Asus ExpertBook B3 Detachable (B3000): Windows 11 brings significant progress to the ARM platform

ARM processors are still quite rare in the PC market. Apple has almost completely dominated the market with its M-series CPUs. Processors featuring the power-efficient architecture remain a small niche amongst other manufacturers and in the Windows segment as a whole. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the ARM CPUs available for Windows PC have left a lot to be desired until this point. Secondly, the small market share has created an issue with compatibility, as most Windows apps are only written for the x86 architecture. Even though Windows 10 on ARM was given emulation capability, it only worked for 32-bit programs.

We have once again done an in-depth review on a Windows on ARM device, the Asus ExpertBook B3 Detachable (B3000). The CPU problem has definitely not yet been resolved, seeing that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 in the laptop is extremely slow. In this regard, all hopes are perhaps now on the Qualcomm Nuvia chips, which are expected to launch in late 2023.

That said, the Asus ExpertBook B3 Detachable showcases another crucial improvement, namely on the software side. Windows 11 is the driver of this development: Microsoft has added support for the emulation of 64-bit applications for the first time with the new version of Windows. As a result, more software applications are now able to run on ARM-based systems than ever before.

You can see this very well in our benchmarks: whereas older ARM-based devices (such as the Microsoft Surface Pro X) were only able to run a few of our Windows benchmarks, the majority of the testing tools worked on the ExpertBook.

Windows on ARM is still not ready to take the mainstream market by storm, despite the launch of some exciting new products this year, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. Nonetheless, there are signs that the platform is slowly on its way to success after years of struggling.