Qualcomm brings receipts: Snapdragon X Elite gets benchmarked, completely dunks on Apple’s M2 processor::Qualcomm made big claims with its Snapdragon X Elite platform and Oryon CPU, but the company proved it to the press last week with a special benchmarking session where we could witness just how powerf
When will it actually release and by that point how far away is the M3?
Also important, will it be available and affordable. I don’t much care about arm laptops if they cost an arm (heh) and a leg to buy and then a couple fingers to import into the mythical and exotic land of not-US.
Considering a severe lack of software support on ARM they better have a massive cost incentive
As per usual, Linux is fine with ARM.
Most things are fine on arm these days. Don’t know what this person is on about
Windows is not fine with ARM, which can be a turnoff for some.
I bet it will be fine with arm fairly quickly now that these chips are on the horizon.
I doubt it. Many windows applications still are 32 bit only today. Visual studio only got 64 bit support in 2022. Windows has a long history of backwards compatibility and I would expect to be depending on software compatibility layers for a decade or more, even for some Microsoft products.
The 20 reference laptops doing the benchmarking in this article were running on windows…
Being able to run benchmarks doesn’t make it is a great experience to use unfortunately. 3/4 of applications don’t run or have bugs that the devs don’t want to fix.
Could you name a few? Just curious if its very specific stuff or apps I might actually use.
A lot of x86 software is still just emulated for arm, not native.
MacOS? Yes. Linux? Sure. Android? Obviously. Windows? Not a chance!
And seeing this is designed for laptops, your options will be either Linux or Windows. The comment is on point.
The benchmarks from this article are running on Windows 11 Arm…
Oh don’t get me wrong, it definitely runs!
But have you tried using it as a daily driver? Most things will break. I discovered this the hard way by installing it in a Raspberry Pi
Was it just because it was arm, or because it was a raspberry pi and had too little of everything else windows likes to hog up? There’s several major laptop manufacturers that are planning to sell laptops with these. I doubt that would be the case if they were all functionally broken to the consumer.
Caveat for all platforms running wine applications. So Linux is fine, except when running windows applications.
Well, mostly, there do exist binary only Linux applications too. Business applications and also some games with native Linux support.
I’d imagine most open source software will just be perfectly fine on ARM on Linux… but I do wonder a little bit about the occasional x86 binary blob we run. They’re generally pretty rare in Linux land… but Steam games are probably not going to have a great time. I’ve used binfmt_misc to run ARM binaries on x86 transparently before using qemu, and it works perfectly fine… but it’s dog slow.
If anything Steam’s support for something else other than i386 is long overdue.
Linux works well but sadly most people don’t use Linux
Most people use Linux, just not desktop. If people are okay with Android, they’d be okay with Gnome as well.
If they sell snapdragon laptops with Linux preinstalled people would buy, sadly they’re more likely to include Windows (which has bad support).
Android is Linux. Linux is the most popular OS in the world.
I was specifically referring to desktop Linux, most people wouldn’t be interested in a laptop running android.
Yet Chromebooks have been a major element for the past 5 years, with more units sold than Apple. I know it’s not technically GNU/Linux. But there’s still a Linux core underneath required to run Chrome OS.
ChromeOS is popular because it’s included in cheap laptops and the operating system is essentially idiot proof (at the cost of being able to do practically nothing)
M3 is available starting next week so not very.
The answer is in the article…
They’ll have to compete in price to have any chance
That really depends on the TDP of the Intel and AMD chips. Both have been progressively pumping more and more juice into their silicon lately in an attempt to be the “fastest”.
If Qualcomm is within spitting distance at a much lower TDP then this might actually be the beginning of the end for x86.
I guess we’ll have to wait for price, benchmarks, and battery life
I’m cautiously optimistic, a new player in PC silicon is exciting if nothing else.
I guess more competition is better
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The M3 was announced yesterday: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/everything-to-know-about-apples-new-m3-m3-pro-and-m3-max-processors/
It will be out before these chips are. So will next gen x86-64 chips, Zen 5 at least, and possibly Intel Arrow Lake depending on timing.
Apple just announced its M3 line of processors, and they’re shipping next week.
Don’t know how to read an article?