*According to Qualcomm
Third times the charm. Qualcomm messed up the last time they tried to make an ARM chip for computers, but this time Im more optimistic. The specs look amazing on paper
It’s hilarious Qualcomm keeps claiming this is their tech. They failed for years to make ARM on pc happen. Then some engineers leave Apple after the transition to M-series chips and make their own equivalent for PCs and Qualcomm, on contract with Microsoft to deliver an ARM chip for windows-powered portables just fucking buys them and slaps their branding on it. There is a HUGE difference between the X series Qualcomm chip and their previous SQ-series science fair trash. The X series are good chips. Their Linux support is lacking but for most users who wouldn’t consider leaving windows even if it gave them cancer these are perfectly fine chips. We need more diversity in the chip market and ARM is great for that. Qualcomm sucks is all.
Great, now make them able to work with Linux!
for Windows PCs
“Whoa! This Is Worthless”
Its the future of Windows, it allows Microsoft to have more control over the hardware. You will own nothing.
NPU
worthless.
premium PCs (laptops)
I understand that it will be power efficient, but premium won’t beat strix halo in performance. Slightly lower memory bandwidth. Mac M3 or M4 is much higher spec’ed.
we’ll see how they do.
Depends strongly on what ops the NPU supports IMO. I don’t do any local gen AI stuff but I do use ML tools for image processing in photography (e.g. lightroom’s denoise feature, GraXpert denoise and gradient extraction for astrophotography). These tools are horribly slow on CPU. If the NPU supports the right software frameworks and data types then it might be nice here.
NPUs are very scammy, with all use vendor specific proprietary, often undocumented, implementations that are often incompatible with previous vendor architectures. Microsoft is makeing DirectML, but AMD/Intel (different NPUs that keep changing) aren’t fully supported. Copilot does manage to do some minimal AI use. Their small LLM is snapdragon elite only. but 27 tokens/s for 1.6gb ram (4 bit int quantized) is much lower than x86 (or gpu) performance on similar sized models. ultra low power use is the benefit, but so far, any chip die space given to NPU is, IMO, a waste of money, partly because it is a dark black box that only Microsoft has the key to.
I don’t trust Microsoft to make apps on their OS work as well as on x86. Their support so far with X elite/pro chips was very telling.
Credit where credit is due, Apple worked hard with other developers to make the transition to ARM possible. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be bothered to do that much.
Compatibility improved a lot since release, you can actually run most apps and games on an X elite now
Almost do most things you could do that you’ve done for decades, and can still do on a competitor, on a $1500 device is not a selling point.
*transition But that’s an interesting lapsus…
fixed, ty
Can’t wait for my next Asus mobo to support this chipset arch.
Too bad software still doesn’t exist in Windows on ARM. Linux on ARM, and no, Android doesn’t count as Google’s trying to lock it down and seemingly at minimum castrate AOSP, has software but Qualcomm will probably never support Linux.
Uhhhh, not sure what you mean about Linux and ARM. That’s very much a thing.
Windows is a different story because cross-compilation with the OS libs and utils is necessary, and Microsoft does not push that.
Running everything in compat mode with translators is kind of defeating the purpose. The way this gets more adoption is Qualcomm OPENING THE FUCKING INTERFACES TO EVERYONE, which they are notoriously against doing. They want everyone to pay a license for fucking everything. So stupid.
My wording might have sucked, but yeah, Linux on ARM has plenty of software, excluding Android.
I don’t know that this is as true as it used to be. For my standard office-centric use case it’s fine. I just need Dropbox and the office suite. But a lot of windows software has ARM versions now. The only thing holding me back is the lack of an ARM Surface Go.
I wish decently powerful small laptops would make a return. I dearly love my 11" MacBook Air and I’m still astounded I can even somewhat use it today for various research and office work, but it could seriously do with an M1 chip and 16GB of memory.
I have a Dell XPS 13 9315, which is roughly the same size as the 11" air (actually slightly smaller), and I absolutely adore it. I didn’t get the highest-end because I didn’t need it, but it’s available with some decent processors and up to 32Gb RAM. It just sucks that everything is soldered to the board and non-upgradeable, and it has only 2 USB C ports, but that’s the price you pay for the size. The battery life is actually astounding, too, I am constantly amazed how long it lasts. The new XPS13 has the weird square flat keys and no border around the touchpad, I’m really glad I got the model I did because the new ones look like a pain to actually use.
Like I can actually do a little bit of light Solidworks on it if I’m not near my desktop, which blew me away. It plays the indie games I like, too, so it basically just does everything I need.
My winter project is to install Linux on it and get it all working the way I want.
I want Netbooks to come back for this reason. The only reason they failed the first wave was because nobody at the time thought to treat them as just smaller laptops that could be improved. They were just glorified pre-Chromebooks that were underpowered.
Technology has progressed since then so there’s no excuse not to bring them back. I loved the idea of carrying something that small around and not have it hinder me as much as a full laptop could.
I’d like to see decently small powerful laptops that can actually be upgraded, ala old-school Thinkpad X-series from before Lenovo ruined the ThinkPad name.
Yes, while I have the MBA running macOS, I have my trusty X260 with Linux for everything I don’t need macOS for. I absolutely love both the size and thickness of it - the keyboard is good, the nub is good, it’s a comfortable, rugged laptop with a dual battery setup.
Fastest? Uhhh, we’ll see about that, I guess. Would be pretty cool, but I have my doubts.
Okay, outside of the title every time they say “fastest” they follow it up with “at iso power” which apparently means equivalent or same. So they’re basically saying they’re the most efficient twice, but they creatively used the word faster like they are an industry leader in more than one metric when they’re not.
Also I have a feeling their claims won’t even be accurate if someone installs windows on a recent macbook, which is why I suppose they are also only comparing to windows native devices.
Until they open up the software, these are doomed to operate in obscurity.
If they think I would be jumping with joy for android on my desktop they are miscalculating.
For people to switch they have to be excited about your platform. WTF should I get excited for when they are killing open source android core?
I should be Excited about the ad company telling me what apps I can install? Fuck u Google.
Qualcomm is too big and well established to be mediocre with day one Linux support
Did they mess up? Seemed like any issues they had were Windows related
That was part of it, but they hyped up the product so much as a Macbook M series competitor and made outrageous claims, including having very optimistic benchmarks. They shot themselves in the foot because any benchmarks compared to the macbook were against them, especially in efficiency. They promised Linux support shortly after launch too but it’s still not fully here.
I mean, that’s how qualcomm does business. For as long as they’ve existed, they’ve made ridiculous comparisons about their newest chip against Apple’s. Fool me once shame on me, fool me twenty times, shame on me again because I should’ve learned 19 times ago
More info in PCMag’s article
