The eight-inch Snapdragon PC for your Windows on Arm experiments | Hacker News Reader

The eight-inch Snapdragon PC for your Windows on Arm experiments

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21 pointsTiredOfLife19 comments

Will you be able to run Linux on it? Or will Microsoft lock it down somehow?

Was just going to ask that. All of this ARM transition stuff makes me nervous.

The Snapdragon 3xc Gen 3 one needed a downstream kernel and community effort: https://github.com/merckhung/linux_on_arm64_laptop#microsoft...

(initially there was some bring-up trickery that led to Linux not booting past Grub, but OpenBSD working fine: https://blog.alexellis.io/linux-on-microsoft-dev-kit-2023/ )

Re: Microsoft, Secure Boot should be disable-able and the devices are ServerReady. As close to an open platform as it gets in ARM land. Other than that, we're on our own, unless Qualcomm will help with their mainlining efforts. That'll be almost enough for the DevKit, but the upcoming Snapdragon X laptops have lots of additional stuff besides the SoC itself.

Microsoft did nor release a device tree for the 2023 Dev Kit, so Linux won't boot. There are community efforts to overcome this but it's for people who enjoy pain! As for OpenBSD, it boot using ACPI, but there is no hardware acceleration for GUIs.

Copilot+ PC architecture requires Proton and another way of secure boot, good luck trying to use everything from Linux side.

Yes, there's a video on the status of mainline Linux support, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422286

For comparison, an equivalently specced Mac Mini will run $2,000. (Apple M2 Pro with 12‑core CPU, 19-core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD)

The Mac Mini benchmarks a little bit slower on Geekbench mutli-core, the GPU will be faster at 6.8 TFLOP vs the dev kit's 4.6 TFLOP, and the NPU will be slower with 15.8 TOPS vs the dev kit's 45 TOPS.

Cool, I guess, but at what cost?

The Qualcomm/Windows partnership has been nothing than frustrating to me: (Supposedly) thanks to that, there are no official Windows ARM images available for virtualization on macOS.

And thanks to that, I'm stuck running a second, frustratingly slow [1] x86 Mac for work, since some niche software I regularly use is only available for Windows.

[1] Thanks for that, Apple – I don't see any reason for that other than planned obsolescence; it was fine with the macOS version it was released with!

Maybe you have a reason, but why can’t you run windows directly on a secondary machine?

IT only allows/manages Macs, and I can’t (and don’t want to) put work data on a personal machine.

I believe Parallels has arm images of windows after they partnered with Microsoft in the last year or so. I don’t know why the images aren’t generally available but worth checking out.

> Speaking of adapters, what you won’t find in Qualcomm’s images here is the power brick: it’s got an external 180W AC adapter.

I have the 2023 model. It was basically the arm laptop board in a square case. Expect same. That was a decent box. Slow for x86 but decent enough.

I expect same for this. Biggest issue is going to be Windows and how well PRISM works and how much more of VS and that eco system is weened off emulation.

There is an ARM-native version of VS out.

And I use that daily. It’s the “decent” part I referred to. I have yet to get it to print with HP printers built in the last 5 years. We will see if HP steps up this round …

This one has the nuvia cpu in it. Much faster than the previous one.

Could Qualcomm pursue the same level of vertical integration that Apple now has from the opposite end?

I sincerely hope they don't. Windows is still (unfortunately, from my point of view) too relevant to become single-vendor at this point.

Frankly, Qcom doesn't have the leadership to even attempt it. They make a lot of really questionable decisions, and basically only exist as a leader today because of a mountain of patents.

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