Chiggs
Gold Member
Whether you like it or not, Arm CPUs are about to make a giant splash on Windows. This newsletter article by Tom Warren, which is also paid, is super-long, so I'll just give you the highlights...you're welcome!
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Microsoft has full confidence that Qualcomm's offerings can beat the M3.
Next week is going to be wild.
Better app emulation than Rosetta 2?!
This time...things are different.
Incredible Windows features only available to systems that have certain AI hardware?
What about AMD and Intel?
Dell's Qualcomm-powered XPS flagship
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TL; DR
If you think what's happening here is same old, same old, or won't impact desktops and gaming PCs, you're being especially myopic. Arm is coming and it's coming next week.
Remember, laptops have a bigger market share by far when it comes to both Mac and PC, and with Microsoft looking to emulate Apple in many ways, you had better believe that Arm is going to land in the desktop realm in the next couple of years.
No matter what you think or how you feel, Arm has captured the imagination of chipmakers and tech companies all over the world. It's cheaper to manufacture because you're not wasting silicon on worthless X86 instructions that most people haven't used for 20+ years. And, from a developer far smarter than me in this area:
And remember, we haven't even seen what Nvidia is planning when it comes to Arm.
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Microsoft isn’t launching a new version of Windows next week, but what it’s about to unveil could be just as significant. After nearly four years of falling behind Apple’s MacBooks, sources inside Microsoft tell me that the company is confident it can finally beat Apple’s own chips that power the MacBook Air.
On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will detail the company’s “AI vision across hardware and software” at an event hosted at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington. It’s a pivotal moment for Microsoft and Windows because it won’t involve the typical chip partnership with Intel that we’ve seen for decades. Instead, Microsoft will set the stage for a summer of Arm-powered laptops thanks to a close collaboration with Qualcomm.
Microsoft has full confidence that Qualcomm's offerings can beat the M3.
I’m told Microsoft has full confidence that Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will begin a new era for Windows laptops. Microsoft seems to be betting on this being as big of a moment as when Apple launched its first Arm-based laptop chips in 2020.
Apple’s M1 chip quickly upended our concept of mobile performance, changing the world of laptops overnight. The chip was great at macOS tasks, and it could be packaged into a laptop that ran cooler, quieter, and with twice the battery life in a form factor that was smaller than most Windows laptops.
As I exclusively revealed last month, Microsoft expects its latest Surface devices to now be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. If Microsoft and Qualcomm have actually pulled this off, it’ll be a huge leap forward for Windows on Arm. Qualcomm already thinks it has the benchmarks to prove this.
Next week is going to be wild.
It’s safe to assume we’re going to see a flurry of Arm-powered devices next week.
Leaks suggest laptop makers are lining up Arm versions of their most popular machines. We’ve already seen leaked marketing material for Lenovo’s upcoming Yoga Slim “Snapdragon Edition” and Dell’s XPS 13 with a Snapdragon X Elite processor. Samsung is also rumored to have a Galaxy Book ready with Qualcomm’s latest chips, and Asus says it’s announcing an “AI PC” on May 20th — the same day as Microsoft’s event.
Better app emulation than Rosetta 2?!
I’m also expecting to see new Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 devices on Monday that use Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips. In internal documents I’ve seen about these devices, Microsoft is touting a faster CPU than the M3 MacBook Air, faster AI acceleration, longer battery life, and faster app emulation than Rosetta 2 — the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps to work on its own processors.
This time...things are different.
It certainly feels like something has changed this time around, especially given the confidence levels I’ve heard about. A lot of that could be down to Nuvia, a startup that Qualcomm acquired a few years ago. Founded by former Apple chip engineers, Nuvia’s CPUs are the basis for these new Snapdragon X Elite series of chips.
Qualcomm also has a double whammy of chips this time around to help Windows on Arm be a serious competitor to Apple Silicon. In addition to the X Elite chip at the top of the line, the entry-level X Plus chip, with fewer CPU cores and reduced GPU performance, will allow OEMs to create more affordable Arm-powered laptops. Crucially, this X Plus variant will still deliver a promised 45 TOPS of neural processing unit (NPU) performance, an important part of why Microsoft is calling these “next-gen AI Copilot PCs” internally.
Incredible Windows features only available to systems that have certain AI hardware?
AI is a big part of the story Microsoft plans to tell next week.
The NPU, a dedicated processor designed to accelerate AI tasks, will help unlock features inside Windows that will only be available on devices that have these new and more powerful chips. Microsoft has been secretly working on a range of AI features, including a flagship one codenamed AI Explorer. Described internally as a way to let you “retrieve anything you’ve ever seen or done on your device,” this feature will use AI to capture everything you do and look at on your PC so you can perform “Recall” actions.
This will make everything you do on your PC searchable. The way sources have described this feature to me is that if you saw an image of an elephant a couple of weeks ago but you can’t remember where from, you just ask AI Explorer to bring that memory back to life, and it’ll show you the exact time you saw it and the context. So if you’ve been working with a colleague and discussing a project, you could look at a snapshot of that moment to remember what you were working on and discussing. This idea of recalling memories and snapshots from a period of time is a key part of how AI Explorer works.
What about AMD and Intel?
Most of these new AI experiences will only work on Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips at first, according to leaked code in recent Windows builds. Both AMD and Intel are expected to deliver chips that may support these features later this year. Documentation I’ve seen suggests Microsoft is expecting AMD’s new Strix chips and Intel’s Lunar Lake processors to combine with Qualcomm’s efforts and mean 50 percent of new laptops will ship with more powerful AI chips by the end of 2026.
Dell's Qualcomm-powered XPS flagship
I’ve never seen a giant Dell leak quite like this one before. VideoCardz published a detailed 311-page internal document from Dell that includes all of the testing and planning phases for its new Qualcomm-powered XPS 13. The document not only lays out the intense planning needed for Microsoft’s big Arm push from OEMs but also offers hints that we might be about to see laptops with 29-hour battery life. While it’s dated from August last year, the document also reveals v2 of these latest Qualcomm Snapdragon chips might be arriving in laptops in the middle of 2025.
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TL; DR
If you think what's happening here is same old, same old, or won't impact desktops and gaming PCs, you're being especially myopic. Arm is coming and it's coming next week.
Remember, laptops have a bigger market share by far when it comes to both Mac and PC, and with Microsoft looking to emulate Apple in many ways, you had better believe that Arm is going to land in the desktop realm in the next couple of years.
No matter what you think or how you feel, Arm has captured the imagination of chipmakers and tech companies all over the world. It's cheaper to manufacture because you're not wasting silicon on worthless X86 instructions that most people haven't used for 20+ years. And, from a developer far smarter than me in this area:
X86's problem is that to make it fast you need to have long instruction decoder pipelines, correspondingly complicated caches, etc. So the number of transistors the lie between an instruction arriving in the CPU and the ALU that's actually going to execute it is quite large.
Arm doesn't need all this. which is where it wins out. In an age when a good x86 core was needing millions of transistors, Arm was needing only a few tens of thousands for the whole instruction set.
And remember, we haven't even seen what Nvidia is planning when it comes to Arm.
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