System on a Chip
System-on-a-chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines all the essential components of a computer on a singlular chip. SoCs have been popular in the mobile industry as you could combine the CPU, GPU, memory and other components on one chip leading to better power efficiency and space savings. This resulted in the boom of lighter, smaller, and longer lasting phones. Recently system on a chip design have begun to invade the computer market for the same benefits.
Apple had made a huge surge in SoC computers with their M1, M2, M3, and now M4 procesors. These chips were extremely succesful rocking the laptop market with extremely thin, light, and powerful laptops that boast better battery life as well. Window based computers have recently tried to jump on this train with ARM based SoC designs. While the computers have had impressive performance reviews a lot of windows apps have not been ported from the x86 architecture that AMD and Intel use to the newer ARM architecture. The lack of porting has led to new Windows devices not being fully capable of efficiently running some apps, leading to increased performance in some and slower speeds in other. I believe that this it is just a factor of time before SoC becomes dominant for mobile computer devices and I am interested to see what happens next.