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Apple's brand new 13-inch 256GB M3 MacBook Air has hit $999.00 today on Amazon, down from $1,099.00. This sale is available in Midnight, but you might be able to get in Space Gray depending on stock, which has been fluctuating today. B&H Photo is matching this sale.
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Chrome for Windows on Snapdragon should be available via Google, complementing the version for X86 PCs that has been on the market for years.
Qualcomm soft-launched the Snapdragon X Elite platform last fall in anticipation of PCs shipping with the Snapdragon X Elite processor in mid-2024. Some of the first devices expected include consumer versions of the Microsoft Surface Pro 10 and the Surface Laptop 6. Those devices, marketed as the Surface Pro 10 for Business and the Surface Laptop 6 for Business, were announced with Intel Core Ultra processors a short time ago. All told, nine PC vendors are expected to ship Snapdragon X Elite PCs.
Chrome's commitment, though, is good news. Early iterations of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7- and 8-series chips were often accompanied by beta versions of Microsoft's Edge and Mozilla's Firefox browser, indicative of the lack of software support for the Arm architecture. Chrome, however, owns 51 percent of the U.S. market, with Edge tally
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In part, that's because they've had to run via emulation, a way of translating the X86 code into instructions that can be understood by the Arm processor. Qualcomm claims that performance won't be a problem for its upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors and the PCs they run on. But the company also unveiled a pretty major caveat to that, too.
According to The Verge, Qualcomm executives told a Game Developer Conference audience that the company believes that most of the games in Steam's list of the most popular games should run at close to full speed on Snapdragon X Elite.
Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil told the audience that game developers could port their games over to Arm, or they could create an Arm64EC app, a hybrid approach where Qualcomm's drivers run natively but the rest of the app is emulated. They could also just let Windows on Arm's emulation shoulder the load. Khalil said he believes most games are GPU-bound, meaning that the performance of the emulator won't have a big impact.
There are some problems, though. Games with kernel-level anti-cheat drivers simply won't work via emulation, as will games that use AVX instructions, Khalil said. The latter is the subject of a
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