Most of the reviews I’ve seen so far are a bit lukewarm. Performance and bettery is good, but they’re barely better than what Intel and AMD offer. They promised 20+ hours battery life, we get around 12-13 which is in line with other chips.
The screenshots in the article are from Dave2D’s video which compared gaming laptops to the X Elite. Laptops without a dedicated GPU could outperform it in battery, and are usually cheaper. Not to mention the new generation of chips are reportedly way more efficient. Kind of underwhelming.
I think people believe that the ARM ISA brings a power efficient design but what really made Apple able to sip power on the M1 was a decade of phone processor design experience and full control of the software stack.
The people working on Snapdragon X Elite are supposedly the same people that worked on the M1 and M2 chips. They made their own company to make ARM chips before being acquired by qualcomm. I was hoping for similar gains…
…but you’ve got Microsoft writing the OS.
Power draw is not all hardware.
I’ve been a general skeptic of exactly how much the power and performance to power stats are attributable to the ARM instruction set or architecture versus the fact that Apple just locks up TSMC’s latest and greatest node for a year before everyone else. AMD’s CPUs are still x86_64 but achieve similar performance per watt as the Apple silicon on the same node and similar TDPs.
So if it turns out that TSMC has the secret sauce, then maybe we don’t need to move laptops over to ARM at all.
Performance and bettery is good, but they’re barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.
And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.
I wonder what’s the Linux experience/support on this laptop
Literally what I was wondering, lol. My first thought was “how well does it run Debian?”
OTOH, I really don’t want to contribute to a sale that may make MS or the hardware manufacturers think people want this AI crap. I just want a beefy ARM laptop that runs Linux lol.
They’re apparently working on it. Tuxedo already got a prototype and Qualcomm has been apparently contributing code to the mainline Linux kernel to guarantee support
Good to know! Will keep an eye out for sure.
Well, actually, what if I want AI “crap” capability with my Linux ARM laptop?
The TOPS on those systems are no joke. Consider that it’s 1/2 the performance of an RTX 2060 in a slim laptop form factor.
Edit: The performance variance is still the same. 2060 can do almost 13 TFLOPS fp16 or about 102 TOPS measured (this figure is on other sites too, this is what I can find atm). SD Elite X can do 45 TOPS. Not bad, considering existing x86_64 CPUs with an NPU do 10-16 TOPS.
Don’t confuse TFLOPs and TOPs. Especially when the latter is 4-bit integer operations.
So the way MS is using it is incredibly dumb, but hardware wise, it’s just a NN-optimized tile on the CPU. That is going to be a great thing for democratizing access to serious machine learning hardware. In that respect, it’s actually pretty awesome, despite the fact that It’s annoying that the initiative is tied so closely to MS.
I wanted an Arm based Linux netbook or laptop for many years ever since the multi-core Smartphones came out around 2008.
Already back then the Intel based Netbooks were laughably bad compared to Arm, and couldn’t even play video properly, while you could do that with ease even on early smartphones with Arm at 1080p.But for some reason Arm has given Linux very little love with their GPU drivers, and AFAIK they still don’t support it well, so now I say go fuck yourself.
Arm is NOT a good company for Linux. How they missed that opportunity for a strong market entry for over a decade I simply cannot fathom.If AMD made an Arm CPU with Radeon graphics, that would be cool. Because AMD has good open source drivers on Linux, and has generally good Linux support.
You’re right. We shouldn’t use proprietary bullshit and hope the corporations do the right thing.
RISC-v is the way.
Framework just announced a RISC-V motherboard you can get which is pretty awesome. Obviously designed for developers etc, but its a good step.
Even the RPi, which has major Linux support has a blob for its graphics driver (at least the last time I checked). And I wouldn’t exactly say Broadcom is falling over themselves to support Linux. Qualcomm, less so.
In theory yes, in practice I’m not so sure. Risc-V is BSD, so whatever company chooses to make it, can change it as they like and completely ruin compatibility.
I don’t think it will work, because the BSD license doesn’t protect it from whatever abuse any maker feels like.
I do follow it as a potential alternative, and alternatives are always nice.That makes absolutely no sense. No company is going to go through all the trouble of making an entirely different processor that will need all new toolchains when risc-v is free. It’s a monumental undertaking. MAYBE china, but who cares? Don’t buy chinese chips.
They will make it incompatible exactly for the purpose of it being incompatible for proprietary purposes, the history of IT is riddled with examples of this being the goto strategy to maintain complete control of the ecosphere you create Apple is probably the best example of this. CPU has been an exception only because they traditionally aren’t designed by the product companies.
So just use another chip… the whole point of RISCv is that anyone can make chips.
risc-v is maturing at a breakneck pace:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/18/24181278/framework-laptop-risc-v-laptop-isa-arm-amd-intel-x86
Why would AMD make an ARM CPU? The power efficiency isn’t related to the instruction set.
Yes that’s what Intel has been preaching for 2 decades now, but I don’t believe it, if it were true, then how come Intel could not compete spending more than Arms entire revenue for 10 years to try to make a better CPU than Arm? They failed for 10 years with $10 billion in losses trying, and then they simply gave up, because they were basically no closer after 10 years than they started out with. And that was back when they still had a production process advantage!!!
But apart from that AMD would make an Arm CPU because it’s become a huge ecosystem competitive in scope to X86. AND I have zero doubt that if they do, they will prove to have better power efficiency than their X86 offerings.
AMD was at it before, but that was when they were near bankrupt, now AMD is hugely profitable, and can easily afford the extra R&D, but of course they will only do it, if they believe they can capture Arm marketshare enough for it to be profitable.Internally, AMD got pretty far along in making an ARM architecture called K12, but it got scrapped because they didn’t have the money to make two architectures, so they focused on Zen.
And AMD is likely working on ARM stuff right now.
Reportedly, they recently restarted their efforts on an ARM SoC design in order to try to get Nintendo to switch (heh) to them for the Switch 2. Nintendo stuck with Nvidia because they could guarantee 100% backwards compatibility with the Switch and AMD couldn’t.
Again reportedly, AMD didn’t shut their new ARM group after this, seeing that Microsoft is opening up Windows to non-Qualcomm ARM SoCs (believe it or not, MS did give Qualcomm an exclusivity deal for Windows on ARM). AMD wants in on that before others take up a piece of that pie.
BIOS locked to Windows keys. Tuxedo is promising a Linux version of the same SOC soon, though.
Qualcomm paid Canonical a hefty sum to make sure chipsets were supported. It went upstream to kernel, but I don’t think it’s even in the 6.10 release last I checked. DKMS job for now I’m assuming?
https://canonical.com/blog/qualcomm-and-canonical-announce-strategic-collaboration
I’m not interested in anything that’s “Co-Pilot enabled.”
So, you’re done with computer hardware?
There’s always Linux.
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Okay but what about app compatibility?
They have something akin to Apple’s Rosetta 2 that’s pretty much the same hit performance-wise.
Yeah, I’m curious to see how this plays out Rosetta 2 was scary good.
It exists and has already been benchmarked, it works just as well as Rosetta 2.
Rosetta 2 was so good because M1 had hardware to help with x86 emulation. Presumably qualcomm can do the same thing.
I think the wave of hype sort of overshadowed a couple of key points about these chips:
- Performance & efficiency aren’t leaps & bounds ahead of the Intel & AMD crowd
- ARM Windows laptops are still Windows laptops
Battery life is hardware and software.
Man, that’s a bummer. I’ve been really unimpressed with Intel’s laptops the past few years.
