I really hope it's like 2031 and we're swimming in way too many of these. Running great Linux. How sick would that be. (And X4 is running mainline great too).
While I am somewhat negative on ARM/RISCV systems due to there being like 50 different boot systems and ASIC setups, I am cautiously optimistic that something like the A16 will end up unintentionally becoming sort of a standard via a large amount being sold.
I suspect in the next 5 years something like this will come up.
Yeah, I’m already trying to avoid that blob as well, pretty much - not easy, I know, there are great reasons to follow their dogma .. but Snapdragon-level SOC’s are for me, as a long-time ARM user/developer with record shipping SKU’s, kind of a dime a dozen, kind of thing .. and also the tax of the MS/Nvidia commoditization, well, stings a bit ..
I am thoroughly enjoying the trouncing that Apple is giving everyone in terms of exploiting ARM - it is bothersome however in many ways true — I just am not so sure the open-ness of things has been fulfilled as much as, say, the good ol’ OpenPandora days, if you catch my drift ..
Everything has to be open. No blobs, compilers everywhere as a first-class application, well managed open source repo’s for everything, updates free of charge around a namespace that is large and wide for many, many communities of developer/user interactions occur, unimpeded by needing to ask permission to sign things, but rather just letting everyone sign things together easily from user to developer-level, and let ship new apps from well-oiled repositories ...
Funny how Qualcomm is juggling three OSes to sell these chips while Apple just stuck a phone chip in the Neo and called it a day. Controlling the chip, the OS, and the actual computer is a huge advantage. Apple is more than one study case on competitive analysis.
All they have to do is support Windows and get their stuff upstreamed in the Linux kernel, no need for specific distro support. I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings.
>I'll never understand why SoC manufactures insist on bespoke kernel/distro pairings
So that if you want to use the next distro release you will be forced to buy their next-gen chip because that's the only supported one on that distro. D'uh.
This is entirely Qualcomm's doing. If they supported Arm SBSA/UEFI+ACPI like some other Arm chip companies (e.g. Ampere) you could boot a generic Linux (or indeed BSD) Arm distro on their chips no problem. Controlling the entire platform is not necessary, just follow the standards.
Qualcomm expects to be paid. a toll/fee by each one of the Linux Distro’s for the privilege of being on the hardware with their chips in the device that is their history and one of the reasons why Apple spent five years kicking them out, they very definitely don’t act as a charity, so in the end, it will be interesting because someone is gonna pay their fee. the end user maybe?
What advantage? I'm always a bit shocked to see people say this without qualifying it at all.
On the contrary, Apple has to do a lot of greenfield work by refusing standards like UEFI, Vulkan and normal filesystems. They end up reinventing the wheel just to support the same featureset that Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and Intel all generally planned for.
Apple didn't have to worry about that when they supported cross-industry standardization efforts. The only reason dGPUs are broken on macOS is because of Apple's software choices.
You sound very ridiculous. Why is Apple obligated? to follow Nvidia? or AMD? or Microsoft for that matter?
Intel said no to designing iPhone chips, IBM and Motorola couldn’t see a future of faster/better chips to meet the demands of future tech devices, Apple with that crazy CEO, Steve Jobs? Had to go it alone and the rest is history.
The Apple Silicon design group appears to be on a roll. What next? Bringing memory in house? I think they will. Because that will be the only way they can build the devices they want to build at a reasonable price going forward.
Before you yell no what is it about the last 28 years have you missed? They seem to be able to execute long-range projects when it comes to hardware and software in comparison to their tech peers, looking forward to the M7 ultra, in-house memory and the C3 modem.
I didn't say they were obligated. I just said that they didn't have these problems when Apple was a cooperative member of industry-spanning consortium efforts.
> What next? Bringing memory in house? I think they will.
It's okay to say that you don't know anything about chip fabrication, instead of making silly assumptions like this.
Apple’s advantage is being the last vertical computer company from the 1980s speaks for itself. having control of the hardware and the operating system software with the ability to create new ecosystems is their advantage in comparison to hardware or software only companies, Note: the tech world would be a better place if Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn, Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois had been able to survive the Microsoft/Intel onslaught.
Even Apple forfeit x86 onslaught. MIPS was a dog's dinner compared to early x86 chips, and Steve Jobs knew this well since he worked at Pixar when they were preparing to throw away SGI machines to replace them with Linux boxes. Digital Domain, Dreamworks and Industrial Light & Magic all all abandoned UNIX workstations because they sucked. All of those companies deserved to die.
The tech world is a better place without full-stack UNIX grifters demanding a pound of flesh. Eventually macOS will be buried alongside them, as Apple has clearly has no interest in developing a fully-featured OS for Apple Silicon.
That's been my experience dealing with QCM based devices running linux in the past. Some OEM buys a batch of chips, gets a reference design and an old version of the linux kernel with a zillion out-of-tree hacks and patches that make updates impossible.
I generally advise clients to use rockchip as they have _very_ good mainline support and put any QCM modem at the end of a USB connection so it doesn't hold the product back.
If the upstream is properly done (that is a big if), this can be a go-to choice for the Linux laptop because it has much smaller config variations compared to Intel-based laptops: Everything from wifi (and even modem?), to audio, to camera ISP is included in the single SoC. If it works it works.
People have had a lot of issues with drivers and locked-down firmware on Snapdragon devices, so even with official Linux support for the chipset, the devices themselves could still be a nightmare to get working.
I don't think so. Every device has locked down firmware really these days, it's not an issue (most peoples BIOS/UEFI/etc is very much not open source).
If the drivers are upstreamed and good, it should work well.
Qualcomm hired some developers back from Linaria and they have been providing support for a bunch of X2 laptops these past two, three months directly via Linux ARM MSM mailing list. I'm surprised it took them this long to announce this publicly.
Hopefully this means Framework releases an X2 mainboard as it would be a match made in heaven.
That's the dream. But I am quite sure Framework is looking into it, if not only because Windows on ARM is gaining traction, which means developers need an ARM machine to develop. I can imagine some would want two identical machines, one with X86_64, one with aarch64.
OpenBSD developer Tobias Heider (tobhe@) has already committed the first pieces of OpenBSD/arm64 support for these Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops.
"This gets USB, keyboard and touchpad working in ACPI mode on the HP Elitebook X G2q."
Why only for these "desktop" socs? Why couldn't Qualcomm partner with Debian/Ubuntu to bring support to their mobile chipsets? Why can't Qualcomm partner with PostmarketOS to help recycle old devices and avoid e-waste?
Well, in case anyone else is wondering, I have the answer. That's because Google is maintaining a cartel, the "GMS" cartel in short. Due to intense lobbying and incredibly weak antitrust enforcement, this cartel still continues to operate globally, keeping soc makers like Qualcomm, Mediatek and Unisoc in chokehold. We won't see any real competition in the smartphone space unless it's destroyed, but market forces alone can't do that.
Google controls the Android ecosystem (restricts what OEMs can do) and employs various practices to ensure there's no alternative besides Apple (this duopoly suits both of them). Chipmakers essentially focus on ensuring they can sell access to BSPs which meet Google requirements, as there's no real alternative for smartphones. If you're not Apple, these chips are meant to be used with GMS Android, that's the expectation.
If there were alternatives (like on the desktop and for some parts of IoT) it would be more cost-efficient to upstream everything, but with the current situation it's fully up to Google.
When Google wanted them to move all their chip-specific code to modules (GKI), they had to do that. And if someone at Google randomly decided "hey, now you'll upstream this stuff", then guess what? They'd have to follow, it's how this monopoly works.
I think the GKI initiative is great, personally. I've worked with chip companies that are super-resistant to upstreaming their code, and just give me a fork-of-a-fork of the kernel and kind of say "welp, good luck maintaining that unless you pay us".
I don't love how much control Google is exerting over Android, and I don't love having to use their signed kernel. But I do prefer that vs. being stuck on an abandoned vendor kernel. If I have to accept low-quality proprietary kernel code, I'd rather keep it in small module-shaped boxes.
Companies like Qualcomm complain about this, but their historical practices are what drove Google to mandate it in the first place.
Historically speaking, between average Android device and average Chromebook, latter is far easier to get mainline kernel + "normal" Linux distro running, e.g: 8 Chromebooks vs. only 1 Android device (and even that is a dev. board) in official Arch supported hardware list:
So Arch on ARM is basically limited to an SoC with at most 8GB of RAM? It looks like we are still very far from a mainstream ARM motherboard with a socketed CPU, upgradable RAM and support for discrete GPUs. Until then, I see no reason to move away from x86.
ALARM isn't official Arch, so this also isn't an "official Arch supported hardware list". Arch is currently still only x86_64 and everything else is at best unofficial if not just straight up unaffiliated.
(do note that this might change soon-ish™ considering [0], but I think they want to first get their automated build infrastructure ready)
This really is about business strategy than any technical effort these days. Porting code should be among the easiest things for the llms to do these days
I think a lot of people don't realize the level of performance Qualcomm has reached with these. This is the closest competition to Apple's M series that we have, for the laptop form factor at least. They are better than Intel and AMD's best. I'd love to buy an X2 laptop with Linux preinstalled and supported.
The Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 with Intel Core Ultra 5 has great battery life: 10+ hours with moderate usage. I also have the Snapdragon T14s which gets about 14 hours, but I'm still waiting to get full Linux support for this two year old laptop.
Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows
Is the M series that much better than a modern ADM/Intel? Or is it that they barely need cooling? I have an AMD laptop and Mac Mini, the Mac never makes any noise. Or is the M series just faster?
M series just always perform better than you expect. I don’t know how to explain it tbh. We use them for live streaming at work and they’re just never pushed to their limits (24gb mac minis) even as we run 7 or 8 independent HD sources + iso recordings of each one. They don’t break a sweat.
I have an m1 16gb MBpro in our fleet for editing and it runs probably as fast as the day I got it (first wave of m1’s).
The low power draw is also very impressive. Fraction of my AMD rig at home.
We get to blame OpenAI et al for this one again. AMD is using their current allocation of TSMC 3nm production to make Epyc rather than Ryzen so Ryzen is jumping from 4nm to 2nm. But 2nm Ryzen is still a few months out, and the 4nm current ones are naturally at a disadvantage when Qualcomm is using 3nm.
From what I can tell, you can get more total performance from intel/amd, but at the cost of more power draw, which besides needing more cooling also means shorter battery life.
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
Yeah, I would say that historically low power draw and low heat just haven’t been dominant priorities in the x86 world. If it can be “fixed” by pushing the fans harder and building in a bigger battery (or PSU), that’s good enough.
This is a natural major conflict with the qualities of a laptop that’s good at being a laptop, but yeah, I’d prefer that my custom built tower be efficient, cool, inaudible, and a small as reasonably possible without severely impinging expandability.
I’ve heard of people building desktops around mobile x86 CPUs soldered onto ITX/mATX boards, which sounds like it might be the solution that mainstream manufacturers don’t want to give us. Even a modest desktop cooling solution is vastly more capable than what can be fit into a laptop and so should keep such a CPU chilly with ease.
On paper, the M series is faster. It's not the same situation as when AMD and Intel were suprised by Apple, though. All of the tricks that made people go for the M1 Macs and think amd64 is dead are now also available on amd64.
Price-wise, you're still often better off with amd64. People like to compare the top-end chips, but the competition for a huge slab of amd64 is a small laptop running an iPhone CPU, not the M6 Ultra or whatever the latest and greatest is today. After Apple followed the rest of the industry, the launch price advantage of the Neo quickly grew smaller, especially outside of the USA. If you want a 15 inch laptop, you're pretty deep into high end prices the moment you consider a Macbook.
In practice, getting the M series to run Linux takes longer than it takes Qualcomm to release a Linux build that works, and amd64 takes a few months of actual vendor support rather than enthusiasts hacking away for free, so in that sense the M series is still behind.
With the help of vibe coding it might take a lot shorter time to get m series working on Linux. Though the quality of code is not guaranteed to be perfect.
I have a beefy AMD system and recently bought a macbook pro M5 pro. I'm still blown away by how much faster the M5 is than my AMD tower, while producing no heat or noise.
I’m glad we’re finally getting more competitors to Intel/AMD.
Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.
If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.
It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
They hate being under someone else’s thumb and Qualcomm had real control over that. They couldn’t stand it and wanted out. Which is just as well, because clearly Qualcomm could’ve been doing better. Apple cut the power usage of the chip and it’s reportedly better than the Qualcomm one.
> It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?
Imagine NVIDIA on steroids. Think bad documentation, opaque code, and everything being locked down. The customer gets squeezed for more money (especially egregious if you don't have enough scale they won't even bother engaging).
Onavo is correct: Qualcomm are extremely notorious for aggressive IP enforcement. They're the Oracle of hardware. In particular they held critical CDMA patents which were required for making a modem which worked in the US.
They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.
If Apple cared about quality, they wouldn't have gotten rid of Qualcomm modems, and forced people to use the inferior Intel modems. I always avoided by iPhone models with Intel modems starting around the 6S era.
A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.
Let me appropriate and rephrase a sentence from earlier in the thread: "performance per watt doesn't matter at all if the combination of the machine's feature set, both in hardware and software, as well as form factor is essentially useless to you".
I have seen this far too many times on HN. A design that put Performance Per Watt first is how you extract more multicore performance when you are fundamentally limited by cooling.
Gud lorde, don't be daft. PPW matters until it hits a point where any optimizations above that line are of much less importance to some people (e. g. me) than other specs. Not to speak of necessary attributes completely absent from your PPW dream machine, which indeed negates PPW considerations on a per device/device-class basis. Which excludes optimizations for microprocessor series. It ain't rocket science.
basically: "I want WSL for my overpriced toaster, I'm totally fine with the keyboard lacking most of the essential keys, pretty please. whispers expletive against Apple whilst making sure no one can hear him"
But that's not answering my question? What do you expect to get from today's ARM chips that's fundamentally impossible otherwise? And how is that a step forward?
In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.
The comment you're replying to is implying that in an ARM world nothing is standard, portable, or compatible by default. Think about smartphones: Every single one a bespoke board with bespoke hardware.
In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.
I know I will never switch to ARM willingly. There is no advantage, only vendor lock-in. I feel that x86's openness was an accident, and we should try to keep x86 alive as long as possible.
It actually was an accident, enabled by IBM using off the self parts unlike their previous computers, and Compaq's clean room reverse engineering of the BIOS.
ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.
There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.
One key frustration is it’s typically not possible to have an arm distribution that boots across most arm boards, because they have incompatible boot loaders. Ie you have a raspberry pi image and a banana pi image and an orange pi image and the rock pi S image that are all different from each other. There have been some attempts at UEFI on arm that would address this, but it’s nowhere near as consistent or compatible as on the x86 platform side.
>And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors
What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.
I had Fujutsu laptops that were far lighter and smaller than Airs, touchscreens in the late 90s, convertibles, 2 in ones, touch bars (Thinkpad). Plenty of designs that don't build around ATX type specs, and things that do (open frame cases, and the vast array of expansion cards that benefit from it). PCs that snap onto a monitor. Things Apple copied or hasn't gotten around to yet then claim then as revolutionary. Apple has more integration and can be more strategic (when they don't need bailing out), but as one company they do far less exploration.
There have been a few cool ideas from PC makers I'll grant you that, but looking at the offerings from the 4-5 largest PC makers today it basically looks like it did 20 years ago.
I'll also grant that Apple has gotten more boring with age - the G4 imac is still the coolest computer I've seen to this day. Just so outrageously out there. Current offerings are efficient but a bit boring. Apple Silicon could make something like the trashcan design work, when it basically failed with x86 PC components.
Having said all that I wouldn't mind seeing an ecosystem of ARM-based components even if they followed the ATX standard. Being able to buy an ARM-compatible motherboard and upgrade my ARM-based CPU and pair it with separate RAM and SSD's would be nice!
I'm more on the Apple hater side, but they getting lazy is simply not true.
For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.
Check this chart. Single core performance is where Apple has dominated the most. Qualcomm is above every non-Apple competitor including desktop chips, and only 5% behind the fastest M5 MacBook Air.
For Geekbench in particular, expect to gain a few percent in Linux vs. Windows. Of course, you should always look at your workload. The thing that causes me to wait for my computer the most is build times, where the multi-core benchmarks are more interesting than single core benchmarks, and these look like they could make for interesting low power dev boxes when proper Linux support lands.
"Desktop chip" hasn't been a meaningful variable for single-thread performance in more than a decade. A single core can't use more than a given amount of power or it would melt and laptops have that much in their power budget.
Where a desktop's TDP is actually useful is for multi-thread performance, and naturally the multi-thread chart is topped by Threadrippers.
Moreover, Geekbench is rubbish in general. For example, it has Threadripper 9980X with a <50% higher multi-thread score than Ryzen 9 9950X even though it has three times the memory bandwidth and four times as many of the same cores and you have to look pretty hard to find a real multi-threaded workload where it's not significantly more than twice as fast:
Yes, where desktops differ is not so much the chips but rather the cooling capability. You have the space to have proper air flow and water cooling etc. So that do give quite a bit of performance.
nothing wrong with it! looks fine! just: there should be other products with the nice core. i could really use a 10-14" tablet. i mean, after all, ROG Flow 13 with a Strix Halo was not even that late after launch! dense is doable!
This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
A lot of people do see the graphs. But reality is - unless they cooperate with lkml and merge it there is no point. Ubuntu has the only beta ISO for it - works not very good for the Lenovo. Qualcomm does not provide any support. Then people won't buy.
I think this is huge. I thought about getting one of these chips a long time ago, but linux support was just a breaker. I ended up sticking to my current laptop and getting a macbook some years after
The "original" X Elite was also supposed to get good linux support but it unfortunately never happened.
Every single one of the "X" series had this identical announcement.
It's not huge because Qualcomm has proven that they'll continue to half-ass support until the next product is announced and then they'll disappear into the ether.
It potentially can be a good thing, but anyone who is jumping up and down celebrating better wait and see, Qualcomm is more of a lawyer/finance company than a tech company in short a patent troll at heart, so it will be interesting to see what type of fee they want to have the privilege of being on their hardware. In the telecom area historically, they like double dipping.
I've had a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for 2 years, constantly trying to get Linux off the ground on it. Didn't happen (well, technically, toward the end of that period, there was an unsupported port of Ubuntu but it lacked half the drivers). And yes, when I bought it there was a very similar announcement from Qualcomm promising first-class Linux support. So I wouldn't gamble on it (especially considering that prices are crazy) until there indeed is a supported distro.
Yeah, I've really wanted an ARM Linux laptop. But I've known ARM is a crapshoot because of my dealing with other devices. So I held off on the initial X release. Then I saw the X1P (or whatever it was) and Qualcomm put out the exact same "someday Linux up streamed!" Promise.
A competent FTC would be fining them for these false and misleading statements. Until that happens, nobody should buy these thinking Linux will ever be supported.
But they support Android right? Won't that mean kernel support is public already? It would have to be merged into mainline. Or is this about something else?
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[ 62.1 ms ] story [ 954 ms ] threadPlease sell >1 model of computer with X2 EE (elite extreme) please please please. Not that #1 was bad at all but more please! https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-A16-Laptop-Review...
I really hope it's like 2031 and we're swimming in way too many of these. Running great Linux. How sick would that be. (And X4 is running mainline great too).
I suspect in the next 5 years something like this will come up.
I am thoroughly enjoying the trouncing that Apple is giving everyone in terms of exploiting ARM - it is bothersome however in many ways true — I just am not so sure the open-ness of things has been fulfilled as much as, say, the good ol’ OpenPandora days, if you catch my drift ..
Everything has to be open. No blobs, compilers everywhere as a first-class application, well managed open source repo’s for everything, updates free of charge around a namespace that is large and wide for many, many communities of developer/user interactions occur, unimpeded by needing to ask permission to sign things, but rather just letting everyone sign things together easily from user to developer-level, and let ship new apps from well-oiled repositories ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824189
So that if you want to use the next distro release you will be forced to buy their next-gen chip because that's the only supported one on that distro. D'uh.
Because getting your stuff upstreamed in Linux is more work than releasing a custom kernel.
On the contrary, Apple has to do a lot of greenfield work by refusing standards like UEFI, Vulkan and normal filesystems. They end up reinventing the wheel just to support the same featureset that Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and Intel all generally planned for.
Intel said no to designing iPhone chips, IBM and Motorola couldn’t see a future of faster/better chips to meet the demands of future tech devices, Apple with that crazy CEO, Steve Jobs? Had to go it alone and the rest is history.
The Apple Silicon design group appears to be on a roll. What next? Bringing memory in house? I think they will. Because that will be the only way they can build the devices they want to build at a reasonable price going forward.
Before you yell no what is it about the last 28 years have you missed? They seem to be able to execute long-range projects when it comes to hardware and software in comparison to their tech peers, looking forward to the M7 ultra, in-house memory and the C3 modem.
> What next? Bringing memory in house? I think they will.
It's okay to say that you don't know anything about chip fabrication, instead of making silly assumptions like this.
The tech world is a better place without full-stack UNIX grifters demanding a pound of flesh. Eventually macOS will be buried alongside them, as Apple has clearly has no interest in developing a fully-featured OS for Apple Silicon.
Consider me cautiously optimistic.
That's been my experience dealing with QCM based devices running linux in the past. Some OEM buys a batch of chips, gets a reference design and an old version of the linux kernel with a zillion out-of-tree hacks and patches that make updates impossible.
I generally advise clients to use rockchip as they have _very_ good mainline support and put any QCM modem at the end of a USB connection so it doesn't hold the product back.
Consider me dangerously pessimistic
If the drivers are upstreamed and good, it should work well.
Hopefully this means Framework releases an X2 mainboard as it would be a match made in heaven.
My friend showed me his brand new Framework the other day, but I couldn't hear his spiel about its features over the noise of its fan!
"This gets USB, keyboard and touchpad working in ACPI mode on the HP Elitebook X G2q."
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=178891082169317&w=2
Tobias (who also works for Canonical) recently demoed Ubuntu, also confirming ARM EL2 support, meaning KVM support unlike previous generation.
https://bsd.network/@tobhe/117122761215052773
Well, in case anyone else is wondering, I have the answer. That's because Google is maintaining a cartel, the "GMS" cartel in short. Due to intense lobbying and incredibly weak antitrust enforcement, this cartel still continues to operate globally, keeping soc makers like Qualcomm, Mediatek and Unisoc in chokehold. We won't see any real competition in the smartphone space unless it's destroyed, but market forces alone can't do that.
If there were alternatives (like on the desktop and for some parts of IoT) it would be more cost-efficient to upstream everything, but with the current situation it's fully up to Google.
When Google wanted them to move all their chip-specific code to modules (GKI), they had to do that. And if someone at Google randomly decided "hey, now you'll upstream this stuff", then guess what? They'd have to follow, it's how this monopoly works.
I don't love how much control Google is exerting over Android, and I don't love having to use their signed kernel. But I do prefer that vs. being stuck on an abandoned vendor kernel. If I have to accept low-quality proprietary kernel code, I'd rather keep it in small module-shaped boxes.
Companies like Qualcomm complain about this, but their historical practices are what drove Google to mandate it in the first place.
> We're upstreaming core drivers for Snapdragon X2 Series — including the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU — to open the door to developers and partners.
Glad this isn't going to be some semi-proprietary thing like support for chromebooks. Hopefully it continues.
https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms
Alas, new Chromebooks are no more. "Successor" Googlebooks are all Android.
ALARM isn't official Arch, so this also isn't an "official Arch supported hardware list". Arch is currently still only x86_64 and everything else is at best unofficial if not just straight up unaffiliated.
(do note that this might change soon-ish™ considering [0], but I think they want to first get their automated build infrastructure ready)
[0]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests...
Regular OEMs will never give their differentiation factor freely.
Even Linux OEMs like Tuxedo apparently cannot get access to hardware specifications, and have to reverse engineer their own devices.
Many Chromebooks have better linux support today than any of Qualcomms laptops from the last few years.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/snapdragon-x2-elite...
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-...
Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows
But I still get more than 10 hours on a charge.Also, that's on Ryzen AI 7 PRO 450, you might be getting even more out of the Panther Lake alternative.
¹ https://www.notebookcheck.net/Excellent-business-laptop-with...
I have an m1 16gb MBpro in our fleet for editing and it runs probably as fast as the day I got it (first wave of m1’s).
The low power draw is also very impressive. Fraction of my AMD rig at home.
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
This is a natural major conflict with the qualities of a laptop that’s good at being a laptop, but yeah, I’d prefer that my custom built tower be efficient, cool, inaudible, and a small as reasonably possible without severely impinging expandability.
I’ve heard of people building desktops around mobile x86 CPUs soldered onto ITX/mATX boards, which sounds like it might be the solution that mainstream manufacturers don’t want to give us. Even a modest desktop cooling solution is vastly more capable than what can be fit into a laptop and so should keep such a CPU chilly with ease.
Price-wise, you're still often better off with amd64. People like to compare the top-end chips, but the competition for a huge slab of amd64 is a small laptop running an iPhone CPU, not the M6 Ultra or whatever the latest and greatest is today. After Apple followed the rest of the industry, the launch price advantage of the Neo quickly grew smaller, especially outside of the USA. If you want a 15 inch laptop, you're pretty deep into high end prices the moment you consider a Macbook.
In practice, getting the M series to run Linux takes longer than it takes Qualcomm to release a Linux build that works, and amd64 takes a few months of actual vendor support rather than enthusiasts hacking away for free, so in that sense the M series is still behind.
Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.
It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?
They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.
The Intel models were worse, but they weren’t bad as far as I know.
And looking at the direction Microsoft is going, and thinking: "Shackling our laptop and desktop chip sales to this is a bad idea."
The entire landscape outside of the Raspberry Pi is a shitshow in terms of "Just download a distro for your device class and arch and it'll work."
Arm SystemReady appears to be a slow push in the right direction from the opposite end.
A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.
Which is fine. Have a great day.
Finally the end of IBM PC clones is taking shape.
In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.
In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.
There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.
If ARM processors are regularly incompatible and segmented, we all lose out and end up in isolated silos.
What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.
I'll also grant that Apple has gotten more boring with age - the G4 imac is still the coolest computer I've seen to this day. Just so outrageously out there. Current offerings are efficient but a bit boring. Apple Silicon could make something like the trashcan design work, when it basically failed with x86 PC components.
Having said all that I wouldn't mind seeing an ecosystem of ARM-based components even if they followed the ATX standard. Being able to buy an ARM-compatible motherboard and upgrade my ARM-based CPU and pair it with separate RAM and SSD's would be nice!
For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.
Not very close at all, not even to the two-year-old model, it appears
https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-plus-loses-to-m4-in-4-out...
https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
Where a desktop's TDP is actually useful is for multi-thread performance, and naturally the multi-thread chart is topped by Threadrippers.
Moreover, Geekbench is rubbish in general. For example, it has Threadripper 9980X with a <50% higher multi-thread score than Ryzen 9 9950X even though it has three times the memory bandwidth and four times as many of the same cores and you have to look pretty hard to find a real multi-threaded workload where it's not significantly more than twice as fast:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-threadripper-9970x-9980x...
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/19122559
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/14591329
yup... still laughably behind by nearly 20%. And that is behind the M5, not even the current M6
I think we have a different definition of what laughably means. Especially since A16 is 25% ahead of M5 in multithreaded.
You're still trying to deliver your original point after you were told you use the wrong reference and you're not doing a good job.
nothing wrong with it! looks fine! just: there should be other products with the nice core. i could really use a 10-14" tablet. i mean, after all, ROG Flow 13 with a Strix Halo was not even that late after launch! dense is doable!
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
I want the stuff to work, I want Qualcomm to provide an easy process to grab a X2 Elite Windows Laptop and install Linux.
No magical binary blob extraction. I want everything tested.
With SteamFrame out we might even get decent gaming !
[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets...
The "original" X Elite was also supposed to get good linux support but it unfortunately never happened.
So hopefully the X2 will actually happen!
It's not huge because Qualcomm has proven that they'll continue to half-ass support until the next product is announced and then they'll disappear into the ether.
I've had a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for 2 years, constantly trying to get Linux off the ground on it. Didn't happen (well, technically, toward the end of that period, there was an unsupported port of Ubuntu but it lacked half the drivers). And yes, when I bought it there was a very similar announcement from Qualcomm promising first-class Linux support. So I wouldn't gamble on it (especially considering that prices are crazy) until there indeed is a supported distro.
A competent FTC would be fining them for these false and misleading statements. Until that happens, nobody should buy these thinking Linux will ever be supported.