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Comment by akmittal | Hacker News Reader

Apple M2 consumes roughly 20 watt and snapdragon X elite is at 23 watt. They are comparing an active cooled snapdragon with Macbook air which does not have a fan.

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If I remember correctly the Apple silicon MBAs have some pretty heavy thermal throttling, it would be interesting to see if this was the case with the snapdragon and what temperatures it reaches without.

That's because Macbook air has no fan, throttling is needed to keep temperature low. Snapdragon laptops has fan so likely won't be throttling

+1. I'd be curious how it stacks up against an MBP

The throttling on the MBAs are pretty minimal. After 20min of sustained, 100% CPU and GPU load we're talking about a ~15% performance drop.

True! It's still close, which is really good news for the non-Mac market. I'm glad Apple's pushing the industry forward.

Now all we need is an ARM version of Windows to make business laptops competitive with the Air

I'll get one of these and run Linux, but ARM Windows is already available.

I'm on an m1 and have ARM windows for playing ck3 in parallels. Runs way better in that then natively.

I couldn't tell you where I got it or what its version is called but it was easy to find IIRC. Official too.

That already exists and has for years. Surface Pro X launched in 2019 with Windows 10 on ARM, Windows 11 on ARM is a thing. x86/x64 apps work through a compatibility layer. You can get an ARM Surface Pro 9 today or something like a Thinkpad X13s Snapdragon.

Really all that's needed is a fast enough, efficient enough CPU that makes it make sense for the price/performance ratio. I bought a refurb'd Surface Pro X for $400 CAD, for that price it's amazing. For the full MSRP? I don't think so...

Windows 10 and 11 support Arm64, but their Server counterparts don't. Microsoft has also been reaching out to application developers, asking them to add Arm64 support. I think we're going to see a major shift to Arm64 in the Windows world in the near future.

Spot on, Apple has done some fantastic work with these arm chips but we need the rest of the market to catch up so we have access to similar chips for other devices.

I mean those numbers still beat the actively cooled M2 Mac Mini or M2 Macbook Pro...

With M3 already out and snapdragon 6 months away from launch, things can go either way.

I actually don't care which one wins. M series chips are revolutionary, snapdragon just catching up at same power draw is good enough

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