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Comment by dagaci | Hacker News Reader

As with Apple, Qualcomm claims so be faster than x86. This is true on the synthetic single core Geekbench benchmark compared to a 2019 Intel cpu. Today the Qualcomm beats the m3 in Geek-bench and the current amd 7940hs.

But for real applications the 7940Hs, beats the Qualcomm even on Cinnebench Single core and multicore

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The problem you'll have with "real applications" is that they're written for amd64 or x86, and Qualcom's translator isn't exactly competitive.

They're going to need Rosetta-like translation performance to beat Intel. Which also begs the question: do modern Qualcoms even come with native 32 bit support? Unlike amd64, aarch64 has no 32 bit compatibility guarantees.

On Linux the situation will be very different. That's why I hope they release these devices for relatively cheap (because most applications and games will be quite slow) so Linux users can get good perf out of them for almost all native tools while Windows userspace catches up.

They don't need native 32 bit ARM Windows support. That's essentially dead and never really took off to begin with, it's a handful of ancient apps in the Windows Store from the Surface RT days. Microsoft has already said they're removing it from the next version of Windows. x86 support will still be kicking around on Windows on ARM64 which is by far the bulk of 32 bit Windows programs.

Microsoft's compatibility layers are pretty competitive. You get about 60% of the performance whereas Rosetta 2 is closer to 70%, which is impressive when you consider MS has no hardware bits to do that unlike Apple.

What has been more of an issue is the slow CPUs themselves. The upcoming Orion chips should perform similarly to M1 on x86 programs.

Snapdragon X Elite does not beat the M3 in single-core. It does beat the M3 in multi-core because of the 12 high performance cores, compared to 4 in the M3. It's more of a M3 Pro competitor.

Which Qualcomm beats M3 in Geekbench?

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