Ever since Apple switched to its own M-series chips for Macs, the PC notebook market has been trying to play catch-up in search of an ARM-based equivalent to Apple's in both power and efficiency.

Qualcomm seems to have finally nailed the formula for its upcoming Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chipset: "Windows Latest," first leaked in January, found benchmark results for this chipset in Geekbench, beating Apple's M1 by one key measure chip and beat both Apple's M1 and M2 chips in one key metric.

First, the bad news. The chipset achieved a score of 1,197 in the single-core test, which is not much of an improvement over the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 average (in the 1,040-1,120 range). It is also weaker than the M1 (around 1,750) and M2 (~1,900).

However, according to Windows Latest, this new chipset, developed by Nuvia's former Apple Silicon engineers, is a big step forward in multi-core scores: the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is in the 5,300-5,900 range while the Gen 4 achieves a staggering score of 9,337. On average, M1 chips are in the 7,000 range, while M2 achieves 8,500 to 9,000. [However, Qualcomm and Microsoft still have reason to refrain from uncorking the champagne.

There are basically four reasons to withhold judgment: the first is simple: this is only one leaked benchmark, and it could be a fake.

The second is that Windows Latest reports that the architecture is slightly different from Apple's M-series chipsets: the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 has eight performance cores and four efficiency cores, while the M1 and M2 reported to have four each. The average consumer will not care about this, but more performance cores may result in faster battery drain.

Third, Apple has a significant advantage in that all Macs have their own chips. In this regard, the ARM version of Windows has historically struggled, far better than the bad days of Windows RT thanks to great emulation, but simply having fewer Snapdragon-powered Windows devices means that software makers have little incentive to make ARM-native There is little incentive to create software versions.

Finally, these Snapdragon scores, while impressive, are competitive with the M1 and M2. Not only that, but these chips are now 1-2 years old and the Apple M3 chipset is just around the corner. Needless to say, this could be a major generational shift.

But it remains an exciting development. The Qualcomm Summit kicks off this week in Hawaii, so specs and benchmarks may be released soon via official channels. Attention.