We already know that there are new Macs running with the M1 chip Impressive performance It beats almost all current Macs with Intel processors, but what about Windows PCs? PCWorld Comparing Microsoft’s Surface Pro X with Apple’s new M1 MacBook Air, the results put the Surface tablet behind the Mac.
Although Windows runs on ARM-based computers, many of them are not currently available to consumers. Microsoft’s Surface Pro X Tablet is one of them – with the ARM chip jointly developed between Microsoft and Qualcomm.
As pointed out PCWorld, The biggest limitation of Windows on ARM systems is that the operating system is limited to running the prototype 32-bit X86 software. In other words, the system could not follow and run 64-bit applications developed for AMD and Intel processors.
The 32-bit software runs at significantly lower performance – and Apple removed them in 2019 with the MacOS Catalina. At the same time, Apple has introduced the Rosetta 2 technology for the new M1 Max, which translates every piece of software developed for Intel Max into ARM binary, which runs better on Apple silicon – based computers.
Microsoft recently released a beta version of Windows, which is a prototype for the 64-bit X86 software, but still not even close to the new Mac with the performance M1 chip. In the Geekbench 5 test, the Surface Pro X performed better with the new M1 MacBook Air, and was positioned behind the cheap HP Pavilion laptop running the Intel Core i5 processor.
Another test was performed by handbrake, an open source software for transcoding videos. The new MacBook Air with M1 chip converted 12 minutes of 4K video to 1080p H.265 format in about 10 minutes, while the Surface Pro X ARM took 2 hours to complete the same operation.
With SQ1 one frame per second, it takes two hours to transcode 12 minutes of 4K video of Tears of Steel into 1080p H.265 format. Apple’s MacBook M1 simply blows the Surface Pro X.
At the end of the day, even with the improvements that Microsoft is making on Windows, ARM engines are at a disadvantage compared to the M1 Max. Based on its tests, PCWorld Apple claims that “Windows on Arm needs a miracle” to achieve the performance of the new Mac with the silicon chip.
But it is hard to believe that further development will reduce the wide gap of performance between Arm and Apple’s M1-based Mac on Windows. In six months, Microsoft can boast that its emulation performance has improved significantly. But without the miracle of a better CPU from Qualcomm or another Arm chipmaker and constant improvements from Microsoft, Arm’s future in Windows looks bleak.
Interestingly, it was completed by the developers Follow Windows 10 on M1 Max The Mac scored better on a geekbench test than the Surface Pro X, which originally ran Windows 10 on ARM.
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