Microsoft: Laptops with Snapdragon X Elite Will Be Faster Than M3 MacBook Air | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft: Laptops with Snapdragon X Elite Will Be Faster Than M3 MacBook Air

macrumors.com

41 pointstosh82 comments

MacBook Air level M3, not MacBook Pro. "Our best chip which isn't released yet is better than the competitors entry level model which is already in market" isn't that much of a brag.

Sure, it may not be very competitive, but given the context which is the performance and efficiency for x86 and previous Qualcomm CPUs, this would be a big leap. Even if it cannot match M-series Pro chips for a while, it could change the landscape quite a bit, because you know what, most people don't actually need or care about Pro level performance.

I don't care who is the best, I care about having enough performance, and performance per dollar. And this is enough performance for many things. It's a useful thing to say (though how useful depends on battery life).

This has been Qualcomm's claim with each of the Snapdragon powered Surfaces Microsoft has released. Even then the claim is hedged about running specific benchmarks. Real world performance of these systems hasn't seemed to beat the compared to Apple systems.

Not to mention that the Air is fanless

I wonder how much of this is raw performance and how much is windows is an unoptimized ad and tracking filled mess compared to MacOS.

And that benchmark is running at 80w...

Apple and third party developers were collectively much better prepared to transition to ARM, to the point that it was totally seamless. Developers were experienced with ARM on iOS, and Apple had a robust dual-binary & backward compatibility system to make sure all apps ran smoothly.

I don't anticipate this level of compatibility with Arm on Windows. You're going to get your new machine, and many if not most of your apps won't run. The intel simulator performance will suffer.

Sometimes the migration path needs even more investment than the end product.

I think it's also a chicken and egg problem. How many people have Windows ARM laptops, and how much incentive / how easy is it for developers to make their apps ARM-native?

There was some talk earlier about the Windows equivalent to 'fat-binaries', the new ABI and executable format.

http://www.emulators.com/docs/abc_arm64ec_explained.htm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39806746

You're right. In those cases a lot of up-front investment needs to be made to hit critical mass

I agree with you. But you don’t need to anticipate, right? This is like attempt number, what, 4 for Windows on ARM? Or maybe we could see this as a continuation of one of their previous failures.

Windows will never leave x86. The only reason to use Windows is that it is the legacy platform for x86 PC type programs.

The first year or two were a mess with support for Apple. I remember as late as 2023 to struggle with running certain, modern, tech stacks on the MBP M1.

It is only within the last year that I feel like the ecosystem has entirely cought up.

Obviously MS will benefit from this, if they are able to run, eg., arm64 docker images etc.

I didn’t hear consumer complaining about it much.

I recall people complaining about things like… was it docker? Other dev tools. But programmers are a niche, and a technically competent niche that can both get into trouble and find other solutions. It is essentially the opposite of consumer support.

A consumer is happy as long as they can run Edge on their computer and log in to Facebook. They will not complain about windows on ARM either.

However, we can definitely agree that certain sectors will struggle more with Windows on ARM. My intuition is that a lot of really conservative industries run on windows. Some with a bespoke program for Windows 95 they still keep running on XP.

If I wipe the windows as usual, ARM Linux should scream on here. With the usual new machine driver drama.

That would require drivers, though. With Qualcomm producing the CPUs, we'll probably need an Ahasi-scale project to make Linux usable on these devices, and that won't happen unless Windows on ARM takes off.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-ARM-Changes

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Snapdragon-8-Gen-3-Linux-6.8

> Granted, this is just about the SoC support and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices of upcoming smartphones/devices will still need their respective Device Tree files added to the kernel along with any other peripheral driver support or pieces like the Qualcomm AI engine we haven't seen open-source patches for yet.

Another article seems to go into more detail (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-Mainline-Linux-2024):

> But still a work-in-progress is audio support, DP Alt-Mode, enabling the DSPs, USB-C power delivery, and GPU acceleration.

Hopefully the hardware is similar enough to older models that it's not too difficult to port existing open source GPU drivers, but with Qualcomm, I'll believe it when I see it.

I'm more concerned about drivers than apps, because that's where you'll absolutely need native ARM builds rather than being able to fall back on emulation.

extremely good point. Also drivers can be even more disruptive. You have a scanner you use 1 / mo but for a critical business. Everything's great on your new Arm / Windows laptop and then you find out the 5 y/o scanner driver doesn't work. Your meeting is in the morning.

Not sure about modern Windows, but on modern MacOS and Linux, at least, drivers for things like scanners and printers are generally user-mode, so can run under Rosetta-type stuff.

I'm not an expert, but it seems that Windows does have a framework call User-Mode Driver Framework, but that wouldn't help with the bulk of conventional drivers that were written in kernel-mode. Going forward it could help though but that would take years

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/w...

Microsoft sabotaged their ARM ecosystem decades ago with their restrictive policies. The reality is that getting most Windows applications to run on ARM will be as simple as a re-compile. If Windows on ARM is unsuccessful it won't be due to technical issues but rather social ecosystem issues.

As simple as a recompile, which is not simple at all when you have a ton of third-party dependencies that are closed-source. Some applications will have (or already had) an easy time porting, while others will be forever stuck in x86 DLL hell.

ARM64EC is one of Microsoft's mediation to this. It allows incremental porting of applications to ARM.

The reality is that getting most Windows applications to run on ARM will be as simple as simply running them

Never had all that much of an issue running pretty much anything with Arm Windows on Apple Silicon.

I think it's much easier to do if you're abandoning video games entirely, something that would make no sense for windows. The only reason I'd buy a non-amd64 PC is if it's better at running amd64 software than amd64 processors.

Having seen what box64 can do on my phone, I don't think it'd be that terrible. The graphics intensive system calls are all native system library code. The CPU parts will run slower, of course, but if they can beat the M3, I don't think the result would be all that bad.

ARM has tremendous efficiency benefits. I'd happily trade off top-line performance for 3x battery life and no fans

i read this with a smile while program under rosetta crashes for the third time today

Another good comparison is WSL on windows vs Unix interface on MacOS. Ignore the technical limitations for a sec and just think about the user experience.

WSL is far less usable due to hardware, networking and filesystem inconsistencies when compared to MacOS's complete native integration.

Now I like WSL and use it as my daily driver, but the UX is not complete enough for mass market.

This ARM transition needs to be utterly seamless. 100% compatibility, 100% performance within a year and double-click ease of use

Really I find the exact opposite issue. Way to many things have started to differ between Mac and Linux for Mac to be of any real value. It's actually a negative in a lot of ways because it's close enough to trick you.

I've had to switch to just native linux but when I don't have my work laptop WSL works perfectly for all our tests while Mac fails.

It's a valid concern that linux devs should be aware of , and a reason I use Windows (If 90% of my work is in a linux vm, why pay $2000 more for the privilege with less flexibility).

Part of this is that a lot of things have become a lot more tightly coupled with Linux in the past couple decades. OS X Snow Leopard, often positioned as the “best” macOS release, also had a number of significant differences from Linux, but those differences were more frequently accounted for in software.

Historically, a lot of it was simply Linux vs BSD differences, but nowadays there's a growing gap from Apple's unwillingness to ship any GPL3 code, leaving them with some tools either stuck in time or replaced with alternatives.

I don't get it, WSL is fundamentally not a mass market feature. Meanwhile the "Unix interface" on MacOS is ancient stuff that everyone who actually wants to use it immediately replaces wholesale with something from brew or whatever is en vogue.

You're right in some sense. The Unix interface (Darwin) is the POSIX api & toolchain that Homebrew tools are built on . Yes the included CLI tools are primitive. That Homebrew works so well IMO is a testament to Darwin

"Unix interface on MacOS" which is OSX being basically built off of Free/Net BSD, is so broken that it spawned brew.

IMO Homebrew's success is a testament to the compatibility layer. All of the modern "linux" tools run natively (resident, same FS, Network, hardware) on MacOS and the patches are minimal.

I think the reference to Homebrew may have been using it as a cautionary tale, not a success story. ie. implying the Unix environment that OS X/macOS provides is so messed up that even a project attempting to remedy the shortcomings ended up producing the rather unhinged brew.

I think GP understands that and just disagrees with it.

Brew looks pretty much like a package manager that has to handle binary distributions alongside ports-style source distributions across a range of OS versions and releases and two instruction sets needs to look. It’s a bigger problem than apt purports to solve, for example, more along the lines of FreeBSD with pkg/ports having to coexist via poudriere.

But since nobody really has said why they think it’s ‘unhinged’ that’s just speculation ;)

I don’t think of what MacOS UNIX offers as being equivalent to WSL at all. One is MacOS and the other is Linux and the two are definitely not the same.

MacOS is a nice OS but if you expect it to be Linux you will have a bad time.

Seamless? How long was it that you couldn't even run Docker?

Of course, the headline doesn't answer the other half of this equation: power efficiency. (Because, yeah, AMD also makes a faster CPU, but you better bring a power adapter.) So a few paragraphs in we have:

"MacBooks with Apple silicon also offer industry-leading performance-per-watt, while the Snapdragon X Elite will likely run hotter and require laptops with fans."

MacBook Airs don't have fans.

The headline obviously can't answer everything, otherwise it wouldn't be called a headline.

The body does address power efficiency.

> There are a few caveats here, including that (...) MacBooks with Apple silicon also offer industry-leading performance-per-watt, while the Snapdragon X Elite will likely run hotter and require laptops with fans.

I say this completely in jest, with a smile on my face: what, you could not be bothered to read my whole comment? You quoted exactly what I quoted. :-)

Exactly. Did you expect a headline with that length?

No, that was the whole purpose of my comment, and why I quoted from the article. Now I'm starting to feel like I'm missing a joke. :-)

I just bought a loaded M3 15" Air, and it's a fantastic laptop in nearly every way. While I don't notice much CPU performance difference from the M2 MBA it replaced (Had a 13" before, but decided I wanted something bigger), I don't want there to be an Intel situation with Apple, and have them get complacent.

So this is great news, because competition should be fierce, and all of us will be the benefactors of that.

Don’t worry, Microsoft will find plenty of new background processes to spin up. Users won’t be faced with the confusing task of finding useful applications to run on their lap warmers.

That's fine and I appreciate this progress, but right now performance is way below energy efficiency to me when choosing a laptop. My major question is, how long will the battery last between each charge. I just don't want to worry anymore about charging when travelling for a few hours.

I’ll echo that. Laptops have been “fast enough” for a long time, which is why I can break out an Core 2 Duo laptop from 2008 and still get a lot done with it, but somehow despite far better process nodes and battery tech, battery life is on average worse today than it was in 2014, which is just goofy.

> but somehow despite far better process nodes and battery tech, battery life is on average worse today than it was in 2014, which is just goofy

Not trying to make excuses for shitty laptop vendors but the CPU power usage is just a fraction of a laptop's power envelope. The GPU, RAM, controllers, storage, and display (including driver circuitry) all eat up power. Their usage is exacerbated if the OS can't sleep or otherwise throttle those components during times of low demand.

Apple's pretty good about managing whole system power. It's gotten "easier" for them with Apple Silicon since everything is a SoC that they control. On x86 machines the vendor is just leveraging the components they get from Intel or AMD. The vendor's control is limited to what the drivers expose.

Often times different components' behavior or stability can change with different power modes. Vendors will just lock the device to high power mode to avoid those pitfalls at the cost of battery life for the user.

I’m eager to see these. I bought a regular windows machine for the first time in decades to see how WSL works for my development work and have been pleased. My only gripe is the power efficiency compared to my Apple Silicon machine. If they can come anywhere near the Apple silicon devices in that dimension, I’m likely to switch over (which feels really weird after 26 years in Apple-land, but I’ve lost my patience with them over the last few MacOS versions).

"Performance" is a marketing term and is meaningless without details. "Faster" means nothing without context.

We need to know the exact workload, the peak performance numbers, the sustained performance numbers, the heat output, etc, etc. People who gloss over these details, probably aren't interested in choosing the right product for the application, but just selecting a "Good" product.

And then you're stuck using Windows.

The overwhelming majority of the world uses Windows to get stuff done.

Another day, another HN user speaks as if Windows is the end of the world and cannot imagine other people using Windows.

The reality is that even among developers, there are a ton of Windows users (for work or personal use). I don't know if there is an accurate number, but if we trust Stackoverflow survey, there are likely more people that use Windows than Mac for personal device. They are just not as loud and talking about this operating system is better than other options.

I came here to make a similar comment. I only have an M1 and I can't really think of anything I need it to be faster for. I've got a Windows 11 PC next to me right now that I only bought for gaming and I still find myself fighting with its incessant need to pipe literally every piece of data it can get its hands on up to Daddy Satya.

Let's say by chance Snapdragon is everything MS says it will be and more.

Who cares? If you're only using Windows for whatever reason, now you'll have a faster Windows. If you're not, "it's faster than M3" is not in and of itself any reason to use it.

qualcomm had demos of snapdragon elite x laptops running debian with 3d stuf going on.

It's not released yet, why so much negativity?

People bond over shared negativity.

I think that for many people they want to feel they made the best choice in what they purchased, so when someone says something else is better, they defensively try to shoot it down, so that they can remain feeling good about their decision.

Occasionally I find people get surprised when I don’t engage in pointless “well my different (but largely equivalent) thing is actually better” debates.

A lot of the “holy” wars are like this, iOS vs Android, Windows vs macOS vs Linux, tabs vs spaces, programming language/framework choices, etc

Really, I’m happy for you to use what makes you happy and please let me do the same without it irrationally bugging you, even though it has no effect on you.

Real reason is that most of HN crowd is biased for Apple.

Some computers that will exist in the future will be faster than some computers that exist today. Story at 11.

80W elite 10C cpu is faster than the passively-cooled 10W 4C CPU? you don't say

Does this mean we will soon see ARM based Linux Desktops?

Chromebooks are essentially that. You need some hacks to get non-Google desktop environments to run, but Chromebooks are how Google brought Linux to mainstream laptops.

Currently I can run PopOS using Parallels, which runs surprisingly well!

What I want is a computer with 64-128GB RAM, a really fast CPU and a coprocessor that does parallel computations (let's call it an AI chip like everybody else) so that I can run ollama / complex Elixir live books etc.

So far the Mac books fit the bill. But I really like PopOS and would really adore to run it on some beefy ARM laptop.

RaspberryPI? If you mean ATX-factor then you can go and buy something like this Ampere Altra.[1] Probably better off putting Asahi Linux on a Mac Studio though, as the CPU upgradability is going to be limited regardless.

[1] https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platfor...

Laptops, sorry, not Desktops.

And I would also want something that performs better than Raspberry Pie.

They've been around for 7+ years with Raspberry Pi

and chromebooks

You are both technically correct - the best form of correct.

It seems like raspberry pi maxes out at 8GB of RAM, which effectively will not allow me to work. I also do not plan run Google's OS for chromebooks, and it seems like installing other OSs is a hassle on the chromebooks.

In essence I want the specs of a MBP M3 Max with 128GB of ram, just running PopOS.

[dupe]

Some more discussion on actual article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39971753

It's about more than the speed of the chips, Apple is simply more capable and willing to commit harder to transitioning to ARM native than Microsoft is.

Also as bad as MacOS is, Windows has aggressively been trashing their OS with adware to the extent that I have to assume Microsoft has lost confidence in the future of Windows and is attempting to cash in - and why would I invest my time into a platform the developer doesn't believe in?

Also compared to say 10 years ago, the amount of software which I need Windows for has absolutely plummeted.

Yet, Adobe Photoshop, that legacy business app from Windows 7 days and your new AAA title remains Windows-only. Overwhelming majority of people have just 1 (one) application which would prevent them from getting out of the worst backwards compatible application platform that is Windows. It’s really amusing.

News to me that Photoshop is a Windows exclusive.

As for legacy business apps, I’ve been part of more conversion/virtualization projects than you can shake a stick at and Microsoft itself has done stuff like .NET core since 2016. I haven’t seen people greenfielding windows exclusive native apps in years.

It’s mostly gaming and old professional apps with 30 year old codebases where I still see Windows dominate and even THERE I see more availability on MacOS nowadays with cross platform development being the norm.

Would love to see the new Snapdragon in the next Oculus Quest.

the air? the one that's thermal throttled the second it's turned on? I'd be more interested if it was the m3 max

Isn't the M4 right around the corner?

TL;DR; - a competitors rumored future (not yet released) computer will be faster than Apple baseline chip from last year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com