LAB NOTES
ZAK STOREY, CONTRIBUTOR
Snapdragon is coming for you
A third player enters the game
OH MAN, AM I EXCITED.
With Intel currently lagging slightly, and AMD’s range of 9000 series chips being mildly underwhelming, Qualcomm’s unofficial announcement, courtesy of CEO Cristiano Amon, stating that it’s targeting the high-end desktop PC fills me with joy.
Right now, my daily driver laptop is anything with a Snapdragon chip. The difference is astounding. Performance is identical to, if not better than, every other laptop I’ve tested. Plus, the battery life is insane, going from four to six hours all the way up to 11 or 12 hours of video streaming.
Back in October 2020, Neil Mohr, head honcho at Linux Format, wrote a fantastic feature for us on why Apple ditched Intel for Arm in its laptop chips. This was the rise of the M1 MacBooks. Time and time again, Arm chips were improving on their IPC and general performance by 50, 100, sometimes 200 percent and above every year. And the trend continues to this day.
In its heyday, X86 saw such leaps. It was a big reason why Moore’s Law seemed so tantamount. Yet over time, as the physical limitations and diminishing returns set in, x86 improvements seemingly slowed down. Its major advancements now lie in adding more specialized processing hardware, optimized for certain tasks, such as Tensor cores, NPUs, and ray-tracing cores.