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The Lenovo Yoga C630 is one of the best Snapdragon-powered laptops out there. ZombieLoad: the latest bug to hit Intel CPUs.priced and under-performing curios, but
laptops that offer genuine alternatives to
x86 machines.
Could that lead to more laptop
manufacturers looking at leaving Intel
and AMD, and using ARM hardware in
their products instead? Perhaps. Intel
hasn’t been doing a fantastic job of
keeping manufacturers onside, due to a
number of high-profile security flaws in
its chips. Meltdown and Spectre made
the headlines last year, and ZombieLoad
was recently discovered, leading to many
manufacturers and software developers
having to scramble to provide patches to
mitigate against the vulnerabilities.
Not only do these flaws annoy
manufacturers, who feel they have to
work to fix Intel’s problems, but most
of the fixes involve disabling Hyper-
Threading, a feature that generates
virtualized processor cores for improved
multitasking, and that has led to some
drastic performance impacts after the
patches are applied.
For example, Apple revealed that, with
the ZombieLoad patch installed, there
could be performance drops of up to 40
percent—which would particularly impact
Macs with multicore processors.
Not only will this annoy customers,
who are seeing their expensive devices
perform worse, but it’s not a good look
for the manufacturers, either. If your Mac
suddenly starts running slow, you’re likely
to blame Apple before you blame Intel.
Speaking of Apple, rumors have
continued to grow that the company
is looking to part ways with Intel and
produce its own custom ARM-based chips
in 2020. Apple is a company that likes to
keep control over all parts of its hardware,
so we think this is an increasingly likely
possibility. Not only will the company
have been nonplussed about having tothrottle the performance of its Macs due
to ZombieLoad (which does not affect
AMD and ARM processors), but it also
recently suggested that the drop in Mac
sales was due to “processor constraints
in the March quarter, leading to a
5 percent revenue decline compared to
last year.” The fact that Tim Cook himself
was all but calling out Intel doesn’t bode
well for the relationship between the
two companies.
If a company as big as Apple ditches
Intel for ARM, we could easily see other
companies following suit.
Another laptop manufacturer that
is set to move from Intel to its own
processors for its laptops (but for very
different reasons) is Huawei. You’ve
probably seen the news about the US
government’s blacklisting of the Chinese
company over espionage fears, and it has
resulted in most US (and UK) companies
ceasing business with it. This means
that Intel will no longer be supplying
processors for Huawei’s MateBook
range of laptops. This has forced
the company to look into creating its
own processors, which we think will
likely be non-x86. Earlier this year,
Huawei showed off its Kunpeng
920 CPU, which is an ARM-
based CPU that it claims is the
highest-performance ARM CPU
in existence.
We would think that Huawei
migrating to ARM for its laptopprocessors would be a no-brainer in light
of its recent troubles. The only problem
is that ARM has also said that it will stop
working with Huawei. This could have
huge implications for both companies—
though especially Huawei, which will need
to look at building its own RISC-based
CPU from the ground up.
So, the future of non-x86 Windows
(and Mac) laptops certainly looks bright.
While we don’t expect Intel-based
machines to suddenly disappear from
the laptop landscape altogether, the fact
that we’re going to be given more choice
is certainly welcome. The fact that these
ARM-based alternatives are bringing
some genuinely innovative new features
to the rather staid laptop form factor is
also to be celebrated—and with Intel’s
once unassailable dominance now under
threat, we’re looking forward to seeing
how the chipmaker responds. All of a
sudden, laptops are exciting again.A Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx
laptop reference design.maximumpc.com aug 2019 MAXIMUMPC 49