Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8cx at its Snapdragon Technology Summit today, promising to compete with an Intel Core i5. While that should solve some of the obvious performance issues with the older chipsets for Windows 10 PCs, it doesn"t solve the other big issue, which is emulated apps.
Indeed, apps like Chrome and Firefox are sluggish, but that"s slated to change. Both Firefox and the open-source Chromium will soon run natively on ARM, meaning that there will be a huge boost in performance of the apps. It"s been pretty widely reported that Chromium is coming, but now it"s confirmed, with Firefox coming as well.
Chromium is what Google"s Chrome browser is based on, as well as other browsers like Opera and Vivaldi. In fact, Microsoft is going to be adding Chromium to Edge, likely the reason that it"s been contributing to the Chromium project to get it running properly on ARM64.
It would seem that the final piece of the puzzle in getting Qualcomm on par with Intel PCs would be a partnership with Adobe. Most of Adobe"s apps are x64-only, which means that they can"t even run on Snapdragon PCs through emulation.
It"s unclear when Firefox and Chromium will actually be available natively for ARM64. They should be available through Nightly channels sooner rather than later.