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After 12 years of trying to create Windows on Arm, Microsoft has made Windows on Arm possible. That's a long time to keep throwing money at a version of Windows that has historically lacked compatible software, reliable emulation, and enough power for even light workloads. But now that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips are turning Windows on Arm into a viable platform, it looks like Microsoft's 12 years of hard work is starting to pay off.
Over the past week and a half, we've tested seven Copilot Plus computers (representing all four Snapdragon X chips) against several similar laptops running Apple Silicon, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen processors. This isn’t the final word on Snapdragon performance — app compatibility is changing on a near-daily basis, and we’ll have full reviews for many of these laptops in the next few weeks — but we now have a good idea of how the first wave of Snapdragon X laptops stack up against the competition and how they still fall short.
This is the fiercest Microsoft has been able to compete with MacBooks in price, performance, and battery life, and while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips don’t outright beat Apple’s M3 chip (with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU) in every single one of our benchmarks, they could make Intel and AMD scramble to catch up to another competitor — this time, on their home turf. A new focus on energy efficiency
Over the past few years, laptop manufacturers have worked to improve power efficiency (and therefore battery life) without sacrificing performance. Apple ditching Intel and using its own chips means Intel isn't improving its power efficiency fast enough. Arm is a processor architecture with an instruction set that is more efficient than the x86 set found in Intel and AMD CPUs. It uses smaller, more optimized instructions to allow the CPU to process tasks faster with less power, which is one of the reasons smartphone chips are based on Arm. Microsoft has spent 12 years trying to get Windows to run on Arm and get those power savings, but progress has been slow because the chips simply weren't fast enough to run Windows and emulate programs incompatible with Arm's instruction set — until now
Qualcomm currently has four Snapdragon X chips: three under the "X Elite" brand and one under the "X Plus" brand. They all share an Adreno GPU, an NPU capable of 45 TOPS, and support LPDDR5X memory up to 8448MHz, but their number of cores and maximum clock speeds will vary, ranging from 12-core chips to a maximum speed of 3.8GHz and a dual frequency of 4.2GHz . -core boost up to 3.4 GHz 10 cores (no dual core boost). With the Snapdragon X Elite series, Qualcomm is abandoning the hybrid architecture of previous laptop chips. Instead of using mixed performance cores for heavy workloads and efficiency cores for less intensive workloads, Qualcomm now uses a homogeneous architecture where each can handle both types of tasks.
