At Computex 2024, everyone was talking about AI again. Intel’s Lunar Lake hardware and AMD’s Strix Point chips will deliver faster AI performance, with upgraded neural processing units (NPUs) that meet and exceed Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirements. That’s great.
But the big promise of Qualcomm’s soon-to-be-released line of Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops is the huge battery life numbers we’re being promised over Intel and AMD-powered laptops.
“We know we haven’t necessarily been the highest battery life design point,” said Intel’s Dan Rogers in
Intel is talking like it’s solved the problem — but we haven’t heard any concrete numbers yet.
Now, the race is on. At Computex, Arm CEO Rene Haas told us Apple “woke up the industry on the art of the possible.” After all, Apple’s Macs once used Intel CPUs. The company dumped them for more power-efficient Arm chips. Now, Intel and AMD need to prove they can deliver long battery life in laptops, too — they don’t want a repeat of what happened to the Mac market happening in the light-and-portable Windows laptop market.
Why Snapdragon PCs are such a threat
Microsoft
Microsoft
<div class="scrim" style="background-color: #fff" aria-hidden="true"></div>
</div></figure><p class="imageCredit">Microsoft</p></div>With Snapdragon X, Qualcomm is hitting Intel and AMD where it hurts — in the battery life.
Microsoft, Qualcomm, Arm, and PC manufacturers are focusing on the AI performance when it comes to marketing those new Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ laptops. It is, as Arm’s CEO put it, a good upgrade story that gives these Arm-powered PC “a great kind of tailwind” — one that makes people want to buy a new machine and start taking a look at these new laptops.
But the real big story for PC users is the battery life. We haven’t gotten our hands on any of these Snapdragon X-powered PCs just yet, so we can’t evaluate the battery life claims — we look forward to doing that in the coming weeks. Still, Qualcomm is talking up some huge numbers. Manufacturers are promising up to 22 hours of battery life on some of these systems. Internal documents from Dell claim Snapdragon-powered laptops may nearly double the battery life offered by Intel-powered laptops.
AMD didn’t talk up battery life improvements
AMD
<div class="lightbox-image-container foundry-lightbox"><div class="extendedBlock-wrapper block-coreImage undefined"><figure class="wp-block-image size-large enlarged-image"><img decoding="async" data-wp-bind--src="selectors.core.image.enlargedImgSrc" data-wp-style--object-fit="selectors.core.image.lightboxObjectFit" src="" alt="AMD NPU" class="wp-image-2356753" width="1200" height="675" loading="lazy" /></figure><p class="imageCredit">AMD</p></div> </div></figure><p class="imageCredit">AMD</p></div>Unfortunately, AMD wasn’t big on talking battery life at Computex. AMD is focusing hard on powerful high-end desktop processors with its Ryzen 9000 processors. On the laptop side, AMD is all about performance, too: Both AI performance and all-around performance with its Ryzen AI 300 series processors.
This all sounds great — but one thing AMD isn’t talking about much is battery life. AMD has a good story if you’re looking for a powerful NPU for AI tasks, a high-end desktop processor, or performance boosts in a gaming laptop.
AMD isn’t pitching its new processors as enabling a huge upgrade in battery life, like Intel and Qualcomm are. Of course, we’ll have to see what happens when new laptops with these processors are released.
That’s fair, and maybe it’s a smart move for AMD to focus more on high-end performance and leave Intel and Qualcomm to fight over the battery life crown. But that does mean AMD might not be the company manufacturers turn to for thin-and-light laptops — not unless it can deliver the kind of power efficiency numbers Intel and Qualcomm are talking up.
Intel talked about power efficiency — but not battery life
Intel had a lot to say about Lunar Lake at Computex 2024. Intel’s new hardware platform prioritizes power efficiency and AI performance. Yes, these will truly be modern “AI PCs.”
Intel
<div class="lightbox-image-container foundry-lightbox"><div class="extendedBlock-wrapper block-coreImage undefined"><figure class="wp-block-image size-large enlarged-image"><img decoding="async" data-wp-bind--src="selectors.core.image.enlargedImgSrc" data-wp-style--object-fit="selectors.core.image.lightboxObjectFit" src="" alt="Lunar Lake architecture intelAutentifică-te pentru a adăuga comentarii
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