Snapdragon Chips for Windows Laptops: Finally Catching Up to Apple’s Macs?

What is it and who is it for?

At launch on June 17, 2024, Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips will appear in Windows laptops.

These new chips are based on the ARM instruction set (ISA) using a Reduced Instruction Set Compute (RISC) architecture. This is completely different from traditional laptop processors from Intel or AMD that use an x86 instruction set driven by a Complex Instruction Set Compute (CISC) architecture.

What’s actually launching?

At launch on June 17, 2024, Snapdragon X chips will appear in ultraportable laptops. They will lack support for dedicated graphics. This means their primary use case will be general productivity such as office work, multimedia entertainment and light professional tasks, and not high end gaming or content creation.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X vs. Intel/AMD x86

Due to the differences in CPU architecture, app compatibility will be an important consideration.

In recent years ARM-based CPUs that power Apple’s laptops and mobile phones have proved that they have significant power efficiency benefits over the CPUs inside Windows laptops. These new Snapdragon chips promise to bring the benefits that Apple laptops have enjoyed to Windows ones. Specifically less fan noise you hear, less heat you feel, and significantly longer battery life. Additionally, the laptops can now become thinner and lighter, as they do not require as much space for cooling or large batteries.

An instruction set is like the language that CPUs understand at a fundamental level. Programs designed for one won't work on chips based on another, similar to how a person who only speaks English won't understand books written in German. As mentioned, the vast majority of Windows PCs today use Intel and AMD CPUs based on the x86 instruction set, while the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X are based on the ARM instruction set.

The Snapdragon chips could mean laptops can get even lighter, cooler, and have longer battery life.

To get x86 programs to run on the new Snapdragon X, either they need to be re-written to take advantage of the ARM instructions or existing code needs to be translated via a translation engine. To accomplish this, Microsoft has introduced a new translation layer called Prism. Prism kicks in when the PC runs an app that isn’t coded for ARM. The drawback is that translation layers generally aren’t as perfect as running native apps. For example, something said in German may only loosely translate to something spoken in English. This can cause higher power draw, slower performance, and more errors.

The goal, of course, is to eventually have an ARM-native version of all Windows apps. This may take time, when applications are re-coded to run natively on ARM, there is a chance bugs will be introduced. It may take several versions for the apps to run perfectly on this new architecture. Until then, Prism will be an important stop-gap, so its performance will be a crucial factor in the chip's stability, performance and energy consumption.

Expected Performance

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At launch, the Snapdragon line will come in two lineups: the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite series and a single 10-core Snapdragon X Pro. Both feature the Qualcomm Adreno GPU for graphics and come with the latest technologies, including Wi-Fi 7, a high-end audio processor, and the latest Qualcomm AI engine.

Benchmarks are understandably scarce, but according to an analysis by Signal65, the Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon X Elite consistently outperforms the Surface Laptop 5 with a 12th Gen i7 CPU by around 10% to 20%. It also holds its own against the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H inside the MSI Prestige 16 Evo in general performance tasks but fell behind by almost 40% in media processing using Handbrake.

The Snapdragon X Elite was within 10% of the performance of the MacBook Air 15's M3 in general productivity tasks. It also nearly doubled its score in Procyon's AI compute Vision benchmark and led its Handbrake score by around 15% to 25%. However, it lost handily in the Chrome browsing benchmark by 40%.

In terms of graphics, the Snapdragon X Elite outperformed the Intel Core Ultra 7 by 5% in the 3D Mark DX12 test. The M3 pulled ahead by 31%, but the game library is very limited on Mac. With the ray tracing-heavy Solar Bay benchmark, the Intel and Apple chips edged out the Snapdragon X Elite by 22% and 29%, respectively. With that said, the Snapdragon X Elite pushed back in the Stell Nomad benchmark, designed specifically for integrated graphics performance. In this test, the Snapdragon trounced the Intel Core Ultra 7 by 42% but trailed the M3 by 35%.

What’s even more impressive is that the Snapdragon X Elite seems to be on par with the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor in PugetBench’s Lightroom Classic test, despite it not being optimized for ARM.

Copilot+ PCs place AI in the trunk

These Snapdragon CPUs also play a role in supporting Microsoft's push for more AI in the Windows operating system. At the Surface Event on May 20, Microsoft extolled Windows’ upcoming AI features alongside the new “Copilot+” device certification. Among its criteria, Copilot+ PCs must have at least 40 TOPs (tera-operations per second) of AI computing performance.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite's advertised NPU performance against current Intel and AMD mobile CPUs.

Current AMD and Intel-based devices do not yet meet this 40 TOPs threshold, but they aren’t far behind. Intel has already announced that its upcoming Lunar Lake processors will bring vastly improved AI performance. We can only imagine AMD is preparing the same with Zen 5.

Should you buy it or wait?

Budget and value shoppers, these laptops are not for you. If you find a decent deal on a laptop at $500, or even $800, you should continue to buy. So far, Lenovo, HP, Samsung and others have only announced premium laptops based on Qualcomm’s new chip, ranging between $1,000 to $1,500.

If you value stability, whether you’re a student or a professional, we recommend holding off on purchasing Snapdragon-based laptops until real reviews trickle out. First-generation products always come with their quirks, and although this isn’t Microsoft and Qualcomm’s first rodeo at ARM PCs, their efforts so far haven’t been all that impressive.

Be wary of “early” reviews

Beware, many creators will rush out reviews on these new laptops, so they can ride the wave of excitement and capture views. These are most likely hype pieces and not real reviews. Based on our extensive experience, it takes around 2-4 weeks or longer to review a laptop and provide meaningful insights. Therefore, expect real reviews to land by end of June or in July.

Overall, if the Snapdragon X delivers on its promises, it could create an entirely new category of devices. It could also position Qualcomm as a serious contender against Intel, AMD, and Apple in the laptop market.

Based on Microsoft’s decision to include these chips in their mainline Surface devices, it appears confident in Snapdragon X’s performance. We are excited and cautiously optimistic for the possibilities. It should be noted that , we also are excited by the new processors coming from Intel and AMD, Lunar Lake and Zen 5, which will finally position Windows laptops as serious contenders to the Mac’s in the non-gamer laptop market.