Is ARM on Windows GOOD NOW? Acer Swift Go 14 AI Snapdragon X Plus Review

If you’ve ever owned a Windows laptop, you’ll know how naff they can be. Having seen what Apple can do with an ARM CPU – even if I don’t like them as a company or tactics, it’s hard to argue the M Macbooks aren’t amazing in a lot of ways – you’d have to wonder just what it’d take for a Windows machine to offer that level of quality, power, and efficiency. The biggest hurdle there has been Windows itself. Windows for ARM has been around for years, but it’s been practically useless, but apparently it’s a lot better now, and machines like this Acer Swift Go 14 AI with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip are not just usable but amazing, so let’s give this thing a go and see if that’s true. Is ARM on Windows Good Now? Let’s find out!

First, we should check out the machine itself so we know what we’re working with. This is the Acer Swift Go 14 AI, a 14 inch laptop with a few interesting quirks. The biggest thing for me is that this is not a touchscreen. For a machine like this, that was quite a surprise to me. Something this thin, light and small normally has a touchscreen, although happily Acer have opted for a large touchpad instead. This thing is about as big as it possibly could be, and tracks really nicely. It has all the usual (Windows) gestures you’d expect, for scrolling, zooming and the rest. The keyboard feels fine enough, it’s a fairly low profile design with a nice enough tactile feel to the switches, but it’s far from my favourite (even laptop) keyboard. The biggest issue I have with it though is thanks to Microsoft – this stupid thing. The “Copilot key”. We will be coming back to this shortly, as this is now a very big (and highly marketed) part of Windows, and this machine in particular. The interesting feature the keyboard has to offer is built into the power button, which actually is a fingerprint scanner. That, combined with the built in IR camera act as biometric security, making this pretty easy to both secure and access.

Following on the physical tour, the IO is pretty typical for a laptop like this, with two USB 4 ports on the left (which act as power in too) and two USB A ports – one left and one right – along with a combo headphone jack. That’s all you get, which is a little shame. I’d have really liked an SD card reader to round that out, although I guess since you probably have a million dongles with machines like this anyway I shouldn’t complain too hard. Connected to all those ports is the heart of the machine, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus CPU – an eight core Qualcomm Oryon chip – which runs at 3.2GHz, and has an ARM-designed Adreno built in, and apparently importantly for AI stuff, it also has a 45 TOPS NPU (neural processing unit) which is a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU. That is connected to 16GB of 8448MT/s LPDDR5x RAM, which runs both the CPU and GPU memory, and you’ve also got a 1TB M.2 SSD in here which in my case is a WD SN5000S. It’s worth noting on the CPU front that there are actually a bunch of different Snapdragon X Plus options, with the one I have been the lowest end. The 8 core with the slowest (by far) GPU and the lowest clock speed. The one you’d get if you bought this from Curry’s here in the UK is the second to highest end 10 core with over double the GPU performance of the one I have here. Acer has a history of weird specs that don’t seem to exist according to them – like on Acer’s own website for the UK you apparently get a 1200p display and this 8 core GPU. That’s the only version they know exists. But Currys is selling an entirely different version which is a completely different value proposition… Crazy, I know.

Actually, speaking of that display, I get the 1600p version – 2560×1600, 120Hz, IPS. Not bad, right? It looks great, colours pop and it’s insanely sharp. It’s decent. Of course I did test it for its colours, which came back as over 100% of sRGB, and 85% of DCI P3. That’s good, but not amazing. I’d have expected at least 90% DCI P3 for this sort of price range and class, but this certainly isn’t bad. Brightness is really good for a mid-range laptop though at 361 nits and 1400:1 contrast, and accuracy is spot on with an average DeltaE of 1.45. That’s great. Plus I tested the response times, because why not – and they do actually list it right on the sticker by the keyboard at 9 milliseconds, and… yeah… no. It averaged 14 milliseconds, which is just 69.6 hertz equivalent. Yikes. It’s usable, obviously, especially since this isn’t exactly a gaming machine, but still that’s not great.

So that’s the machine, now let’s talk software. Windows for ARM has clearly come a long way, with, I think, the biggest change being added in the 24H2 version that this machine came with, the X86 compatibility layer called Prism. Prism, much like Rosetta did for the M series Macs, is a compatibility layer that means most X86 apps will run on these machines now, without developers having to make ARM versions. Performance does suffer – as an example my own DirectX code that happily runs at 1000FPS on basically any machine runs at around 600 FPS on this thing – but at least it runs! There have been a couple of programs that don’t work – namely stuff that requires very specific often CPU features, like Cinebench 2024 which in its regular X86 version requires AVX2 instruction support, which obviously an ARM chip doesn’t support (ARM being RISC, or reduced instruction set computing) – but on the whole everything (even games) run straight out the box. That’s really impressive!

Something to consider is that something Microsoft said on their docs page, “Prism is optimized and tuned specifically for Qualcomm Snapdragon Processors. Some performance features within Prism require hardware features only available in the Snapdragon X series”. That entirely makes sense – it’s why Apple could get away with making Rosetta so good, it was such a small set of hardware to support – but it also means the freedom to use any ARM chip just doesn’t exist on Windows for ARM. It isn’t really Windows for ARM, it’s Windows for Snapdragon. Oh, and it’s also worth knowing that Prism only supports user-mode code, so it doesn’t support drivers or stuff like kernel-level anti-cheat. Those things must be native ARM compiled, so basically any online multiplayer game these days is off limits until they get recompiled for ARM.

When it comes to performance, this specific machine might not be the exact best representative since it’s the lowest end version of the Snapdragon X Plus, but native performance from Cinebench 2024 (the ARM version) is pretty great. 105 points in single thread, which for context is what a 7800X3D offers, and about the same as the Ryzen AI Max 390 (the amazing chip everyone wants right now). Multi-thread isn’t quite as exciting, offering only a 6x multiplier, at 712 points in my testing. That’s the same as an i5-12400 or 8 core Apple M3, which, like, that’s not terrible, but it isn’t amazing. The 10 core version should offer a decent bit more performance, at the cost of a little more power. Sadly HWInfo doesn’t have the ability to report on this chip properly so I can’t get useful power measurements, but at least on the TDP front I think it peaks at 23W, which isn’t quite as impressive as you might think. I mean, a Ryzen AI 7 350 – a pretty comparable (actually fair bit faster) 8 core chip – runs at 28W, so this thing isn’t worlds better, something the M series chips from Apple definitely offer.

And actually speaking of efficiency it’s worth noting the battery life here. Acer claims a frankly astonishing 28 hours of battery life – I’m not sure what insane combination they expect that to be true under, but I ran a simple timer and that clocked in at 13 hours and 25 minutes. That was on 70% screen brightness the whole time, and some use writing part of this very script. Over 13 hours of usable battery life is amazing, I don’t want to undercut that, but that was doing basically nothing the whole time. More strenuous tasks will easily drain that down faster. Oh, and what’s hilarious to me is, you know that stupid bug where if you close your laptop with it connected to a charger, then disconnect the charger, the laptop will wake back up at some point and then drain itself completely flat while almost setting fire to the bag you keep it in? Yeah, THIS THING DOES THAT! I charged it fully, closed it with the charger connected, then disconnected the charger. I left it for a day over the weekend and when I got back to it, it was completely dead. Like, COME ON MICROSOFT. You make an entire new fork of Windows for low power mobile devices, AND YOU DON’T FIX BASIC STUFF LIKE THAT? Come. On.

Clearly Microsoft has spent their entire tech budget on AI stuff instead of actually useful and useable features and fixes, which is more clear than ever here. Copilot – which does include the now optional insanity that is “Recall” – is everywhere. And, like. Why? What’s the point in having a corpo-shilling version of a chat bot permanently on your PC? It doesn’t even run locally! What’s the point in that 45 TOPS NPU? Well apparently for camera effects. This thing comes with a remarkably good – but still not smartphone quality – 1440p webcam, and a few ‘AI’ effects. The problem? The AI effects are so, so bad. Let me show you.

So this is the built in camera and microphone. I found that the microphone drops out a hell of a lot, so if you see the little label I’ll put on the screen suddenly switch to ‘lav mic’ you’ll know it’s because the built in mic was silent for a lot of it. I think that’s Acer’s “PurifiedVoice 2.0” cutting it out. Amazing. From what I can tell, the mic sounds decent enough. The camera though, in really good light like this actually looks pretty nice. It’s hardly great quality, but for a built in webcam? Sure, it’s decent. In anything other than perfect light though, my god it sucks. So, so grainy. As for effects, you have two sets. Acer’s own settings, what they worryingly call “PurifiedView”, which consider of two options, either “Portrait refinement” which just makes you smoother than melted butter, or “Super sharp” which realllyyyyyyy lives up to its name. That isn’t a good thing. Or you can use the Windows “Studio Effects”. These are the true AI features, the ones that wake up the NPU and make the light built into the trackpad light up. There’s “Automatic Framing”, which is kinda cool where if you’re far enough away it’ll zoom and reframe (very slowly) to keep you central in the frame. Portrait light seems to do literally nothing. Eye contact is creepy, but does work. The background effects are just blur rather than replacement, and it’s pretty dreadful at edge detection which isn’t even something you need AI for like come on. The creative filters are just hilarious. That’s just shading, animated is the smoothing filter again, and watercolour is a weird sepia effect. These aren’t great if I’m being honest. Oh and there’s zoom, which is hilariously slow. Like what.

There are some other local AI features, like live transcription with translation. It only supports either US English or Chinese, so I guess you know who this is made for. The funny thing is that because this is live translation, this is super behind, and it’s a really pretty bad experience. It just misses words out, or flashes them up so quickly you could never read them, or occasionally it’ll just get it wrong entirely. I filmed a test clip to see how this works, and hilariously it called itself annoying – I didn’t say anything that sounded even remotely similar to ‘its annoying’ but that’s what it went with. Amazing. While I can potentially see what some of those features – namely the live translations – could be really useful once they’ve been highly, highly refined, this ain’t it chief. This isn’t selling me on the “AI future” Acer and Microsoft clearly want me to buy into. This turns me away more than anything.

So, is Windows for ARM good now? Well, I guess? I mean stuff does run on it, but good luck getting everyone who’s written software for Windows to remake it just for ARM machines – I am a Windows software developer and I have no plans to remake my programs. These Snapdragon X Plus chips aren’t even any more efficient, they seem to be at best kinda mid performance, and to make it worse, Acer has already made this thing completely irrelevant! They sell a machine almost exactly the same as this, except it has a Ryzen AI 7 350 (a faster chip with the same power usage), and a much nicer OLED panel, all for over £100 less! Why would you buy this thing when that exists? I have no idea. Is ARM the future? For desktop? I kinda doubt it, at least for the foreseeable future. For laptops on Windows? I dunno, AMD is kinda killing it right now, and those chips don’t come with any compatibility headaches. If these Snapdragon X Plus chips were the same sort of deal Apple’s M1 was – a fraction of the power consumption and better performance – then this might be a different discussion, but for basically the same power usage and more money? That’s not exactly a killer deal is it?