Not only that, it sounds like a major customer (Apple) is close to finally ditching Qualcomm's wireless chips? (At least that's been rumored [1])
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/24/apple-has-reporte...
Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not because Qualcomm is bad.
It bears in mind that just because you are good at one thing does not imply you will be good at another. For instance, Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product or various entities trying to produce MIPS and ARM products failing time and time again.
I keep hoping Apple will release a MacBook with a 5G chipset. The rumors are saying their in house one will ready in 2026 at the earliest. It sure seems like a long road given they bought the intel RF division in 2019.
That's an interesting statement, as their Wi-Fi cards are some of the best on the market and common laptop-purchasing wisdom says to buy anything with an Intel Wi-Fi adapter and avoid everything else.
On the 802.11 wireless front, intel maintains a marked advantage in having inbox drivers in Linux by the time you need them. I would take an ath11k/ath12k over equivalent Intel parts but Qualcomm's driver upstreaming process takes way too long while Intel tends to integrate before the products are generally available.
So, I wouldn't say intel's modems were awful, maybe not as good as the QC's of the time, but it could just have been immature, and underfunded. Apple OTOH, is famous for taking somewhat failed teams and having a long enough vision to create great products. They seem to understand that 9 women can't create a baby in 1 month and are willing to keep iterating until its right if it solves a problem for them.
For individual devs laptops are fine, usually, but there's also no solid "reference" platform, since all the laptops are targeting different consumer lines.
That's a bit beside the point though, the Dev kits should've come out months before the consumer products were launched... and failing that at the same time.
Qualcomm and Arrow said the units would ship "tomorrow" in July... and it took over a month (after accepting many orders) before they even updated the stock to a more realistic timeframe, late September.
Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.
Internally, nearly 20 years. It was kept alive for a long time by a single individual as a side project. When I first got out of college I actually helped update tests that were being used for it (I maintained the ARM compiler test harness, and it was being used for some Windows on ARM stuff as well).
Microsoft has never went fully in on arm, whereas Apple was willing to burn bridges and start brand new.
I mean, forget about basic open-source development, let alone performing AI inference work on your new Snapdragon laptop.
After some digging, I’ve learned that just four overworked developers in Prague make up the core team unclogging this tooling dependency log-jam. Gah!
For what it’s worth, WSL2 (Linux on Windows) actually runs quite impressively on the Snapdragon X.
My thinking is this, if Windows ARM is a success -- there will be more units out there that can ALSO run Linux too. If Windows ARM is a failure, then Linux will suffer too.
What an embarrassment. So basically, it’s not a serious product.