Snapdragon X Series chips are heading to PCs to take on Apple's processors

https://liliputing.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-series-chips-are-heading-to-pcs-to-take-on-apples-m-series-processors/

by PaulHoule • 3 years ago

49 49 3 years ago

Does anyone actually run windows on arm in any meaningful day to day job?

kotaKat• 3 years ago

I love my Thinkpad X13s for day to day netadmin work. The hardware is absolutely solid and gorgeous and it performs quite well for the work I do. And while it's not strictly an ARM-only exclusive, the onboard UWB 5G is a delight on the road between client sites. Battery life is finally usable for me as well on the road with my weird requirements (like a visual light defect in my eyes making me basically demand full backlighting all the time).

It's good, it's fast, but it's not cheap.

jjtheblunt• 3 years ago

Every Surface Pro X does, i bet. Mine does.

FinnKuhn3• 3 years ago

I think with the end of Microsoft's deal with Qualcomm we will see drastically more ARM devices, just because it would make it easier to run on Macs

wyldfire2• 3 years ago

it would make it easier to run on Macs

But Apple doesn't ask HP or Dell to make its laptops. And Apple uses their own SoCs exclusively. So I don't think it would change anything other than some mild effect -- helping a larger shift in the developer ecosystem to make more developers accustomed to developing on ARM.

quic_bcain2• 3 years ago

I do. (Disclaimer: I work at qualcomm and am a part of a "dogfooding" effort). It's certainly adequate for the work I'm doing - which involves developing on/for linux, so I'm logging in to the development systems remotely. So locally I'm running things like a browser, IM, MS Outlook.

I'm looking forward to Snapdragon X, there's definitely occasions where it feels like I could use some more local perfomance.

One of the irritating things is that there's no native Chrome release for Windows-on-ARM. MS suggests that we use Edge but I'm quite comfortable with Chrome. So I use Chromium instead and it's great except it seems to be missing some DRM magic or something and therefore anything like gif files or webp and most videos on most websites can't be played back. However youtube does seem to be clever enough to see the browser's limitations and transcode/filter the content to something acceptable to Chromium. If I want to see those videos I switch to Edge.

fortran77• 3 years ago

I have a Lenovo X13s snapdragon (previous generation) laptop and love it. Very few compatiblity problems and everything runs fast enough. Really looking forward to the X series.

zmk5• 3 years ago

My hope is that framework will make a mainboard for this. I would really love to try ARM on a laptop without having to get a Mac (even though they are great devices!)

hu3• 3 years ago

There are several Arm Chromebooks from Lenovo, Samsung, Acer, Asus, Hp, etc...

Beware of the amazon affiliate links but here is a list I found:

https://www.linuxmadesimple.info/2019/08/all-chromebooks-wit...

kramerger• 3 years ago

My first chromebook 10+ years ago used a Samsung Exynos (ARM Crotex-A15 IIRC).

It was made out of cheap plastic, tried hard to look like a macbook air. But it worked really well with chromeos and the battery life was excellent. Boot time was like half a second.

opan• 3 years ago

I'm guessing you mean high performance ARM in a laptop, since there have been many low-end options for a while, such as the Pinebook Pro.

heavyset_go• 3 years ago

Using Linux on ARM SoCs is a pain in the ass.

Aaargh20318• 3 years ago

Does this have the same x86-like memory ordering that the M series have to speed up translated x8y code.

_ph_• 3 years ago

I sincerely hope that this means a lot more choices of good ARM based computers. While I am a happy Apple-user, or rather because I am, I want more great ARM chips on the market. I still remember the great times in the 80ies and 90ies, where a lot of different CPU architectures were competing with each other. Having more competition should be good in several aspects.

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

"Snapdragon" is a brand associated with poor performance, like Intel's "Atom" brand. Qualcomm should kill it off and start a new name or, better yet, change their name so people will forget that Qualcomm is associated with bad performing chips in general.

vlovich123• 3 years ago

Really? I associate it with the highest performing mobile CPU that’s not Apple. Is there a line of CPUs that outperforms them for high end mobile?

tbihl4• 3 years ago

Mediatek's Dimensity flagship series was ahead of Qualcomm 1-2 generations ago, at least by some metrics (if you care at all about battery life.) Not sure about now. Qualcomm made a big jump after stagnating for generations.

haunter• 3 years ago

"Snapdragon" is a brand associated with poor performance

By whom, you? By my experience is the best performance/money smartphone CPU with decent support. What else do you buy Mediatek? Allwinner? Those are the "Atom" CPUs

silisili• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, Snapdragon is today an almost generic term that doesn't indicate much.

The SD 808 was one of the worst mobile processors in history. The 865 and 625 among the best. 888 and Gen 1 both terrible. Gen 1+ and Gen 2 amazing.

pixelpoet• 3 years ago

The company says those Oryon cores will bring “a quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency,”

Oh, that's unfortunate; ideally it would be strictly better and more than a Planck length improvement.

positr0n• 3 years ago

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-06-01

lttlrck• 3 years ago

Borrowing from the Sinclair QL?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL

It did not do well, but not due to the name. Brilliant commercial though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO5BUIKykMM

oldpersonintx3• 3 years ago

downsides of Windows software compatibility will trump performance or battery life upsides

Windows is effectively x86 forever

as bad as things are for Intel, I doubt they are losing sleep over this

tbihl4• 3 years ago

All things are effectively monopolies forever, until they're not. Facebook is undefeatable except that all the kids stopped using it. Google is printing money, but technically savvy people all know it's shit at answering search queries anymore. And on and on. x86 is too much of a juggernaut to overcome, except that most people just interact with internet browsers now, and the pace of security research means that legacy software is a big liability.

Or unless you get the government to take anti-trust action 'against' you at your zenith, a la Standard Oil.

oldpersonintx3• 3 years ago

x86 is not a monopoly

bloqs• 3 years ago

Rosetta example proves this is just a money barrier

astrange2• 3 years ago

Something like Rosetta is not expensive to develop, and ARM Windows has an equivalent I believe.

anaisbetts• 3 years ago

Have you actually used Windows on ARM? It works incredibly well, I'm not sure where you got this notion from. x86/amd64 automatic translation is almost completely seamless.

Windows isn't The Problem here, it's Qualcomm being a tire fire and being leagues behind Apple. It's wild how they have managed to have such a stranglehold on the entire ARM architecture via patents, all so they can enable Apple to wipe the floor with them

TillE• 3 years ago

I suppose if you have the OS and web browser running natively on ARM, it's tolerable to run non-CPU-intensive software through a translation layer.

And yeah it's pretty good, I was able to run some creaky old VB6 program on Windows for ARM64.

mcphage• 3 years ago

...I don't get why. The Windows PC market is both much smaller than the android phone market, and generally lower end in terms of hardware and pricing. Apple sells boutique, expensive machines—but even still, their real money is in the phones.

So what would Qualcomm get out of this?

tbihl4• 3 years ago

Pivot existing expertise and engineering into new segments before someone else does. Also, I would expect that having Windows on ARM would shift the loose Windows-Android connection into something more robust, which only stands to aid Android in gaining/maintaining market share.

Laptops, phones, and tablets increasingly convergent segments, but x86 devices are sitting on the sidelines waiting to be rendered completely irrelevant in applications with battery life concerns.

dingi2• 3 years ago

Perhaps the community will manage to get it to run Linux. Software availability for ARM is one area where Linux beats Windows. Let's hope not to see Qualcomm's usual shenanigans around hardware/drivers in PC chips.

quic_bcain2• 3 years ago

Perhaps the community will manage to get it to run Linux.

You should expect Qualcomm to contribute support to the kernel for Snapdragon X, as they've done with several predecessor SoCs. I would be surprised if it was not already running Linux inside of Qualcomm.

Of course, Qualcomm's got room for improvement here but IMO they're moving in the right direction.

[disclaimer: I work for qualcomm]

dingi2• 3 years ago

Qualcomm's mainline Linux support has been abysmal as far as I know. Community got some support upstreamed.

bestouff• 3 years ago

One of the veery nice properties of the PC world is that CPUs are rather well documented, you can write drivers, a full OS, really low-level code for performance. Qualcom on the contrary has a secrecy culture which makes its SoC quite unappealing for the developers.

pbalcer• 3 years ago

+1. This is one of the most underappreciated things about the x86 CPU ecosystem. The documentation is usually solid, and all the Linux drivers are fully open-source and well maintained. Both AMD and Intel are almost always among the top contributors to each Linux kernel release. Hopefully Qualcomm follows suit, and does better than they do with Android... Closed source driver blobs are the worst. I personally wouldn't buy a desktop computer that doesn't at least have an option of running fully with open source drivers.

jamesy0ung• 3 years ago

Sure the chips may be “faster” but Qualcomm has historically not documented a their SoCs well, making a Linux port rather difficult and Windows on ARM sucks.

Moldoteck• 3 years ago

Looking at surface pro x, I really don't see the arm advantage. Battery life is not that different from intel models while having much less compatibility

BearOso• 3 years ago

From what I've heard about Oryon, there's lots of complaints from OEMs about poor performance and battery use due to strange restrictions Qualcomm put on the power delivery system. They're effectively requiring a set of mobile power solutions in parallel to meet higher power requirements. This increases the design cost, and is inefficient.

canucker2016• 3 years ago

n.b. caveat lector and PMIC seems to be "power management integrated circuit"

from https://semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-qual...:

"Things started to go off the rails early for Oryon, not for design reasons but for idiotic corporate greed reasons. Qualcomm wants to sell more of their PMICs and Qryon seemed like a good vehicle to do it so they force bundled the two products. This is hardly unprecedented behavior although it is market distorting and ensures that the end result will be less than it could be. More on this in a bit but just realize the PMICs are not picked for merit, they were chosen because Qualcomm makes more money that way, quality of the final product be damned. Remember the crack above about Microsoft?

Back to the story, there was an issue with said PMICs. Basically they are cell phone PMICs and Oryon is not a cell phone SoC. Why is this an issue? You might be aware that cell phones and laptops require differing wattages, and not by a little. Those cell phone PMICs are optimized for phone currents, running them at laptop levels is far less efficient than engineers would prefer. But it can be made to work. The sane answer is to use a less expensive off the shelf PMIC that would result in a more efficient end product. Since that would also have the effect of making Qualcomm less money, efficiency be damned, Qualcomm PMICs it is. But…"

read the article for the rest of the sad own-goal story...

Snapdragon X Series chips are heading to PCs to take on Apple's processors

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