Well, they’ve gone and done it. The rest of the computer industry has finally answered Apple’s M-series of ARM-based silicon. It took them nearly four years, but Microsoft and Qualcomm have joined forces to produce a Windows-on-ARM platform that, while it doesn’t beat Apple’s laptop game, at least it’s finally playing in the same ballpark. Qualcomm created their Snapdragon X series of SoCs and, importantly, Microsoft has helped both by creating the laptops that the processors will go in, but also a version of Windows that doesn’t suck on ARM architecture.
Good for them. Good for everyone. You kind of knew it was inevitable. And in a way it just validate’s Apple way of thinking. It doesn’t seem like they’re getting the same power-per-watt ratio that Apple does, but it’s lightyears better than x86. And it’s their first whole-hearted attempt at it, so they’re bound to get better quickly.
I wonder how good this kind of solution can get? Better than this, their first serious attempt, sure. But given that Qualcomm has a lot of different customers to please, not just Microsoft, and Microsoft has a lot of different hardware to run on, not just Snapdragon X’s, can they ever be as good at this as Apple is? Apple designs their own silicon to work the best it can for exactly one customer: themselves. And Apple writes their software for only one company’s hardware: their own. Everything can be made to work seamlessly, flawlessly and with high efficiency in the same device.