Lenovo ThinkPad X13s
A glimpse of the Arm-powered future of the PC
ONE DAY, X86 PROCESSORS in PCs will be entirely replaced by Arm chips. That’s the widespread assumption—just don’t expect us to tell you if it will actually happen or when. What we can say for sure, however, is that if future PCs do end up being Arm-powered, then the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s will retrospectively be seen as a harbinger of things to come.
This slick little 13-inch laptop rocks a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, a pure Arm-powered processor. If you’re not familiar with it—and why should you be?—it runs four performance-spec Arm Cortex-X1 cores and another four Cortex-A78 efficiency cores.
You also get an Adreno 690 GPU, and in this particular configuration, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It’s all housed in a super high-quality 13-inch chassis, the form factor dictated by a 1,920 by 1,200 pixel IPS panel. It’s a super-thin design, so the ports are limited to a pair of USB-C sockets, plus headphones and a SIM slot for 5G connectivity.
Physically, it’s a very nice bit of engineering, but how does that Arm stuff even work with Windows? Well, Microsoft does an Arm-compatible build of Windows 11 complete with a compatibility layer for running x86 software. In theory, it’s all totally seamless. You install a legacy x86 app just like you would a native Arm app, and it just works.
In practice, it’s hit and miss, as some apps fail during the install process. Of those that work, they generally run smoothly, but at a performance cost. A good example is the Chrome browser. There’s no native Arm Windows version available, so you have to install the x86 build. It seems to work fine at first—load up, say, a 4K YouTube video, and it plays without a glitch. But if you pull up task manager and have a look at the CPU load being generated, it looks a little ugly.
Chrome running a 4K video soaks up around 25 percent of the CPU’s resources. But if you play the same video in Edge, which Microsoft has recompiled for Arm, the CPU load is only 5 percent. Put simply, your battery life running Chrome is going to take a major hit. That’s a pity, because battery life is probably this laptop’s main selling point. We managed just over 19 hours of battery life with Wi-Fi enabled and playing 1080p video via the native Arm Windows media app. That’s proper all-day stuff—you might even manage a couple of days.
As for performance, it’s difficult to make direct comparisons. Many of our benchmarks apps wouldn’t install, but the 2,345 points the X13s returns in Cinebanch R23, for instance, is pretty feeble. It’s slightly more than half of what you could expect from something like a U Series Intel Core i5 processor.
It’s also less than one third of the performance of the M2 chip in Apple’s MacBook Air, which is also an Arm processor. Ouch. If you factor in that the screen is merely okay (we recommend going for the optional 400 nit panel, as the 300 nit standard screen isn’t bright enough), and that the $1,376 price as tested is hardly a bargain, then we can only conclude that if the Arm revolution is heading for the PC, you might want to wait a little longer to jump onboard.
The reality is that compatibility with x86 Windows software is patchy, so you wouldn’t buy this for legacy apps; just the battery life. But to be frank, if you want an Arm laptop for that reason, Apple’s MacBook looks better, lasts as long, has much better sound quality, a superior screen, and comparable build quality. It’s not a Windows laptop, of course, but then nor is the ThinkPad X13s when you get right down to it.