Windows on Arm – The Empire Strikes Back pt. II

Intel takes the fight to Qualcomm and AMD.  

• Intel has formally launched its answer to the Qualcomm X Elite and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series and if its benchmarks are to be believed, the fight for the laptop market will be closer than anyone expected (including me).
• Lunar Lake was originally supposed to be released in 2025 but with the extreme pressure exerted by Qualcomm (and now, AMD), this was rolled forward into 2024 with devices expected in Q4 2024.
• On 3^rd September, Intel released the benchmarks for Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V series and announced that the laptops are now available for pre-order from its usual partners and will begin shipping to customers on September 24^th.
• The benchmarks are impressive given Intel’s recent performance but will need to be verified when devices are in the hands of 3^rd parties.
• I suspect that reviewers are already testing these products but as usual, they are likely to have been embargoed until September 24^th.
• Furthermore, Intel claims to have used production rather than prototype devices for its testing implying that these figures should be a reasonable representation of reality.
• Intel is claiming “historic x86 power efficiency” and that the Core Ultra 200V series achieves 1.2x improvement in performance per watt than the Qualcomm X ELITE x1e-80-100 which is 2.3x better than Intel’s previous generation.
• This translates into 20.1 hours of battery life using a well-known Office productivity benchmark, 10.7 hours on a team call which beats Qualcomm’s 18.4 hours on Office productivity but loses out against Qualcomm’s 12.7 hours on a Teams call.
• Intel also spent time calling out the 2.2x improvement in power efficiency on gaming versus the previous generation, highlighting the 23 games that it tested where the Qualcomm chip did not run at all and claimed a 16% improvement over AMD’s AI 300 series.
• On the games that would run on Qualcomm, it claimed a 68% advantage and went on to hammer the competition on its AI performance.
• Here, it is claiming a maximum of 120 TOPS when combining resources from the CPU, GPU and NPU and highlighted that it retains support for FP16 instructions while AMD and Qualcomm top out at INT8 for AI inference.
• However, of Copilot+ there was no mention because Microsoft’s x86 version of Copilot+ is still not ready and is not expected to be released before November 2024.
• This clearly demonstrates where Microsoft’s priority for this generation lies, and so I think that Qualcomm is going to have plenty of support when it comes to the long and difficult job of fixing all of the things that so far do not work with Windows on Arm.
• Assuming that Intel’s benchmarks prove to be reasonably accurate (and I have no real reason to think that they won’t be), then the stage is set for a large increase in competition in laptop processors which is excellent news for the consumer and Microsoft.
• Since Apple launched its groundbreaking M-series of laptop and desktop processors, there has been a slow but steady influx of higher-end users to Apple, which has forced the Windows community to react.
• Qualcomm’s entry forced both AMD and Intel to react and the result is a large jump in performance and battery life which is only going to improve further as competition intensifies.
• The big winners are Microsoft and the consumer but even if the benchmarks are correct meaning that the Arm advantage is much less than expected, Qualcomm still has an ace up its sleeve.
• That ace is price because, on a straight comparison, the Qualcomm-powered devices are significantly cheaper than either AMD or Intel.
• This means that even if one does not care about AI in Copilot+, Qualcomm-powered devices offer more bang for the buck.
• The third generation of Windows on Arm is a night-and-day improvement over the last time this was tried, and the commitment is there to take this to the mainstream.
• The vast majority of the stuff that most users care about works flawlessly and a lot of the long tail of apps that use the emulator work well enough so that the user does not notice the emulation.
• Generally, anything that is written directly to hardware (like games or VPN apps) that have not been ported struggle on Windows on Arm but this time, the will appears to be there to fix these issues.
• Hence, Qualcomm is unlikely to take any share in gaming laptops for a while but this was never the intent at the moment and it is important to remember that this is just the first generation.
• I think the stage is set for Qualcomm to take share in laptops, especially in the mid-to-high-end market, where usage is less specialised and price is a factor.
• This should provide it with a platform of volume from which it can address the areas where Windows on Arm still needs attention to the point where everything works equally well on x86 and Arm.
• This will take some time but almost none of this is included in the current forecasts for Qualcomm.
• Hence, I see upside in revenues and profits in Qualcomm compared to current expectations meaning that it remains one of the most inexpensive ways to play the AI boom.
• I have a position in Qualcomm and remain very happy to hang onto it regardless of the current market volatility.