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Qualcomm strong-arms its way into Windows laptops this summer

But will they be better than Intel, AMD, or Apple chips?

It has 10 cores, 42MB of cache, a maximum multithreaded frequency of 3.4GHz, and an NPU with 45 tera operations per second (TOPS, or how many mathematical calculations it can solve in a second) to assist with fancy-smancy generative AI applications. This was a highly controlled hands-on demo spread across several prototype (reference) laptops, and the programs available to “test” the new chips were chosen by Qualcomm, so I wasn’t convinced these Snapdragons will be more powerful in practice than what the other chipmakers offer, and I won’t be one way or the other until I get my hands on a finished product. Apple has proven that sticking an Arm-based SoC into a laptop can drastically increase battery life, decrease power consumption, and run a lot cooler than Intel’s and AMD’s x86 processors.

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