The quicker Windows ARM becomes a viable solution, the quicker we see Windows ultraportables comparable to MacBook Airs. And also a better Windows experience on Mac but that's a given
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Qualcomm Claims Snapdragon X Elite 21% Faster Than Apple's M3 Chip
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I doubt that. If you plan on running them at the same wattage(Most probably will), it will not have a huge lead. But at the massively boosted wattage, it's faster
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Not happening, I'm fairly certain. Maybe later this year. I swear I saw that Qualcomm had an exclusivity deal for ARM chipsets, which hinders growth. Qualcomm will be crushed like Intel soon
Not to the extent of x86 on Windows, or so I've heard. At the same time though, it's closing the gap
It does.
Yes, but at the X Elite's wattage, Apple has the M3 Max. And since Qualcomm is talking multi-core performance, even the M3 Pro is going to handily beat it.
Crushed by whom? Few companies are interested in playing in that space. Most are only interested in smartphones, because much higher volume, and in not designing their own cores, because that costs money.
Ah. Interesting. I didn't know that.
Very true.
They had an exclusivity deal for Windows on ARM. other competitors will enter the market soon. They just haven't been able to until this year.
Yep, it's known as XTA (x86 To ARM), and like Rosetta 2, I believe it's a mix of AOT and JIT.
Other competitors can enter the market, but the question is whether doing so is lucrative.
Seriously, fanless is the way to go. I'm still waiting for at least the base pro to become fanless, dont matter if they put a giant sink and make it 100-200gms heavier, as long all the holes and gaps are sealed closed. I'm sick of dust in my Macbook.
The fans are so the CPU and GPU can run longer before throttling, which is important for any time consuming and intensive tasks, or activities such as gaming. If you do work that taxes the device for long periods of time you don't want a device with no fan... Obviously in the future this would be lovely, but it's impractical now.
If dust is a problem where you live, maybe invest in a big air filter or three? I've sworn by them for years when living in big dirty cities. Phillips make very reliable ones, and they make a difference to air quality and airborne particulates.
I'm very happy with my fanless M1 Air for personal use, for what it's worth, but my work laptop has to work harder for longer, so I tolerate the dust and added thickness. I wouldn't want a 500g passive heat sink making my 16" Pro even thinker and even heavier...
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The test they ran was the snapdragon 12 core vs the m3 8 core. If they would have compared against the 12 core or 16 core m3, the M chip blew the snapdragon out of the water. Then, compare laptop performance and snapdragon would use more battery to get close to the performance and Qualcomm might have throttled performance on battery life.
Nobody is going to run the POS windows os on an arm anyway. MS spent all of the last 4 decades using intel cpus and didn’t keep up with current technology whereas OSX and Linux have kept up with arm technology and it shows
Competition is great. I have been using Windows 11 in VMware Fusion without issues
Competition is great indeed! And we’re seeing how things are getting increasingly interesting in the ARM field, with Apple leading the way, Qualcomm catching up, with this chips being allegedly faster than Apple’s M3, but probably Apple’s M4 will regain the crown once the first M4 powered Macs hit the market (I don’t think it is fair to use the M4 on the iPad to compare), because of how big of a jump it represents from the M3. I’d also like more actors to jump in the flourishing ARM market, aside from Apple and Qualcomm.
On the old x86 side, AMD is keeping the pace thanks to the great Zen micro architectures, but it seems like will be Intel who’s going to lead this space, at least efficiency-wise, judging by what they are achieving with their latest Meteor Lake and upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs, and the very promising Lunar Lake System on a Chip.
So we not only have competition on the ARM side but also a crucial battle between ARM and x86 is going to take place in the near future, with the RISC chips having, in my humble opinion, much bigger momentum and possibilities (just recently ARM also announced a new upscaling technology for graphics that honestly seems state of the art).
There is no "probably". The M4 in the iPad already crushes the top-end SXE; in the Mac it will only run faster as it will have better thermals. For that matter, on a technological level, the M3 already crushes the SXE; the only reason the SXE "wins" in some benchmarks is because it's got three times as many P cores (and 50% more cores overall). The M3 Pro, still not a proper comparison as it's half E-cores, makes this more obvious.
Competition is fantastic, certainly, and I'm glad to see it, but it's not some magical leveler that has suddenly given us a close game. Someday it may, but not yet.
Sure, but there's no reason to believe the M4 would be slower on the Mac. It will almost certainly be at least equally fast. It might be a little faster due to better thermals, especially on devices with a fan (but even on the Air, it might have a little more endurance than on the iPad Pro).
What's less certain is how much faster the M4 Pro, Max, Ultra will be, especially given that there is no such thing as an M3 Ultra (and it's increasingly likely there never will be). But if we assume the M4 Pro is configured similarly to the M3 Pro, it'll handily beat the SXE.
I really hope AMD eventually finds a way to improve their efficiency.
As for Intel, that'll be interesting to watch. Meteor Lake performance is a bit of a downgrade compared to Raptor Lake, but I think that was to be expected, as they prioritized getting a new design right over making it fast. It's process/architecture, not optimization. Lunar Lake will tell us what their new design is capable of.
Yep. It's an interesting choice, too. Qualcomm is no stranger to e-cores; they even do three tiers on some SoCs. So why just one on the SXE, which is heavily marketed towards laptops? (Probably because of the design history: Nuvia started out with a server focus, not a mobile one.)
It'll be interesting so see how that evolves.
I think you misunderstood me. Although I didn’t mention it, I assumed the M4 on the iPad Pro is thermally more constrained than on a Mac. That’s why I expect better performance on a Mac. Also, there’s the possibility that it comes with higher clock speeds.
Ah. Yeah, I thought you were implying the Mac version might yield lower results than on the iPad.
On the contrary! I’m really hyped by what the M4 has yet to show us!
In all honestly, if my eyes weren’t troubled by OLED screens, I’d have waited to refresh all my Apple devices with the M4 chip: the upcoming A18 iPhone 16, an M4 iPad Pro, an M4 Pro Mac mini, and maybe even an M4 MacBook if I needed a laptop! Such a great jump from the previous ones, it really looks like the beginning of a new super cycle.
Fortunately, I don’t need that horsepower on my iPhone or my iPad (I don’t render or transcode videos on them, although maybe I would play more games there), but on my next Mac mini it’s gonna be very welcome! I’ll have to think if I go with the regular M4 or an M4 Pro tho. The base configuration RAM will be key for that decision.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the M5 will keep improving the performance but if M5 is still built on 3nm, I think the jump won’t be too big from the M4, and they will probably focus on a larger Neural Engine and maybe a better GPU.
Overall, I sense the M4 will be such a great sweet spot to be on for many years into the future.