“Multi-day” battery life sounds wild! That’s probably the biggest thing for users. It would be good for Apple to get some competition because their M-chips seemed so far away from everything else.
As someone who has used the Snapdragon X Elite (12 core Oryon) Dev Kit as a daily driver for the past year, I find this exciting. The X Elite performance still blows my mind today - so the new X2 Elite with 18 cores is likely going to be even more impressive from a performance perspective!
I can't speak to the battery life, however, since it is dismal on my Dev Kit ;-)
Today Qualcomm CEO stated[0] that the combination of Android and ChromeOS, e.g. Android Computers, will be available on Snapdragon laptops. Maybe these X2 CPUs will be in those laptops.
I'm holding my breath though. I have a Samsung Edge 4 laptop and I didn't find the battery life impressive - prob got around 6 hours under coding / programming tasks. GPU performance is terrible too.
Linux support is still basically non-existent for the first gen, and they made all this deal about supporting Linux and the open source community. This is to say, don't trust them
Does anybody know if the X2 supports the x86 Total store ordering (TSO) memory ordering model? That's how Apple silicon does such efficient emulation of x86. I'd think that would be even MORE important for a Windows ARM64 laptop where there is so much more legacy x86 software going back decades.
Their top model still only has "Up to 228 GB/s" bandwdith which places it in the low end category for anything AI related, for comparison Apple Silicon is up to 800GB/s and Nvidia cards around 1800GB/s and no word if it supports 256-512GB of memory.
These all have nightmarish support. They're not a big deal for Qualcomm so the driver support is garbage. And you're stuck on their kernel like one of those Raspberry Pi knock offs. It's just really hard to take them seriously.
> And you're stuck on their kernel like one of those Raspberry Pi knock offs. It's just really hard to take them seriously.
Qualcomm has beem mainlining Snapdragon X drivers to the 6.x kernel tree for over a year now. There have been multiple frontpage HN posts about this in the past 12 months.
Webcam/mic/speaker support may be a WIP depending on your model, but snapdragon X Elite has been booting Linux for months now, using only drivers in Linus' tree. The budget chips (Snapdragon X Plus) have far less direct support form Qualcomm, but some independent hackers have put in heroic effort to make those run Linux too.
If Snapdragon (or ARM players in general) wanted to challenge x86 and Apple dominance, do they need to compete in the exact same arena? Could they carve out a niche (example: ultra-efficient always-on machines) and then expand?
We’ve been using X Elite Snapdragon laptops (Thinkpad T14s and Yoga Slim running Ubuntu’s concept images) to build large amounts of ARM software without the need for cross-compiling. The hardware peripheral support isn’t 100% yet (good enough) but I’ve been impressed with the performance.
ARM seems to be popular in the server space and it’s nice to see it trickling down to the PC market.
To be fair, they did say "PC" specifically. It's not uncommon to consider that a category that doesn't include Apple (e.g. the "I'm a Mac" "I'm a PC" ads from years ago)
You can probably pretty easily just say Prime==Performance and Performance==Efficiency, but I think the "Prime" branding is kind of a carry over from Snapdragon mobile chips where they commonly use three tiers of core designs rather than the two. They still want to advertise the tier 2 cores as fast so T3 is efficiency, T2 is performance, T1 is Prime.
As an example, the Snapdragon 700-series had Prime, Gold, and Silver branding on it's cores.
Did qualcomm ever get its act together with firmware/drivers and linux? It's a dead end to me if they aren't at an Intel/AMD level of openness on this front.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 1047 ms ] threadI can't speak to the battery life, however, since it is dismal on my Dev Kit ;-)
[0] https://www.techradar.com/phones/android/ive-seen-it-its-inc...
Ironically M1 chip is better supported on Linux.
Qualcomm has beem mainlining Snapdragon X drivers to the 6.x kernel tree for over a year now. There have been multiple frontpage HN posts about this in the past 12 months.
Webcam/mic/speaker support may be a WIP depending on your model, but snapdragon X Elite has been booting Linux for months now, using only drivers in Linus' tree. The budget chips (Snapdragon X Plus) have far less direct support form Qualcomm, but some independent hackers have put in heroic effort to make those run Linux too.
ARM seems to be popular in the server space and it’s nice to see it trickling down to the PC market.
Has Microsoft actually pushed for the ARM changes? Because I don't believe Qualcomm can do it alone.
Not sure what a prime core is.
For comparison the M4 Pro can go as high as 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.
As an example, the Snapdragon 700-series had Prime, Gold, and Silver branding on it's cores.