Arm is a processor architecture with a more efficient instruction set than the x86 set found in Intel and AMD CPUs. It uses smaller, more optimized instructions, so the CPU can process tasks faster using less power
What is this bs, I thought the verge was better than this
In addition to calling out misinformation, it would be helpful to the discourse if you could also explain why it's wrong and what the correct facts are, to help educate those of us who don't know as much about the topic as you might.
Sure, the idea is it makes little sense to say and instructions set is itself and more efficient or faster. It is only the implementation that matters. It's equivalent to saying macos is faster than windows cause of how it looks. It's the implementation that matters.
On top of that, the specific argument they make "smaller, more optimized instructions" is doubly nonsense because all modern high-end cpus, whether x86 or arm, break instructions down into smaller subparts and run those.
When apple's M1 came out, a lot of tech media outlets struggled to come up with a explainable reason for why it was so good beyond "appel gud engineering" and one of the main things a lot of them coalesced around was ARM somehow just being a better, faster isa, meaning a lot of people who know little about chips go around saying it and it's pretty irritating. I'm no chip expert either, but I do know Qualcomm/apple aren't making more efficient chips because of the ARM isa.
They can also be priced more reasonably. At $1,099, the base 13-inch MacBook Air M3 has an eight-core processor, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. But at $999, the base 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 has a 10-core processor, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of storage — and you can easily upgrade that storage yourself.
We’ve spent the past week and a half testing seven Copilot Plus PCs, representing all four Snapdragon X chips, against a slate of similar laptops running Apple Silicon, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen processors.
Microsoft automatically enables Auto SR (its own version of Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR, which increase frame rates by dropping the in-game resolution and then upscaling with AI) on a short list of games, which includes The Witcher 3 and Control.
In other games that are supposed to be optimized for Windows on Arm, like Control and Borderlands 3, turning on ASR degraded the visual quality with distracting flickering lines on or around fine details like mesh screens and hair.
In Tom’s testing, the Microsoft Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X Plus CPU lasted about seven hours with the brightness set to 100 percent while being pushed with all sorts of tasks like downloading games from Steam and taking video calls.
They feature nearly everything most other laptops in that price range do: beautiful OLED displays; high storage capacity; long battery life; fast processors; metal chassis; and in some cases, the latest Wi-Fi 7 adapter.
And now that every major Windows laptop manufacturer has at least one Snapdragon X-based machine, there should finally be enough of an install base to entice developers at large to create native Arm64 versions of their apps, which will make these an easier sell.
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