Apple took the market by storm a few years ago when it decided to free itself from Intel for its processors. By creating its own chips based on ARM architecture, Apple quickly demonstrated that this move made sense. The industry as a whole could not help but notice that Apple Silicon chips were able to make better use of the Arm architecture and achieve high energy efficiency. A situation that gave Apple an undeniable advantage in the notebook sector. But for many months now, we’ve known that Qualcomm would come up with a competitive solution. Leaks and teasers have been the order of the day over the past few months. But Microsoft itself believes that this and subsequent ARM chipsets will deliver better processor performance and be faster at AI tasks than anything produced by Apple.
Will the Windows laptop get its revenge on Apple?
Microsoft itself will enter the fray with a Surface Pro 10 equipped with a Snapdragon X Elite SoC. But of course, the key to this turnaround will also lie in the use of the AI embedded in Windows. So, to sum up, the new SoCs delivered by Qualcomm are potentially capable, at the very least, of competing with the best X86 CPUs and Apple SoCs, but their AI acceleration capabilities will push this advantage even further. The Snapdragon X Elite can outperform a processor like the i9-13900H and even the Apple M3 by more than 20% in Geekbench 6. But meanwhile, the competition is also making progress. Intel’s 13th generation has been replaced by Meteor Lake, and Lunar Lake is coming this year, while AMD’s Strix Point has also been announced, with a strong focus on AI acceleration. At Apple, things are a little more nebulous, but it seems hard to imagine the company not reacting. So Qualcomm is going to have to act fast, because the market just won’t stop.
A major spotlight will be shone on May 20 at a Microsoft event dedicated to the “advent of the AI PC”.
