For Qualcomm, the Third Time’s the Charm (Premium)

It’s been a year of highs and lows—OK, mostly lows—for Windows 10 on ARM. But Qualcomm’s latest chipset promises to change that.

As you may recall, Microsoft first revealed its plans to port Windows 10 to Qualcomm’s ARM-based Snapdragon chipset family two years ago. Then, in mid-2017, Microsoft announced its Always-Connected PC initiative, which would include all Qualcomm-powered PCs as well as a new generation of Intel-powered PCs with integrated cellular data capabilities.

I was immediately bullish on both of these initiatives, which between them span three core areas of the PC experience: Hardware, software, and connectivity.

I described Always-Connected PC as nothing less than the future of the platform, which makes sense from a hardware perspective: The PC will evolve to the point where not having cellular connectivity will be as out of place as it would be in a smartphone.

And I argued that Windows 10 on ARM was the push that Windows needed to drive a new decade of innovation and change. On another level, Windows 10 on ARM—and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon efforts for the PC market—are likewise the push that Intel needs to deliver more energy efficient chipset designs of its own.

And that’s the problem for Qualcomm. In addition to having to improve its own chipsets to fix the problems we’ve seen so far—performance and compatibility—Qualcomm also has to contend with Intel, the processor market’s 800-pound gorilla. If Intel ever does get its act together, it could stamp out Windows 10 on ARM before it has a chance to be truly competitive.

The initial Qualcomm offering for PCs was, to be kind, unimpressive. First generation Windows 10 on ARM PCs utilized the same Snapdragon 835 chipset as did the previous year’s smartphones, and it was in no way optimized or designed for the PC architecture. The resulting PCs, like the HP Envy x2, were thin, light, and silent, and they offered epic battery life. But the performance was so terrible that I couldn’t recommend one to anyone. And there were serious compatibility issues, too: At launch, these PCs couldn’t run 64-bit apps of any kind.

To its credit, Qualcomm remained committed to the PC market and it had a plan to aggressively improve its chipsets. More specifically, Qualcomm this past year began designing chipsets especially for specific markets instead of using the same chips in different products. For the PC market, the firm branched off of its smartphone-based Snapdragon 845 and created something called the Snapdragon 850 for second-generation Windows 10 on ARM PCs.

As its first PC-centric design, the Snapdragon 850, offered only modest improvements over its predecessor: A 30 percent performance boost, and 20 percent improvements to both battery life and LTE speeds. The first 850-based PCs were announced in August, and they’re now being sold. I’m reviewing the first, the Lenovo Yoga C630, now.

You may be interested to know that I’m seeing about a 22 percent performance improvement in my early benchmark testing when compared to the Snapdragon 835-based Envy x2. That’s good, but not great. And with x86 desktop apps, the performance is still on the leisurely side. Worse, the Snapdragon 850 does little to address the platform’s compatibility issues: Developers can create 64-bit ARM Store and desktop apps, but few will; and 64-bit Win32 apps like Photoshop are completely incompatible.

This past summer, I talked to Qualcomm about the future. They told me then, and more recently ahead of this week’s Snapdragon Summit, that its second-generation, PC-specific chipset would be a far more dramatic improvement. I was told to expect something on the order of a 2x performance over the previous generation.

Well, Qualcomm announced that new chipset today. Now called the Snapdragon 8cx—for “computer” and “extreme”—it’s the first PC chipset to be manufactured on a 7nm process; Intel still can’t hit 14nm. The company tells me that it is performance-comparable to Intel’s 15-watt U-series Core processors.

We’ll see. But as important, Qualcomm is working to improve application compatibility as well. The firm can’t do anything about emulating 64-bit Win32 apps for reasons that I don’t quite understand. But it is bringing both Chromium and Firefox to ARM in 64-bit form, which will solve a lot of problems. And it has told me that it is discussing with Adobe how that firm might make its offerings available on the platform.

When you combine this work with Snapdragon’s core strengths–epic, 20+ hour battery life, seamless connectivity and network switching, and silent operation—you see the makings of a true Intel competitor. And while Qualcomm’s fate in the PC market is not yet clear, what is clear is that the firm will disrupt the ecosystem, and force Intel to catch up in the areas in which it is delinquent.

It’s been a sobering year for Windows 10 on ARM. But I still believe that Qualcomm can pull this off. And from what I can tell, it is doing everything it can to make that happen, and it is exceeding my expectations for what is possible. As always, we’ll need some real-world experience with actual shipping hardware to be sure. And that won’t happen until Q3 2019, which feels like an eternity right now. But next year should be very interesting and will be, I think, the turning point for Windows 10 on ARM.

I can’t wait.