Microsoft is confident that it finally nailed the transition to Arm chips — so confident that, this time around, the company spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against the MacBook Air.
On a recent morning at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft representatives set out new Surface devices equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips inside and compared them directly to Apple’s category-leading laptop. I witnessed an hour of demos and benchmarks that started with Geekbench and Cinebench comparisons, then moved on to apps and compatibility.
Benchmark tests usually aren’t that exciting to watch. But a lot was at stake here: for years, the MacBook Air has been able to smoke Arm-powered PC chips — and Intel-based ones, too. Except, this time around, the Surface pulled ahead on the first test. Then it won another test and another after that. The results of these tests are why Microsoft believes it’s now in position to conquer the laptop market.
Performance
Over the past two years, Microsoft has worked in secret with all of its top laptop partners to ready a selection of Arm-powered Windows machines that will hit the market this summer. Known as Copilot Plus PCs, they’re meant to kick-start a generation of powerful, battery-efficient Windows laptops and lay the groundwork for an AI-powered future.
“You’re going to have the most powerful PC ever,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, during the briefing. “In fact, it’s going to outperform any device out there, including a MacBook Air with an M3 processor, by over 50 percent on sustained performance.”
Windows laptops have fallen far behind MacBooks in performance and battery life ever since Apple’s transition to its own chips with the M1 launch in 2020. That makes Microsoft’s confidence levels here surprising, particularly given its rocky efforts with Windows on Arm over the past decade. Microsoft first attempted to transition Windows to Arm chips with the Surface RT in 2012, but performance was terrible and app compatibility was virtually nonexistent. The launch of the Surface Pro X in 2019 was a lot better thanks to improved emulation and underlying Windows changes. It wasn’t enough to match Apple’s M1 launch months later, but it was a sign of things to come, with the start of a close Qualcomm partnership that now looks like it might finally pay off.
“It’s something we haven’t had in over two decades, we’ve not had the high ground on having the most performant device. We’re going to have that,” says Mehdi.
I won’t be fully convinced until I’ve spent enough time with one of these new Copilot Plus PCs, but everything Microsoft showed me around performance and battery life looks lightyears ahead of the Arm-powered Windows laptops that existed before today.
Compatibility
One of the big advancements is an improved emulator called Prism, which Microsoft claims is as efficient as Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer and can emulate apps twice as fast as the previous generation of Windows on Arm devices.
“We spent a ton of energy here. For apps that are not yet native, we’re now able to take advantage of Prism’s capabilities and solve this with the better energy, platform, and performance efficiency of the emulator,” says Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri.
That should result in efficiency gains over the previous emulator, but Microsoft is being vague with its promises here, so I’m not expecting huge leaps. Emulation only goes so far anyway. Apple’s success with the M1 was thanks to developers quickly porting apps to be fully native. Windows needs that same level of support from its developer community.
Fortunately for Microsoft, two major shifts have happened in recent years. First, many of the biggest apps now natively support Arm chips: Photoshop, Dropbox, Zoom, Spotify, and top entertainment apps like Prime and Hulu are all native ARM64 apps now. Second, Google and many other browser makers are moving to ARM64. A native version of Chrome launched recently, followed by Opera just last week. Firefox, Vivaldi, Brave, and Microsoft Edge are all also ARM64 native, so you won’t lose performance in any browser. That’s a big deal when you consider a lot of apps are web-based now and that we spend more time than ever inside a browser.
Overall, Microsoft believes 87 percent of total app minutes spent on these Copilot Plus PCs will be inside native apps. It’s still working on closing that other 13 percent, but the Prism emulator will help in the meantime.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160463/microsoft-windows-laptops-copilot-arm-chips-m1