Microsoft Says Windows Laptops With Snapdragon X Elite Will Be Faster Than M3 MacBook Air (2024)

Monday April 8, 2024 10:00 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

"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.

Tags: Microsoft, Qualcomm

[ 448 comments ]

Top Rated Comments

weezin

3 days ago at 10:03 am

The benefits of Apple Silicon are performance combined with energy efficiency. It's not impressive to just beat Apple in the performance metric, you have to also do it in the performance efficiency metric. Otherwise, who cares?

Score: 109 Votes (Like | Disagree)

icanhazmac

3 days ago at 10:08 am

Good, the more Microsoft invests in Windows for ARM, the closer we are to getting bootcamp back.

Score: 95 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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