I ask this because when M1 Mac’s came I felt we were entering a new era of portable PCs: fast, lightweight and with a long awaited good battery life.
I just saw the announcement of the Snapdragon X Plus, which is looking like a response to the M chips, and I am seeing a lot of buzz around it, so I ask: what is so special about it?
In: Technology
There’s nothing revolutionary about the chip – it’s essentially the same thing as the ones found in iPads and iPhones. The developer kit, which is a pre-release test hardware for the new product, was literally iPad internals in a Mac Mini shell.
The revolutionary thing about it is that someone (Apple) bothered to run a desktop operating system on it and made the transition completely seamless.
Microsoft has tried the thing for years now, and they released commercial products trying to do the same thing, way before Apple did.
The product was called Windows RT (released in 2012!) and it ran on computers with ARM processors, the same type M1 is.
The problem Microsoft faced was that Windows RT won’t run most apps that run on normal Windows installations that run on Intel/AMD chips that use the x86 architecture (I.e. not ARM).
Even if Windows RT ran on the M1, the problem was that people can’t use their apps with it, because they aren’t compatible with the processor – they speak different languages.
That’s what Apple got right. Their software called Rosetta 2 acted as a translation layer so that all the apps Mac users were using would run on the new chip, without having to do anything at all. Yes, some of them were buggy and needed some quick fixes, but that’s far from “absolutely would not run at all” as you would find in Windows RT.
Because of the success and widespread adoption of the M1, it encouraged app developers to make native ARM-compatible versions of their apps.
And now because tons of app developers now have ARM compatible versions of their software, Microsoft is now finally confident enough to push their dormant Windows for ARM projects because they know app developers would support them now (clearly they didn’t before) because half the development work they need to do (making ARM versions of apps) was already done thanks to Apple.m
That now means Microsoft is now more confident about announcing the use of an updated ARM chip from Qualcomm where Windows users will finally be able to have an ARM based computer that runs all their apps.
And take note, this Qualcomm partnership isn’t new – Microsoft has been releasing Microsoft Surface computers with Snapdragon chips exclusively for years now, alongside the M1 – except they still don’t run all the apps.
The Snapdragon X elite isn’t the revolution in the Windows space, it’s Windows finally catching up to make the apps actually run on the new chips they’ve been pushing since 2012.
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