If you need a machine to do actual work on, the SPX won’t work. I use the SPX ten hours a day, every day, at least, and I promise you that it’s so slow for me as a full-time stick and options trade that I can’t take it anymore. The only reason someone running native Excel would think that it’s “fast” is because Excel almost never uses any CPU firepower. It’s a very slow machine, whether running in emulation or native ARM64. The people who say that it’s comparable to an Intel i7 haven’t tested real applications in it. When you type a word, you often need to wait fir 0.5 seconds or 1.0 seconds to see it in the screen. I’m running Windows 11, and battery life is the same as always: absolutely terrible. To give you an idea, it takes 180 seconds to launch StreetSmart Edge, and often longer to launch ThinkOrSwim, on my 16 GB RAM SPX with an SQ1 CPU. Qualcomm has previously shown that the Snapdragon 8cx compares favorably against the Intel Core i5-8250U ( Kaby Lake-R) that is available in the Surface Pro 6.Running a trading platform such as TD Ameritrade’s ThinkOrSwim or Schwab’s StreetSmart Edge is extremely slow. That chip is built on a 7nm process node, and is comprised of an octa-core, 64-bit Kyro 495 CPU and an Adreno 680 GPU. Although it was not mentioned, we're assuming the SQ1 is based on the Snapdragon 8cx, which was designed from the onset for PCs. This SoC was engineered in partnership with Qualcomm and incorporates a Microsoft-designed AI engine (9 TFLOPs compute). Today, however, Microsoft is going back to ARM with the all-new Surface Pro X, which is bringing with it a much more powerful SoC to provide a compelling balance of performance and battery life.Īt the heart of the Surface Pro is Microsoft's new SQ1 processor. However, it didn't take long for Microsoft to release that the limited app ecosystem and performance of the ARM version wasn't attracting customers, so it abandoned its efforts after the Surface 2. When Microsoft first announced the Surface family, it was available in both x86 and ARM versions.

Sq 1 processor