I didn’t think the thing would be good. When he got it in, we spent a day running benchmarks and fooling around with it. We compared it to his old workstation and my desktop system. It wasn’t a very controlled environment, we were just having fun and putting the thing through it’s paces.
I asked my friend yesterday how he liked the machine having worked with it for some time now and he’s really happy with it. It is across the board faster than his old machine and is wonderful to work with. He can setup complex simulations and take it with him to the office. This was always a bit of a pain point in the past, where he would run the simulations at home on his workstation, but then could only share the results. Sometimes they would rent server time to run the simulation on a cloud system, but that was a bit of a hassle and had costs. Now he just uplugs his notebook, puts it in the bag and off he goes. He also now doesn’t have 2 systems from work he needs to regularly log into and keep up to date. Sometimes he had a couple of months where he didn’t need the laptop and it would get fussy over missing updates etc. So for him at least it’s a big win and to me shows you can run some pretty heavy stuff on those machines.
Are there faster machines out there? Absolutely. Are there even better notebooks out there? For sure, Apple M3 is faster and M4 is even faster still. And with Apple the performance per watt is better as well. But running Windows on those is (for now at least) not something that’s suitable for work. The security department would certainly not approve of a highly modified version of Windows.
The whole point of this post was Arm chips might be huge in the future and I have to agree. These current gen Arm CPUs are impressive and the next gen will be even more so.
You also seem to indicate running benchmarks and running applications is somehow not the same thing? Sure not all benchmarks are realistic, but are more of an indication and relative performance thing, as to easily compare different systems. And not all applications stress the system the same way. But every benchmark I’ve seen says that notebook is on par and exceeds the performance of my 5950X desktop and to me that’s impressive. In the real world if we are using simple office applications or websites/web-apps, I doubt we would notice the difference in performance, both are equally fast and perhaps the latency of the internet connection is a bigger factor there. But something like Speedometer shows the real world browser performance of the laptop is better than on my desktop.
Did the engineers at Qualcomm spend a couple of weeks with a small team to optimise a custom Linux environment for Geekbench and put a boatload of cooling on the chip? Sure, I believe that. They want to show the CPU in the best possible conditions. Is the real world performance still very good? Yes, it is. And there are so many notebook reviews that back this up.
Are there also terrible notebooks with a CPU throttled all the way down and lacking enough cooling? Also yes. But the same can be said for x86 notebooks. Especially Intel notebooks of 12th and 13th gen, those ran hot and slow all the time.
If you are convinced all Arm notebooks suck, I’m not here to change your mind, I’m not here to provide any kind of proof. All I can tell you is I know of one real life case where I saw with my own eyes the thing was pretty damned good. If you don’t believe me, that’s just fine. It’s just a discussion on the internet, don’t take it too seriously.
It’s not like anyone can afford a new laptop in 2026, with the RAM prices being what they are. So it probably won’t be the year of the Arm CPU, no matter how good those chips actually are.
Alright, I’ve got nothing for you then.
I didn’t think the thing would be good. When he got it in, we spent a day running benchmarks and fooling around with it. We compared it to his old workstation and my desktop system. It wasn’t a very controlled environment, we were just having fun and putting the thing through it’s paces.
I asked my friend yesterday how he liked the machine having worked with it for some time now and he’s really happy with it. It is across the board faster than his old machine and is wonderful to work with. He can setup complex simulations and take it with him to the office. This was always a bit of a pain point in the past, where he would run the simulations at home on his workstation, but then could only share the results. Sometimes they would rent server time to run the simulation on a cloud system, but that was a bit of a hassle and had costs. Now he just uplugs his notebook, puts it in the bag and off he goes. He also now doesn’t have 2 systems from work he needs to regularly log into and keep up to date. Sometimes he had a couple of months where he didn’t need the laptop and it would get fussy over missing updates etc. So for him at least it’s a big win and to me shows you can run some pretty heavy stuff on those machines.
Are there faster machines out there? Absolutely. Are there even better notebooks out there? For sure, Apple M3 is faster and M4 is even faster still. And with Apple the performance per watt is better as well. But running Windows on those is (for now at least) not something that’s suitable for work. The security department would certainly not approve of a highly modified version of Windows.
The whole point of this post was Arm chips might be huge in the future and I have to agree. These current gen Arm CPUs are impressive and the next gen will be even more so.
You also seem to indicate running benchmarks and running applications is somehow not the same thing? Sure not all benchmarks are realistic, but are more of an indication and relative performance thing, as to easily compare different systems. And not all applications stress the system the same way. But every benchmark I’ve seen says that notebook is on par and exceeds the performance of my 5950X desktop and to me that’s impressive. In the real world if we are using simple office applications or websites/web-apps, I doubt we would notice the difference in performance, both are equally fast and perhaps the latency of the internet connection is a bigger factor there. But something like Speedometer shows the real world browser performance of the laptop is better than on my desktop.
Did the engineers at Qualcomm spend a couple of weeks with a small team to optimise a custom Linux environment for Geekbench and put a boatload of cooling on the chip? Sure, I believe that. They want to show the CPU in the best possible conditions. Is the real world performance still very good? Yes, it is. And there are so many notebook reviews that back this up.
Are there also terrible notebooks with a CPU throttled all the way down and lacking enough cooling? Also yes. But the same can be said for x86 notebooks. Especially Intel notebooks of 12th and 13th gen, those ran hot and slow all the time.
If you are convinced all Arm notebooks suck, I’m not here to change your mind, I’m not here to provide any kind of proof. All I can tell you is I know of one real life case where I saw with my own eyes the thing was pretty damned good. If you don’t believe me, that’s just fine. It’s just a discussion on the internet, don’t take it too seriously.
It’s not like anyone can afford a new laptop in 2026, with the RAM prices being what they are. So it probably won’t be the year of the Arm CPU, no matter how good those chips actually are.