Many people thought Qualcomm’s forthcoming Snapdragon X Elite processor for Windows laptops would be outdated due to Apple’s new M3 chip. That’s not the case at all.
I mean, cudos to them for participating in the arms race, but again, M3s are shipping right now, not in 6 months, and judging by the only 11 month window between m2 and m3, we’ll see another bump from Apple next year too. Further, the articles goes on and on about how the 80watt TDP isn’t for the chip but the whole system but then also points out that no one knows the power draw of the chip at all, yet still goes on and on about efficiency.
I’m happy that other chip makers are jumping in the race, even intel has gotten a kick in the pants to stop sitting around releasing high priced garbage because no competition, but all this marketing hype around the X Elite is premature and just a marketing gimmick to try and keep people interested for 6 more months until something finally ships.
M3 has been another fairly substantial leap forward. I got an m3 MacBook last week and I’m seeing insane speed ups over my octo-core i9 it’s replacing, especially for heavy compute tasks like video encoding and ML workloads while generating next to no heat, rarely any fans at all, and an crazy battery life. Generating stable diffusion images went from about a minute to 5 seconds, handbrake encodes went from about 35fps to 196. I fired up steam and gamed for 4 or 5 hours and barely used 25% of the battery. 95% of the tasks I do don’t even turn on the fans, totally silent passive cooling most of the time. The whole thing is barely warm on my lap.
Now, my i9 on the other hand was a lap burner that had two fan settings: annoying and holy hell.
I mean, cudos to them for participating in the arms race, but again, M3s are shipping right now, not in 6 months, and judging by the only 11 month window between m2 and m3, we’ll see another bump from Apple next year too. Further, the articles goes on and on about how the 80watt TDP isn’t for the chip but the whole system but then also points out that no one knows the power draw of the chip at all, yet still goes on and on about efficiency.
I’m happy that other chip makers are jumping in the race, even intel has gotten a kick in the pants to stop sitting around releasing high priced garbage because no competition, but all this marketing hype around the X Elite is premature and just a marketing gimmick to try and keep people interested for 6 more months until something finally ships.
It’s still fairly impressive for their first chip.
Also apple just moved to a new node with m3. I doubt next year’s will be as big of a jump.
True, but still…
Didn’t m2 offer almost no difference in efficiency?
Compared to what- m1? So m1 and m2 use the same 5nm process, but m2 had small evolutionary improvements https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/apple-m2-vs-m1
M3 has been another fairly substantial leap forward. I got an m3 MacBook last week and I’m seeing insane speed ups over my octo-core i9 it’s replacing, especially for heavy compute tasks like video encoding and ML workloads while generating next to no heat, rarely any fans at all, and an crazy battery life. Generating stable diffusion images went from about a minute to 5 seconds, handbrake encodes went from about 35fps to 196. I fired up steam and gamed for 4 or 5 hours and barely used 25% of the battery. 95% of the tasks I do don’t even turn on the fans, totally silent passive cooling most of the time. The whole thing is barely warm on my lap.
Now, my i9 on the other hand was a lap burner that had two fan settings: annoying and holy hell.
That’s what I’m saying, m4 will be a refresh of the m3, don’t expect more than an Intel performance increase