I did not expect ARM would take so long to catch up with even the Apple M1 or the same core designs in the Apple A14. The Cortex X3 in the current flagship chip Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 still _just_ fails to match the Apple A14 (let alone the A15 and A16), perhaps this little design boost is finally enough to match it.<p>If Microsoft can get Qualcomm to implement some of the same chip tricks Apple pulled off for x86 emulation performance they can use it for a potentially somewhat compelling laptop package. It's a tough ask though, as Qualcomm seems mostly to just use pretty vanilla ARM designs. And I don't expect anyone but Microsoft to be interested in taking that plunge.
To quickly lower expectations before reading the article:<p>> Every year with these Arm flagship chip announcements, the company also includes a wild design for a giant mega-chip that usually never gets built.<p>That being said, this 14-core figure is when doing a full-Arm SoC (with Arm internal bus). SoC vendors are still allowed (AFAIK [0]) to do their custom interconnect that goes higher than that<p>[0] there have been rumors seen here that Arm is pushing towards a model where SoC vendors must do all-Arm components. That still sounds weird to me, and I'm not witnessing any actual effect of this, so I still highly doubt it.
Still waiting for non handicapped (thinkpad x13s) ARM competitors. I would like to get performance + long battery + good screen + Linux but it seems to me that It will take so much time that I'm better off waiting for Asahi Linux to get mature and buy a second hand M1.<p>It's sad.
For anybody looking for a "decoder ring" of sorts that briefly describes arm CPU lines, see <a href="https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/</a><p>Finding this was helpful to me, as I can never keep track what is a fast (eg, Xeon equiv) type arm chip, and what's a low power embedded (Atom equiv) and what's a laptop / desktop chip.
>Today an iPhone 14 Pro embarrasses Arm's best with 63 percent higher single-core scores in Geekbench compared to an X3-equipped Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.<p>> but these launch events have a history of making performance claims that don't align with what actually arrives in consumers' hands.<p>Sigh. Both are factually wrong.<p>First point, Where the heck did that 63 percent came from? The iPhone 14 is about 38% faster. With much larger die size, and larger cache.<p>Second point implies ARM is lying. When ARM is the only company that gives precise reading of their benchmarks and ISO performance. How about asking that from any other manufacturers.<p>My guess is that for hardware you should ignore Ars and only read Anandtech or other site who goes into deep dive. Ars is fast becoming Engadget or just another blog.