Until now, emulation of x86 and x64 apps on Arm-based Windows PCs has hardly been ideal in terms of performance. Qualcomm is trying to assure game developers that most of their will “just work” on upcoming Snapdragon X Elite-powered systems, but apps that have been optimized for or ported to Arm are likely to run more smoothly than those where emulation is involved.
To that end, Google is this week rolling out a version of Chrome that’s optimized for Snapdragon-powered Windows PCs. It started publicly testing a Chrome app that supports the Arm64 architecture back in January.
The company says that the app will make web browsing smoother and faster on PCs with Snapdragon chipsets. Both Qualcomm and Google note that, according to early benchmarking on Snapdragon X Elite reference devices, Chrome is in line for a bigger performance boost when PCs with that chipset start arriving. The first of those systems are expected to go on sale in the next few months.
Optimizing the planet’s most popular browser and likely one of the most-used Windows apps in general is likely to go some way toward making Arm-based Windows more palatable for many. Microsoft released an Arm-optimized version of Edge in 2020, but Chrome is far more widely used.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-releases-a-version-of-chrome-optimized-for-snapdragon-powered-windows-11-pcs-160042086.html?src=rss