New benchmark results have emerged online, apparently showing an upcoming Snapdragon
Qualcomm, the company behind Snapdragon chips, has been promising powerful, yet efficient, ARM-based computer chips for some time now. ARM’s RISC chip architecture is an alternative to the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD.
Because ARM chips consume less power and are more efficient than x86 chips, they were primarily used to power mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (with Qualcomm accounting for the vast majority of chips used by those devices) .
However, some laptop makers have started releasing laptops powered by ARM chips – and this prompted Microsoft to release Windows 11 on ARM – a special version of the operating system that can run on ARM’s RISC instruction sets (the commands that control the operation of a CPU). at the transistor level).
While ARM-based laptops offered a lot of potential—promising smartphone-like features like fast boot times, instant resume, and long battery life compared to traditional Intel or AMD laptops—the reality was often a lot more disappointing. Laptops with ARM chips were often very expensive, less powerful than their x86 counterparts, and suffered from a lack of compatible software. Users were limited to using ARM apps from the Microsoft Store – and the selection was usually quite poor.
In short, I’ve never reviewed an ARM-based Windows laptop that I would recommend to most people. But while Microsoft and laptop makers struggled to make ARM-based laptops worth buying, Apple came along and showed everyone how it’s done; after Intel’s highly publicized dumping, it released new MacBooks in 2020 powered by its M1 chip – which uses ARM architecture.
The M1 generation of MacBooks was a huge success and proved that you could have ARM laptops that could rival Intel or AMD laptops in performance, while also delivering on promises like long battery life. The success of the M1 MacBooks made ARM-based Windows laptops look even worse – and the gap only widened when Apple released its M2 and M3 chips.
New chips in?
However, this could finally change with some exciting looking (honest) benchmark leaks, such as reported by Windows Latest. According to the website, new benchmark results have appeared on the Geekbench website, which were apparently achieved by a currently unreleased Lenovo device called Lenovo 83ED.
According to these results, the Lenovo 83ED is equipped with a Snapdragon X Elite (X1E78100) chip with 12 cores and running at 3,417 MHz.
It looks like this device scores 1,628 points in Geekbench’s single-core tests and 11,392 in the multi-core tests. These are quite respectable numbers, beating the multi-core scores of both the M1 and M2 chips in the same tests as Windows Latest explains.
What’s especially interesting about his new leak is that it follows recent leaked benchmarks found on the Geekbench website for a device with a different Snapdragon X Elite chip with the SKU number X1E80100. This apparently also has 12 cores, but a higher clock speed of 4,012 MHz.
This has led to speculation that Qualcomm is launching more than one model of the Snapdragon X Elite chip, with the X1E80100 being a more expensive model that offers better performance. This is a similar approach to Apple’s as it has different types of M1, M2 and M3 chips with different core counts that affect performance and price.
The more expensive X1E80100 scores 2,574 and 12,562 in Geekbench’s single-core and multi-core tests, respectively.
This is quite a bump, especially in single-core, and if accurate this Snapdragon coming close is the recently released M3 chip, which narrowly beats it with scores of 3,181 and 15,620 in the same tests.
Finally, Windows 11 ARM laptops worth buying?
If these leaks are true, it could mean that Apple’s MacBooks will finally get some stiff competition from Windows 11 on ARM laptops. While the benchmark results only tell part of a story, the idea of ​​new ARM chips coming out that could ensure Windows 11 runs well on the hardware is certainly exciting.
You only have to take a look at our best laptops guide to see that it’s filled with plenty of MacBooks running on Apple’s ARM silicon, while not a single Windows 11 laptop is powered by ARM.
Could this change things? Maybe – I’d certainly like to see an ARM-based Windows 11 laptop that runs software as well as a MacBook, while also offering massive battery life and fast boot times. Fast and secure built-in 5G connectivity would also be a great feature and could even give these laptops an edge over MacBooks which still don’t offer mobile data connectivity (you’ll have to rely on Wi-Fi).
However, there is still a major hurdle that Windows 11 on ARM devices must overcome: the lack of app compatibility. All that potential power won’t be of much use if you can’t run applications you depend on.
Because the ARM architecture uses different instruction sets than x86, you can’t simply run apps designed for the latter. App developers need to create new versions that can run natively on ARM hardware – and Microsoft has done a poor job of encouraging them to do so so far. This has led to something of a vicious cycle, as the lack of app support meant that Windows 11 on ARM devices wasn’t popular – and that lack of popularity meant that many app developers didn’t think it was worth devoting resources to porting the app. apps to a platform that relatively few people use.
So Microsoft needs to ensure that anyone who switches to a Windows 11 ARM device doesn’t miss out on their favorite apps. One thing the company should do is look at how Apple handled this. When the M1 Macs first launched, the majority of the native apps were made by Apple. However, you could still run apps designed for Intel-powered Macs thanks to a clever tool from Apple called Rosetta 2. This acted as a compatibility layer allowing Intel apps to run on M1 Macs with minimal impact on performance.
It worked great, and it meant that people who moved to M1 MacBooks could continue to use almost any software they were using. And since the M1 Macs became a huge success, more and more applications received native M1 (and M2 and M3) versions. Today, most popular apps run natively on M3, rather than relying on Rosetta 2.
Microsoft is a company with a long history of software development, so I remain confused as to why it hasn’t done something similar. While there are tools that allow Intel apps to run on ARM in Windows, they lack the performance and ease of use of Apple’s implementation. If this new Snapdragon
