Snapdragon X Series chips are heading to PCs to take on Apple's processors | Hacker News Reader

Snapdragon X Series chips are heading to PCs to take on Apple's processors

liliputing.com

49 pointsPaulHoule49 comments

One of the veery nice properties of the PC world is that CPUs are rather well documented, you can write drivers, a full OS, really low-level code for performance. Qualcom on the contrary has a secrecy culture which makes its SoC quite unappealing for the developers.

+1. This is one of the most underappreciated things about the x86 CPU ecosystem. The documentation is usually solid, and all the Linux drivers are fully open-source and well maintained. Both AMD and Intel are almost always among the top contributors to each Linux kernel release. Hopefully Qualcomm follows suit, and does better than they do with Android... Closed source driver blobs are the worst. I personally wouldn't buy a desktop computer that doesn't at least have an option of running fully with open source drivers.

> The company says those Oryon cores will bring “a quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency,”

Oh, that's unfortunate; ideally it would be strictly better and more than a Planck length improvement.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-06-01

Borrowing from the Sinclair QL?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL

It did not do well, but not due to the name. Brilliant commercial though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO5BUIKykMM

My hope is that framework will make a mainboard for this. I would really love to try ARM on a laptop without having to get a Mac (even though they are great devices!)

There are several Arm Chromebooks from Lenovo, Samsung, Acer, Asus, Hp, etc...

Beware of the amazon affiliate links but here is a list I found:

https://www.linuxmadesimple.info/2019/08/all-chromebooks-wit...

My first chromebook 10+ years ago used a Samsung Exynos (ARM Crotex-A15 IIRC).

It was made out of cheap plastic, tried hard to look like a macbook air. But it worked really well with chromeos and the battery life was excellent. Boot time was like half a second.

I'm guessing you mean high performance ARM in a laptop, since there have been many low-end options for a while, such as the Pinebook Pro.

Using Linux on ARM SoCs is a pain in the ass.

I sincerely hope that this means a lot more choices of good ARM based computers. While I am a happy Apple-user, or rather because I am, I want more great ARM chips on the market. I still remember the great times in the 80ies and 90ies, where a lot of different CPU architectures were competing with each other. Having more competition should be good in several aspects.

Perhaps the community will manage to get it to run Linux. Software availability for ARM is one area where Linux beats Windows. Let's hope not to see Qualcomm's usual shenanigans around hardware/drivers in PC chips.

> Perhaps the community will manage to get it to run Linux.

You should expect Qualcomm to contribute support to the kernel for Snapdragon X, as they've done with several predecessor SoCs. I would be surprised if it was not already running Linux inside of Qualcomm.

Of course, Qualcomm's got room for improvement here but IMO they're moving in the right direction.

[disclaimer: I work for qualcomm]

Qualcomm's mainline Linux support has been abysmal as far as I know. Community got some support upstreamed.

My understanding is that they're awful for Android but quite good with Chromebooks, so there is hope (w.r.t. mainline Linux support)

n.b. caveat lector and PMIC seems to be "power management integrated circuit"

from https://semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-qual...:

"Things started to go off the rails early for Oryon, not for design reasons but for idiotic corporate greed reasons. Qualcomm wants to sell more of their PMICs and Qryon seemed like a good vehicle to do it so they force bundled the two products. This is hardly unprecedented behavior although it is market distorting and ensures that the end result will be less than it could be. More on this in a bit but just realize the PMICs are not picked for merit, they were chosen because Qualcomm makes more money that way, quality of the final product be damned. Remember the crack above about Microsoft?

Back to the story, there was an issue with said PMICs. Basically they are cell phone PMICs and Oryon is not a cell phone SoC. Why is this an issue? You might be aware that cell phones and laptops require differing wattages, and not by a little. Those cell phone PMICs are optimized for phone currents, running them at laptop levels is far less efficient than engineers would prefer. But it can be made to work. The sane answer is to use a less expensive off the shelf PMIC that would result in a more efficient end product. Since that would also have the effect of making Qualcomm less money, efficiency be damned, Qualcomm PMICs it is. But…"

read the article for the rest of the sad own-goal story...

I have a Lenovo X13s snapdragon (previous generation) laptop and love it. Very few compatiblity problems and everything runs fast enough. Really looking forward to the X series.

Sure the chips may be “faster” but Qualcomm has historically not documented a their SoCs well, making a Linux port rather difficult and Windows on ARM sucks.

...I don't get why. The Windows PC market is both much smaller than the android phone market, and generally lower end in terms of hardware and pricing. Apple sells boutique, expensive machines—but even still, their real money is in the phones.

So what would Qualcomm get out of this?

Pivot existing expertise and engineering into new segments before someone else does. Also, I would expect that having Windows on ARM would shift the loose Windows-Android connection into something more robust, which only stands to aid Android in gaining/maintaining market share.

Laptops, phones, and tablets increasingly convergent segments, but x86 devices are sitting on the sidelines waiting to be rendered completely irrelevant in applications with battery life concerns.

Does anyone actually run windows on arm in any meaningful day to day job?

I love my Thinkpad X13s for day to day netadmin work. The hardware is absolutely solid and gorgeous and it performs quite well for the work I do. And while it's not strictly an ARM-only exclusive, the onboard UWB 5G is a delight on the road between client sites. Battery life is finally usable for me as well on the road with my weird requirements (like a visual light defect in my eyes making me basically demand full backlighting all the time).

It's good, it's fast, but it's not cheap.

Every Surface Pro X does, i bet. Mine does.

I think with the end of Microsoft's deal with Qualcomm we will see drastically more ARM devices, just because it would make it easier to run on Macs

> it would make it easier to run on Macs

But Apple doesn't ask HP or Dell to make its laptops. And Apple uses their own SoCs exclusively. So I don't think it would change anything other than some mild effect -- helping a larger shift in the developer ecosystem to make more developers accustomed to developing on ARM.

but why do consumers care?

their x86 laptops are fast enough

they probably get as much battery life as they practically need

ARM cpus likely won't change the price much

Microsoft and everyone else has to support x86 until doomsday no matter what

so why should a consumer pick one?

They certainly aren't power efficient enough, the main reason I hear people want PC laptops is they think they're going to play games on them, which is kind of the opposite.

Of course that is self-purchased laptops by young people; it doesn't really apply to cases where a school buys them.

It would enable Microsoft to sell Windows licences to use Windows on Macs. Right now you can't buy Windows for Mac.

Are you describing a "hackintosh" like configuration? Because that could be feasible but this would not happen commercially. First off: the Windows on ARM port was shipping on laptops/tablets to Apple shipping their first M1 devices. Apple wouldn't support a configuration running Windows on their laptop and Microsoft doesn't sell Windows for use on some system that the vendor didn't intend to have it. Windows is not Asahi Linux.

Microsoft had a PPC port of NT, and it never was a commercial offering for Powerbooks. Despite the fact that it could work, you couldn't get it out-of-the-box. And Microsoft obviously had x86 support and Windows-on-x86 macbooks was never a supported configuration by Microsoft nor Apple.

> Apple wouldn't support a configuration running Windows on their laptop and Microsoft doesn't sell Windows for use on some system that the vendor didn't intend to have it.

They did on x86; Windows runs fine on Apple hardware with Boot Camp with support from both Apple and Microsoft. Why would ARM be any different?

Microsoft explicitly links to Apples documentation on how to install Windows on MacBook's [1].

Microsoft is of cause selling Windows for any system, they don't care what it is running on (ignoring the deal with Qualcomm for ARM). Apple also explicitly tells you how to install Windows on MacBooks [2] (the intel ones, not the newer ones, as Microsoft hasn't released a ARM Windows edition so far).

Until recently everything you say wouldn't be feasible was working exactly as I described and I don't see why we can't go back to that state when the exclusive deal for Qualcomm ends.

[1]https://support.microsoft.com/de-de/topic/installieren-von-w... [2]https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201468

I do. (Disclaimer: I work at qualcomm and am a part of a "dogfooding" effort). It's certainly adequate for the work I'm doing - which involves developing on/for linux, so I'm logging in to the development systems remotely. So locally I'm running things like a browser, IM, MS Outlook.

I'm looking forward to Snapdragon X, there's definitely occasions where it feels like I could use some more local perfomance.

One of the irritating things is that there's no native Chrome release for Windows-on-ARM. MS suggests that we use Edge but I'm quite comfortable with Chrome. So I use Chromium instead and it's great except it seems to be missing some DRM magic or something and therefore anything like gif files or webp and most videos on most websites can't be played back. However youtube does seem to be clever enough to see the browser's limitations and transcode/filter the content to something acceptable to Chromium. If I want to see those videos I switch to Edge.

From what I've heard about Oryon, there's lots of complaints from OEMs about poor performance and battery use due to strange restrictions Qualcomm put on the power delivery system. They're effectively requiring a set of mobile power solutions in parallel to meet higher power requirements. This increases the design cost, and is inefficient.

Looking at surface pro x, I really don't see the arm advantage. Battery life is not that different from intel models while having much less compatibility

Does this have the same x86-like memory ordering that the M series have to speed up translated x8y code.

"Snapdragon" is a brand associated with poor performance, like Intel's "Atom" brand. Qualcomm should kill it off and start a new name or, better yet, change their name so people will forget that Qualcomm is associated with bad performing chips in general.

Really? I associate it with the highest performing mobile CPU that’s not Apple. Is there a line of CPUs that outperforms them for high end mobile?

Mediatek's Dimensity flagship series was ahead of Qualcomm 1-2 generations ago, at least by some metrics (if you care at all about battery life.) Not sure about now. Qualcomm made a big jump after stagnating for generations.

>"Snapdragon" is a brand associated with poor performance

By whom, you? By my experience is the best performance/money smartphone CPU with decent support. What else do you buy Mediatek? Allwinner? Those are the "Atom" CPUs

Unfortunately, Snapdragon is today an almost generic term that doesn't indicate much.

The SD 808 was one of the worst mobile processors in history. The 865 and 625 among the best. 888 and Gen 1 both terrible. Gen 1+ and Gen 2 amazing.

downsides of Windows software compatibility will trump performance or battery life upsides

Windows is effectively x86 forever

as bad as things are for Intel, I doubt they are losing sleep over this

All things are effectively monopolies forever, until they're not. Facebook is undefeatable except that all the kids stopped using it. Google is printing money, but technically savvy people all know it's shit at answering search queries anymore. And on and on. x86 is too much of a juggernaut to overcome, except that most people just interact with internet browsers now, and the pace of security research means that legacy software is a big liability.

Or unless you get the government to take anti-trust action 'against' you at your zenith, a la Standard Oil.

x86 is not a monopoly

Pardon my lazy shorthand. Dominant systems/players/schemes seem unbeatable until they aren't (typically related to the hubris associated with being dominant.)

Rosetta example proves this is just a money barrier

Something like Rosetta is not expensive to develop, and ARM Windows has an equivalent I believe.

ARMCE executable format as well, but developers have to care to recompile.

Have you actually used Windows on ARM? It works incredibly well, I'm not sure where you got this notion from. x86/amd64 automatic translation is almost completely seamless.

Windows isn't The Problem here, it's Qualcomm being a tire fire and being leagues behind Apple. It's wild how they have managed to have such a stranglehold on the entire ARM architecture via patents, all so they can enable Apple to wipe the floor with them

I suppose if you have the OS and web browser running natively on ARM, it's tolerable to run non-CPU-intensive software through a translation layer.

And yeah it's pretty good, I was able to run some creaky old VB6 program on Windows for ARM64.

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