s strictly the CPU that did it? Not to mention it does it while sipping battery power (comparatively speaking). The SoC’s are not standing still by any means, that’s the point I’m driving at.
The real question is will it be faster head to head if both laptops are not plugged in, and will it deliver as good or better battery life than a MBA at the same time?
That's the starting point.
That's the starting point.