this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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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

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (6 children)

When will it actually release and by that point how far away is the M3?

[–] [email protected] 43 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Considering a severe lack of software support on ARM they better have a massive cost incentive

[–] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago (3 children)

As per usual, Linux is fine with ARM.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Most things are fine on arm these days. Don’t know what this person is on about

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Windows is not fine with ARM, which can be a turnoff for some.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I bet it will be fine with arm fairly quickly now that these chips are on the horizon.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The 20 reference laptops doing the benchmarking in this article were running on windows....

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Could you name a few? Just curious if its very specific stuff or apps I might actually use.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

A lot of x86 software is still just emulated for arm, not native.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Most things are fine on arm these days

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The benchmarks from this article are running on Windows 11 Arm...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

If anything Steam's support for something else other than i386 is long overdue.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Linux works well but sadly most people don't use Linux

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Most people use Linux, just not desktop. If people are okay with Android, they'd be okay with Gnome as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

If they sell snapdragon laptops with Linux preinstalled people would buy, sadly they're more likely to include Windows (which has bad support).

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Android is Linux. Linux is the most popular OS in the world.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I was specifically referring to desktop Linux, most people wouldn't be interested in a laptop running android.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago

M3 is available starting next week so not very.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The answer is in the article...

It is worth noting that by the time Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite hits store shelves, Apple’s M3 line of CPUs (which are expected to be announced this week) and Intel’s next-gen Meteor Lake laptops processors with its beefy NPU and GPU, will be the new competition.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They'll have to compete in price to have any chance

[–] darkevilmac 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I guess we'll have to wait for price, benchmarks, and battery life

[–] darkevilmac 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm cautiously optimistic, a new player in PC silicon is exciting if nothing else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I guess more competition is better

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Apple just announced its M3 line of processors, and they’re shipping next week.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Don't know how to read an article?