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Comment by Dowwie | Hacker News Reader

"We are introducing Phi Silica which is built from the Phi series of models and is designed specifically for the NPUs in Copilot+ PCs. Windows is the first platform to have a state-of-the-art small language model (SLM) custom built for the NPU and shipping inbox. Phi Silica API along with OCR, Studio Effects, Live Captions, Recall User Activity APIs will be available in Windows Copilot Library in June. More APIs like Vector Embedding, RAG API, Text Summarization will be coming later."

2024: the year of personal computers with neural processing units running small language models

How do NPU's work? Who builds them and how are they built? Are they capable of running a variety of SLM-like firmware?

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For the price of these new laptops one can already buy a MacBook with a general purpose GPU that is more than capable of running these models. One can buy a windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card that can also run these models. Perhaps it would be interesting if the price was substantially lower.

These new laptops are half the price of macbooks with the same ram and storage

In which configs and which geographic locations? In the US, pricing for equivalent Surface and Mac hardware configurations looks the same, to me.

And that's if the Snapdragon X Elite is actually on par with the Apple M3, like Microsoft claims.

Earlier X Elite benchmarks[1][2] showed that it was behind the M3, but hopefully Qualcomm have made some solid performance changes since then. Competition is good.

1. https://www.xda-developers.com/snapdragon-x-elite-benchmarks... Note: the link is comparing vs the M2

2. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/early-snapdr...

US. Canada. Probably other regions. A Surface Laptop with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is $1200 USD. A M3 MBA with with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is $1500.

An equivalent-specced Surface laptop would be the following specs:

- 13" or 15" screen

- Snapdragon X Elite (which still doesn't match M3 performance)

- 16 GB memory

- 512 GB SSD

Surface laptop price is $1399 (13") or $1499 (15"), which is $100 cheaper for the 13" vs the equivalent MBA, and $200 cheaper for the equivalent MBA 15". The Snapdragon X Plus, which is what it looks like you priced out, is quite inferior to the Elite and even the older Apple M1/M2 series chips.

This is all to say that neither is a bad buy, depending on your needs.

Also worth noting that the Macbook Air is still not upgraded to a MicroLED display (uses IPS instead), whereas the Surface Laptop now comes standard with OLED.

no it doesn't, at least not according to the specs https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...

The Surface Pro has an OLED config now, which costs more, but the laptop and standard pro are still LCD.

I just bought an M3, my first MacBook in a while. I was appalled by the screen brightness and contrast. It’s really lacking.

Only the tablet has oled option. And that is an 500$ extra.

Are we talking about AI/ML?

X Plus and X Elite NPU hit 45 TOPS. M4 is 38 TOPS...

Also, as far I know, Elite does match M3. Actually, Qualcomm promise that even X Plus is able to match it, as they say Elite is better than M3.

We'll have to wait to see more benchmarks.

PS: There's 3 Elite series.

  > Are we talking about AI/ML?

No, I was speaking to the usual single-core and multi-core benchmarks. Though you should buy based on what performance metrics you value most.

While I have a basic understanding of TOPS metrics I don’t have a good enough understanding to speak much about it — especially when I’m not sure of what exact AI/ML workloads will be used on such platforms. I mean, how many tokens/sec and what wattage does that equate to?

  > Also, as far I know, Elite does match M3.

I would disagree from what I’ve seen.

  > Actually, Qualcomm promise that even X Plus is able to match it, as they say Elite is better than M3.

The real world benchmarks will tell. I am super curious about the performance-per-watt which is something that really matters to me (heat, battery life, etc).

Can the Elite outperform Apple’s chips? Can it do it at comparable wattage, or is it going to burn your lap doing so? Can’t wait to see.

In single core performance...

In multi-core from what I've seen X Plus is faster than base M3.

I couldn't find the Geekbench results for an MBA M3, but here's for an MBP 14" M3:

Single: 3088 Multi: 11595

Non-production Elite X From Anandtech[1]:

Single: 2800 Multi: 14400

Non-production Plus X From Anandtech[1]:

Single: 2425 Multi: 13100

Slower single perf for both Snapdragons. Decent 10% jump in multi over the M3. I am eager to see how the production units will pan out on benchmarks and sustained performance.

Qualcomm's been shady in the past with their so-called "Apple killer" chip benchmarks. I don't think these are "Apple killers", but I hope it pans out, for competition's sake.

1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21364/qualcomm-intros-snapdra...

M3 was last year though, M4 has just been released, though iPad only for now

And here's some real world benchmarks:

M4 iPad Pro: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6036233 S: ~3747 M: ~14740

Snapdragon X Elite: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=snapdr... S: ~2400 M: ~14000

Note this is an M4 iPad Pro. I would imagine an M4 Mac would spec a little better, due to less heat/power constraints.

tl;dr: M4 stomps on the Elite in single-core with about 36% more performance. The baseline M4 and X Elite are about even on multi-core. X Elite has marginally better NPU TOPS performance if that's something that matters to you.

ASUS Vivobook S15 S5507QA: 32GB/1TB 1400 EUR

MacBook Air 15,3" Apple M3 8-Core CPU & 10-Core GPU 24GB/1TB 2649 €

1. Ah I had assumed you were talking about the new Surface laptops, my bad.

2. Where are you seeing the pricing for those Vivobook configs? I'm not able to pull up equivalent pricing in the US, so far.

That might be a pretty good deal, depending on the real world performance of the X Elite and the build quality of the ASUS laptop (I've had quite a few and it's been some great hits and some major misses.)

The euro prices were from a leak.

But the us price for 15" vivobook 16gb/1tb with elite (from announcement video) is 1299.

15" m3 with 16gb/1tb from apple.com is 1899

Asus, the brand that can't make an ISO keyboard in Europe.

Either Surface line or Lenovo x line can be compared with Apple devices, anything else falls short.

But not same performance. One of the reason QC not releasing anything but controlled benchmarks is most likely the subpar performance of Windows on ARM. This will be the biggest hurdle for QC Elite chips, competing with M-seried which is design in tandem with MacOS.

Isn't the unified memory architecture one of the advantages of the Apple M* notebooks for running AI workloads?

Speculation.

More like not totally baseless rumors. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/qualcomm-faces-be...

In Australia they are the same price ($1.9k AUD vs $1.6k for MacBook air). How much where you're at?

M3 15" air with 24gb ram and 1tb ssd is 3400 australian dollars

Does the cheapest Microsoft one come with 24 gigs ram and one TB SSD?

The NPU runs this Silica model at 1.5 watts. MacBooks cannot even drive multiple monitors in this price range.

The MacBooks have an NPU too. Just nobody has done anything with them.

The MacBook NPU is 3x slower than the 45 TOPS threshold required for Copilot+ PC branding.

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