The Snapdragon X Elite aims to make your Windows PC better than a Mac | Hacker News Reader

The Snapdragon X Elite aims to make your Windows PC better than a Mac

xda-developers.com

26 pointsxgdgsc24 comments

I'm not a fan of Apple's, but people pinning their hopes and dreams of a real high performance ARM competitor on Qualcomm making fast chips seems like a bad plan.

They have consistently under-delivered on chip performance, and have no issue weaseling benchmark numbers to sell them, leaving consumers highly unhappy once they buy the thing.

They also make Apple look like open source zealots when it comes to openness.

2 years ago Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, which was founded by chip people who left Apple. That's why people have more hope now than in the past, these are supposed to be the first chips developed by the new team.

I can't imagine Apple ever rewarding its silicon designers enough to keep them from jumping to a more lucrative arrangement, possibly with more autonomy as well (in this case founding a company and being acquired by Qualcomm.)

Which I guess is good for the industry as a whole.

Qualcomm has not been consistent. They were, but the most recent generation has been a jump back into relevance.

> The company also noted that it'll offer 50% better multithreaded performance than an Apple M2, but didn't speak on single-core CPU performance.

Single threaded performance - https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1716904403259834529

VS Apple M2 Max: 14% faster at 30% less power

VS Intel i9-13980HK: 1% faster at 70% less power

No, that's not what it said.

It's 30% less power at the SAME speed. It's not clear what power comparisons are with Oryon running at max clock.

Also, Oryon is a SoC in between M2 and M2 Pro. It's comparing itself to M2 Max for certain workloads and then M2 for others. It should be comparing itself to M2/M2 Pro only which means efficiency would be a bit better for Apple Silicon.

Also, it's not clear how they're coming up with the power. Is it the entire laptop? Just the SoC? Package power with RAM? Only the core?

Qualcomm's slide put Oryon chips at 50-55 watts but M2 Pro/Max runs at 35w - 40w max. I think we should take Qualcomm's slides with skepticism until real machines get shipped.

Apple added instructions and a whole storage mode (ie. TSO) to make emulating x86 faster. Has Qualcomm done something similar?

what were the added instructions that were added? The only things I was aware of were TSO and adding back partial support for smaller page sizes

Linux users will benefit the use of these chips but Windows users will have to understand what it means to use arm as a processor. Most windows users will not and only complain about the speed when the transpiler needs to kick in for most of the apps they run...

> Linux users will benefit the use of these chips

But will the Linux kernel be locked forever at a specific version because it was heavily forked by Qualcomm to make it work with this chipset, and will the chipset require a lot of proprietary blobs, like in the Android world?

I would very much like to have a power-efficient and powerful laptop, but this would reduce a lot my enthusiasm for such laptop powered by this chipset.

If it wasn't it wouldn't be Qualcomm. Come on, do you know one current Snapdragon phone with a totally upstreamed kernel ? Or even a not-so-recent phone (say less than 5 years old) ? Or even an ancient phone ?

Nope. So how do you think your "Snapdragon X Elite" laptop will work under Linux ? Well it won't.

Correct me if I am wrong but Qualcomms previous high end laptop chip, the 8cx Gen 3, is supported in the regular Linux kernel.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.20-SoCs-8cx-Gen3-Arm

Not everything works but yes, you're right it's better now than last time I had a look: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Thinkpad/X13s

I've not used it personally, but the current Windows 10/11 ARM64 releases come with a Rosetta-like comparability layer for both 64 and 32 bit x86 application binaries and I've heard pretty good things about it.

> The Snapdragon X Elite aims to make your Windows PC better than a Mac

What are they replacing Windows with?

Potentially good news perhaps for the future of Hackintosh. Contributors have got ryzen integrated GPU hardware accelerated with new drivers, so perhaps MacOS ARM on non-apple silicon is a possibility.

Anyone know if there will be a Dev Kit 2024 for this?

But when will Windows Arm properly finished with all pro applications compiled in arm (for example, All Adobe apps) ?

https://is-windows-on-arm-ready.vercel.app/ has a list. As the chip performance is great, running x86 apps could have adequate performance for many people. I' m using a 8cx gen3 2in1 laptop as a vscode remote client. It can run Android apps and linux subsystem and Windows apps altogether. Even the CPU is worse than Snapdragon X by a lot, it can connect 3 displays altogether (2K+2K+4K) and have greate battery life. The only things drawing windows on arm experince back is Modern Standby that makes work session recovery from suspend not as stable as my M2 Max macbook pro. And x86 drivers not supported by the transpiling layer.

This is a valid point. Windows on ARM currently lacks the native app ecosystem that macOS has, and won't be "better than Mac" until the apps catch up.

Because Apple has a Mac monopoly and customer lock-in, it was able to drag its developers and users into the bold new ARM era, solving both the supply and demand side. Of course shipping a killer product (M1 Macs) at just the right time certainly helped. (And iOS/iPadOS devs were already using ARM with Apple's APIs, languages and tools, so now they have an even more streamlined path to the Mac side.)

Kind of weird that Apple, and not Microsoft, succeeded in leveraging their desktop OS and APIs into the mobile space.

Ask the people behind those apps.

OTOH Microsoft partly did this to themselves by encouraging native proprietary software. That's where they pushed their ecosystem.

Yes, native is their thing, Windows isn't a WASM platform (or the like).

We managed to move from x86 to amd64. We'll do the same with RISC-V.

Can't say about ARM, I personally find it just a distraction that'll pass.

Hasn't Microsoft long been pushing for everything new to be written in .NET, which is a virtual machine like Java?

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