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[Daring Fireball] Qualcomm’s Awkward Boasting Regarding Its Forthcoming X Elite Platform
(daringfireball.net)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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While I agree with spins, I don’t agree with overall judgement.
M1 chips were a boom for Apple from day 1 even almost all 3rd party software was not optimized.
So this can significantly ramp up the experience of PC laptops. Of course it is very unlikely to push them above Macs, but the race may be more interesting.
Apple has Rosetta 2, which translated x86 apps on install into ones that function extremely well on ARM. Usually much faster on the base M1 than natively on the previous most powerful i9 Intel Mac.
Windows has nothing like that, and resorts to emulation, which is much slower. Qualcomm chips would have to be MUCH faster than Apple silicon just to match them.
QC is hoping to beat the mid level M2 in one metric right around the time the M4 series is released.
Rosetta only analyzes startup sequence and caches that translation so that it doesn’t have to be computed every time. Everything else is even technically impossible and is a simple emulation.
One thing to note is that M1 chips have few tricks to provide faster emulation. But Qualcomm can do the same.