On Intel, Qualcomm and the rise of the ‘productivity processor’

The PC processor industry is on the cusp of a major transition. We’re seeing the rise of what I’d call the “productivity processor,” with chips specifically designed for the work-obsessed, always-on-the-go professional. It’s a sea change in the way chip companies respond to user needs, and we’re not done yet.

We’ve talked about laptops with all-day (and more!) battery life for several years now, but without the performance to back them up. Now we have two processor families making good on the promise: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform and Intel’s Lunar Lake. These aren’t chips that just happen to offer long battery life. No, they were specifically designed to do this, from the ground up.

For me, a “productivity processor” must do two things. First, it must proficiently run office apps and surf the Web without compromises. Second, it should allow you to work without a power cable for a remarkable amount of time. This is the sea-change ingredient.

Enter Intel’s Lunar Lake. One of the reasons I tested Lunar Lake both on wall power and on battery power was to see how long the sample laptop could handle office tasks in both productivity scenarios. I performed the same tests on Microsoft’s Surface Pro (11th Edition), the first time I had been able to put Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite through its paces. I also compared the similar Surface Laptop 5th Edition, another Snapdragon X Elite processor machine, when I did my Lunar Lake testing.

I used UL’s Procyon Office applications tests, which opens Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook and performs various tests within each application. The goal isn’t to gauge how well each app performs (there’s a related test for that), but to see how long each laptop lasts. Here are my results:

Intel Lunar Lake: 17 hours, 7 minutes

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite: 16 hours, 20 minutes

AMD Ryzen AI 300: 10 hours, 42 minutes

Intel Meteor Lake: 10 hours, 35 minutes

All four processors delivered a day’s worth of work. But two were in a class by themselves—and actually respond to a cultural shift.

Think about this: Each of those laptops can last about two work days on battery alone. That’s a big payoff for the modern user who’s jumping from the cafe, to the conference room, to the train, to the backyard, to the living room and expects her laptop to still be working the next day when she starts that cycle fresh.

The new productivity laptops also charge using just a USB-C cable. This means that, over time, more people won’t go hunting for a power outlet in the increasingly rare case their laptop runs out of juice. I think the future will be in USB-C power banks that can pump a few watt-hours of juice into your laptop, giving it another few hours of life. I bought this 1.4lb, 24,000mAH Anker power brick a few years ago, and it’s been great. But it’s also overkill in this new world of long-life laptops.

But but but gaming!

It’s true that both the Snapdragon X Elite and Lunar Lake laptops don’t handle prolonged workloads well. Any app that requires constant, intensive activity—such as gaming—depletes their batteries quickly.

That’s where Intel and AMD made some smart decisions. Intel’s mobile Core HX processors fill that role nicely, with powerful, power-hungry processors that pair nicely with an external GPU. AMD’s rumored “Strix Halo” or “AI Max” mobile processors may do the same. The subtext here is that one processor family is aligning more closely with the needs of the on-the-go productivity worker (which probably accounts for most people) and the other is being designed with gamers in mind.

I’d really like to see a fusion of the two, with the new Thunderbolt 5 standard allowing those on-the-go notebooks to plug into an external GPU dock at the end of a workday. We’ll see.

I love creator-class hardware like the Surface Laptop Studio, with its discrete GPU and a hefty battery. But over time, that battery degrades. On recent trips, I’ve panicked thinking that the Studio would run out of juice. At the launch of Intel’s Lunar Lake in Berlin, I was taking notes on a Snapdragon PC.

Indeed, now with Lunar Lake and Snapdragon X Elite, we finally have silicon that makes working on the go not just a specialized application, but a mainstream commitment. Does this signal the end of “battery anxiety” forever? I hope so. I can’t wait for the day that power outlets in every seat at the airport feel as anachronistic as ashtrays.