Fanless Windows laptops are no problem with Snapdragon ARM chips - why won't any manufacturer take the plunge?

Passively cooled and therefore silent Windows laptops have long been on our wish list. Many years ago, there were a few models, for example with low-powered Intel Atom processors. However, these required significant compromises in performance. Qualcomm's announcement of the first Snapdragon X ARM processors for Windows a few years ago raised our hopes for a passively cooled laptop with solid everyday performance. Apple has demonstrated for years that this concept works extremely well with its highly successful, fanless MacBook Air.

However, those hopes have yet to be fulfilled, as only the Microsoft Surface Pro 12 convertible combines a current Snapdragon X2 Plus SoC with a passive cooling system. Since the exact same processor uses an active cooling fan in the Surface Laptop 13, this gives us an ideal opportunity for a comparison.

The Snapdragon X2 Plus (X2P-42-100), with its six CPU cores, delivers very good single-core performance in both models, even beating current AMD Zen 5 processors and matching the fastest Intel Panther Lake chips. While its multi-core performance is not class-leading, it is more than sufficient for everyday use. Although there is a noticeable difference of around 35 percent in multi-core performance between the passively cooled Surface Pro 12 and the actively cooled Surface Laptop 13, it is barely noticeable in normal use, where single-core performance plays a much more important role.

There is therefore no real reason why laptop manufacturers are not bringing passively cooled Windows laptops to market. Even the new Googlebooks all have a fan, which makes even less sense given their restriction to Android apps. We would like to see more passively cooled devices and believe they would also be well received by customers. This applies, for example, to compact models such as the Dell XPS 13 or the Asus Zenbook 14, which are not designed to deliver the highest possible performance anyway. But what do you think: would you give up some multi-core performance for a fanless device?