After 12 years of trying to make Windows on Arm happen, Microsoft has made Windows on Arm happen. That’s a long time to keep throwing money at a version of Windows that, historically, has lacked compatible software, reliable emulation, and capable enough performance for even light workloads. But it seems like Microsoft’s 12-year odyssey is starting to pay off now that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips are turning Windows on Arm into a viable platform.
We’ve spent the past week and a half testing seven Copilot Plus PCs, representing all four Snapdragon X chips, against a slate of 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 power efficiency
For the last few years, laptop makers have focused on increasing power efficiency (and therefore battery life) without sacrificing performance. For Apple, that meant ditching Intel and using its own Arm-based chips; Intel wasn’t improving the power efficiency of its own fast enough.
Arm is a processor architecture with a more efficient instruction set than the x86 set found in Intel and AMD CPUs. It uses smaller, more optimized instructions, so the CPU can process tasks faster using less power, which is one reason smartphone chips are Arm-based. Microsoft’s 12-year journey to make Windows work on Arm and reap those power savings has been slow going because the chips haven’t been fast enough to run Windows and emulate apps that aren’t compatible with the Arm instruction set — until now.
Source: Qualcomm
Qualcomm currently has four Snapdragon X chips: three under the “X Elite” brand and one under “X Plus.” They all share an Adreno GPU, an NPU capable of 45 TOPS, and support for LPDDR5X memory up to 8448MHz, but their core counts and max clock speeds change as you go down the lineup, from a 12-core chip with a 3.8GHz top speed and 4.2GHz dual-core boost to a 10-core at 3.4GHz with no dual-core boost.
With the Snapdragon X Elite lineup, Qualcomm ditched the hybrid architecture of its previous laptop chips. Instead of using a mix of performance cores for heavy workloads and efficiency cores for less intensive work, Qualcomm now uses a homogeneous architecture — every chip can run both types of tasks.
Competing against its new CPUs are Apple’s hybrid core Arm chips, AMD’s homogeneous core x86 chips, and Intel’s hybrid core x86 chips. (Though Intel is adjusting its hybrid core architecture by ditching just the LP cores in its next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which arrive this fall.)
The best CPU performance Windows on Arm has ever seen
We ran Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 because they work across Windows and macOS as well as on Intel and AMD’s x86 chips and Apple and Qualcomm’s Arm chips. Together, they provide a broad overview of a processor’s capabilities when handling various workloads. While we tested laptops of different sizes from different brands, these benchmarks are still a great baseline of how these chips fare compared to their competitors and how they stack up.
Single-core performance
Among the laptops we tested, Apple’s M3 chips still lead the pack in single-core performance, but Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is not far behind. The gap between them is narrowing, signaling that Windows on Arm is finally becoming competitive in terms of raw processing power.
