Microsoft is confident that Windows with ARM will finally surpass Mac

Microsoft is preparing to unveil its vision of artificial intelligence computers in Seattle next month. The company is confident that its new ARM-based Windows laptops will outperform Apple’s MacBook Air with an M3 processor, The Verge reports.

Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will be coming to a variety of Windows laptops this year, as well as to Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft is so confident in Qualcomm’s new chips that it plans to conduct a series of demonstrations that will show how much faster these processors will be than the M3 MacBook Air in performing processing tasks, accelerating artificial intelligence, and even emulating applications.

Microsoft claims that these new Windows AI computers will have faster application emulation than Apple’s Rosetta 2.

Qualcomm engineers claim that their emulation tool will allow running programs not ported from x86/64 on ARM 64 architecture with barely noticeable performance degradation.

Native ARM apps are still key to improving the performance of future Windows laptops on ARM. For example, Google has recently released its own version of Chrome for ARM64, ready to be used on these devices.

Insiders also report that Microsoft plans to supply consumer models of its upcoming Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors instead of Intel Core Ultra chips.

Qualcomm is also confident in its new processors. Recently, the company demonstrated benchmarks that outperform Intel’s latest Core Ultra 7 chips.

Microsoft’s big AI PC announcement will take place on May 20, just one day before the annual Build developer conference. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will talk about the vision of artificial intelligence in hardware and software, which will set the stage for the latest Windows on ARM push and investment in AI features for Windows 11.