It took Qualcomm several years to build a truly powerful ARM desktop processor, crucial for the success of Windows on ARM. Meanwhile, Apple has successfully released multiple generations of devices featuring its own ARM-designed processors, seeming to dominate the market without any real competition in sight.
However, all of this changed with the introduction of the Snapdragon X Elite processor. Microsoft is now confident that Windows laptops equipped with this chip will surpass the Apple M3-powered MacBook Air in both CPU performance and AI task processing speed.
According to internal documents, Microsoft claims that the new Windows AI PCs will be able to "emulate applications faster than Rosetta 2," an Apple technology used to ensure compatibility between Intel-based applications and Apple Silicon ARM processors.
Emulating applications has been a weak point for Windows on ARM, especially in terms of performance. Nevertheless, progress continues to be made in this area. For example, Windows 11 introduced the ability to emulate x64 applications on the ARM platform a few years ago, a crucial development given that not all programs have native versions available for ARM64.
Source: TheVerge and their own sources.
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