For as long as I can remember, Microsoft and Intel have been inseparable partners. Intel made the x86 chips that were the heart of a PC’s motherboard, and Microsoft made the Windows operating system that ran on those PCs. In fact, the two brands fit together so perfectly that industry analysts merged them into one word: Wintel.
Over the past three decades, rivals have briefly challenged Intel at the top of the CPU market. Most have a market share that is almost too small to measure. Can you name a PC built with a Via processor? The most successful rival, AMD, has managed to achieve a PC market share of approximately 20% appealing to gamers and other performance-focused buyers.
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Now, Qualcomm’s introduction of the Snapdragon X series has the potential to change the game board entirely.
In My review of the cheapest Surface Pro 11 configurationI summed up my thoughts in four words: “This machine is really cool.” I’m writing this article on the same Surface Pro 11 I described in that article, and I have no intention of going back to my old Intel-based machine.
Lest you think I’m an outlier, let me highlight some of the reviews my colleagues have published about the new generation of Snapdragon X-powered PCs.
Zac Bowden, reviewing the Surface Laptop 7 in Windows CentralHe calls it “the best clamshell laptop on the market,” adding that battery life on the high-end 15-inch model he tested was “nothing short of phenomenal.”
At PC World, Chris Hoffman called Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X “a showcase for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite hardware.” He also highlighted the “incredible battery life” made possible by the ARM architecture.
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And at Engadget, Devindra Hardawar showed visible relief in his review of the Surface Pro 11. Microsoft’s latest model is “the best Surface tablet ever made,” he wrote, adding, “Microsoft has finally made an ARM-powered Surface tablet that I don’t want to throw out the window.”
They are all seasoned, slightly jaded critics who aren’t afraid to tell Microsoft when the company is making a mistake, and they don’t say anything of the sort.
In fact, the only negative review I could find of these next-gen Windows PCs was from With cablewhere Christopher Null called the Surface Pro 11 “horribly expensive” and praised the device’s “incredible battery life.”
Early benchmark tests also offer strong support for Qualcomm’s hardware. Tom’s Guide published a detailed summary and concluded that “Snapdragon X Elite laptops offer excellent performance and (potentially) strong battery life.” [I]”It’s safe to say that Qualcomm has put Apple and Intel on notice.” The only weak point, they noted, was in gaming.
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If I were an Intel executive, I’d be sweating buckets. ARM-based designs are demonstrably superior on the desktop right now, and they’re becoming commonplace in data centers, too, with significant power consumption advantages that are compelling in the AI era. Intel can probably survive on inertia for a while, but the Snapdragon X processors are really going to expose its weaknesses in a way that hasn’t been seen before on the PC side.
If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, I’ve already seen this movie,” you’re right.
This is the same failure that Intel suffered four years ago, when Apple launched its new MacBook lines with M1 processors. Then too, Apple’s new generation of ARM-based laptops earned high praise for battery life and performance, but some critics remained skeptical, like the folks at Macworld, who were epically hesitant with their comments. “Should I buy an M1 Mac?”
On its website, Apple goes out of its way to criticize the performance of Intel-based machines. You may still be able to find an Intel-based Mac on Apple.com, but I had no luck when I searched.
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Of course, Apple had one big advantage when it decided to split from Intel: it is the only hardware vendor that runs MacOS. The PC market is much more diverse. If I were to try to describe the current relationship with Wintel in social media terms, I would simply say, “It’s complicated.”
Ultimately, that will be Intel’s lifeline in the Windows space. Qualcomm will take a big chunk of the market away from Intel, but the notoriously conservative population of business buyers will likely stay away from the untested Qualcomm platform, which has questions about compatibility. All those old apps, designed to run on Intel hardware, will be a powerful motivator for corporate buyers. Gamers are also likely to remain loyal to the older platform and its guaranteed high frame rates.
The pressure is on Intel, though, no doubt about it. The company hasn’t had any serious competition in decades, and we haven’t even talked about what will happen when Nvidia adds SoCs to its GPU hegemony and AMD launches its Copilot+ PCs.
It doesn’t help that Intel’s latest 13th and 14th Gen CPUs are… plagued by problems that are causing “widespread instability” and even permanent damage to some PCs. The company promises a fix in the form of a microcode patch, but the burden of delivering that patch to customers falls on the PC manufacturer, meaning some people who bought those devices may be at risk for a long, long time. It also doesn’t help that Intel is reportedly planning to cut thousands of jobs to address financial problems and market share erosion.
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In a Slack chat last month, my colleague Jason Perlow predicted that the x86 architecture will never go away, but there’s no doubt that it’s reached the end of its productive lifespan. The question now is whether Intel has the technical ability to start innovating on ARM. Because, if it can’t find a “Qualcomm killer” soon, then it’s game over.
Ask anyone who uses a modern MacBook.