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> A generic Snapdragon ARM SoC, say, would deliver notably less performance in this specific scenario that is critically important to Mac users.

In some senses it's even more important for Snapdragon - Google doesn't yet ship a native Windows ARM build of Chrome. So for MacBook competitors using Windows on Snapdragon, you either have to use Edge or the emulated x86_64 Chrome.

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I wonder why Chrome doesn't ship one. They can demonstrably target that CPU, since they ship a mac/arm64 build, android builds, and of course ChromeOS for arm both 32 and 64. Perhaps the market share of Windows on arm is just negligible?

Yes that's probably the most likely factor. For a while, clang didn't have all the support necessary to build chrome on win-aarch64 but that's no longer the case. Chromium builds exist already so there's probably not much except a business commitment to build/test/support the platform. And yes maybe the share just isn't enough to justify that yet.

Do they license codecs for Windows or something?

I didn't understand the author's point here... Do they think Qualcomm couldn't make these hardware changes as well? Of course they can, though they may not have considered it until now.

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