Snapdragon Oryon, faster than Apple's M2 chip at 30% less power
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Hopefully Snapdragon will have user replaceable ram and hard drives.
But even the “old” M1 is still amazing, so if this pans out it will be awesome. But so far Qualcomm has been in the business of quantity over quality, so they’ve always cut some corners that made their chips less than high-end. Are they’re serious this time?
Man, some of you can be ruthless
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-...
How does a "mandate" like that work? What if someone uses a different PMIC? Or, what if they include one "mandated" PMIC for boot, then offload to a sane one a few hundred ms later?
A couple of different levels of mandate come to mind, some of which may overlap:
1. Qualcomm won't sell you the SoC without the appropriate number of their PMICs to support it.
2. Qualcomm's reference designs only include their PMICs, and the datasheets don't tell you what electrical requirements those parts are satisfying.
3. The reference firmware from Qualcomm expects those PMICs to be present, and will panic if they aren't.
4. Same as #3, except it's in the boot ROM.
5. Part of the power supply is internal to the SoC, and the matching Qualcomm PMIC is required to complete it.
The SemiAccurate article suggests that #1 and #2 are definitely the case, and #3-5 may be true as well.
could the OEMs pay for the QCOM PMIC but use a different PMIC in their laptop?
QCOM says no because there are proprietary protocols between the SOC (the CPU part) and the PMIC.
The QCOM PMIC, multiple of them in order to handle the workload on a laptop, would require a more expensive PCB as well.
The proprietary SOC-PMIC protocol would preclude the use of a non-QCOM PMIC.
The article states that QCOM is giving the OEMs money to placate them, more than the actual revenue from the PMICs. But that won't help the power usage of the system.
So look carefully at the power usage benchmarks for the new QCOM-powered laptops.
They’ll tie their SoC to some other random part, invent some proprietary protocol to brand it with, and then get upset when you say you don’t want the extras. I’m sure there are some technical advantages to their solutions, but they’re just as often bloated and not appropriate for the design.
We all know that chip vendors don’t exactly write the best code, that’s expected. But inviting even more proprietary drivers or even blobs(!), for a solution that sales says will just work and solve all our problems, is usually a risky move. Heavily modifying or reimplementing boot code and drivers is an inevitability, and no engineer who’s been through that is going to invite more blobs into their codebase if they can avoid it.
“Over the summer, reports popped up that Qualcomm was requiring the use of its power management integrated circuits (PMICs) with the Oryon-based processors. Kondap said that Qualcomm's PMICs are "an option for OEMs to choose," and that the company has been providing them for "many years now."”
For example, just partner with one of the popular game companies, let's say Riot Games, and natively compile one of their games and show side by side against a competitors CPU how much more FPS Oryon gets, or how much more the battery life goes on.
It doesn't even have to be a game, they could have shown a video export or compilation of a big code base...
If it's over a variety of tasks and/or in a task that's similar to real world computation, kudos to them!
I am very much in the jaded camp of "tomorrow, all beer is free" when it comes to product announcements that no normal person can purchase
Diablo 4, Baldur’s Gate 3, etc run great with it
The Deck is successful as it is because it requires very little effort from developers to adequately support. As long as they implement full controller support and avoid certain problematic middleware, their plain old Windows builds will most likely run on it just fine without modification. Once you start asking them to deploy separate builds on a different architecture, the whole thing will fall apart.
If it worked as well as a mac did and had the same or better battery life.
I've been sorely tempted to pick up a refurb off eBay, they're only about $500. Supposedly can run Linux OK too.
Right now, AMD ThinkPads are better. They are fast, run cool, and have pretty long battery. Still far from >18 h you can get from an M2, but can go ~11 h easily.
Hopefully Snapdragons can become a compelling alternative. Personally, I think they need to be much better than x86_64 to be worth the switch, as some software does not run so well on ARM.
let's see how this matches up to m2 / m3 vs the amd 7840u series chips too in terms of performance vs power draw.
people soon will be spoilt for choice. no more noisy laptops.
Couldn't see the thread, no account =/ Twitter is so broken these days...
Addon to redirect automatically: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/nitter-redirect/
https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1716902706621866487 takes you to the specific slide, but https://nitter.net/IanCutress/status/1716902706621866487 takes you to the top of the thread.
Still, a lot better than enshittified-twitter. Similar extension for Chrome users: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...
They should've just added an anchor and made the browser scroll to it.
If you only look at Twitter, Twitter's all you're going to see.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38005867
It indeed is much more readable than Twitter.
If it was true it would have been reported elsewhere.
Though there’s some sleight of hand in that they appear to do that while allowing two of their cores to boost really high, count the ST perf of the boosted cores while claiming efficiency on the whole SoC.
So it’s true and not at the same time.
That's why you have to look at extensive, detailed benchmarks and see which ones are closest to your workload and pick what's right for you.