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point Lenovo’s Snapdragon 8cx-powered laptop
will have already been on sale for more than a
year. But if the past year or so of Snapdragon-
powered laptop launches have taught early
adopters anything, it’s that their overall computing
experiences are far more frustrating than those the
average consumer will likely experience waiting
for 5G connectivity to become as ubiquitous on
laptops as it is certain to become on phones.
The frustration largely stems from the occasionally
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Windows software to run properly on Snapdragon
processors. Snapdragon’s ARM architecture is
incompatible with the x86 architecture on which
most Windows apps and drivers are built. The
result is that many apps, from web browsers to
games, run sluggishly on Snapdragon-powered
laptops, and others (especially multimedia content
creation programs) can’t run at all.
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laptop PCMag tested, the Asus NovaGo. And not
much has changed with the latest one we’ve tested,
the Microsoft Surface Pro X, which uses a
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Microsoft SQ1. A recent glance at the top 100
games available for download from the Microsoft
Store shows that around half won’t run natively on
current Snapdragon-powered laptops.
Unless Qualcomm and Microsoft come up with a
silver bullet that removes all the software
problems quickly, this situation will likely persist
once 8c- and 7c-powered laptops go on sale.
@branttom
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