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Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

qualcomm.com

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Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#41

Post by kwanbix »

brokencode wrote: post #31
electroly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surface Pro 11 owner here. SQL Server won't install on ARM without hacks. Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization on ARM. Most games are broken with unplayable graphical glitches with Qualcomm video drivers, but fortunately not all. Most Windows recovery tools do not support ARM: no Media Creation Tool, no Installation Assistant, and recovery drives created on x64 machines aren't compatible [EDIT: see reply, I…

That’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.

Because Apple controls verything vs Windows/Linux world where hundres (thouthands?) of OEM create things?

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#42

Post by renewiltord »

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.

Ironically M1 chip is better supported on Linux.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#43

Post by electroly »

goosedragons wrote: post #39
electroly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surface Pro 11 owner here. SQL Server won't install on ARM without hacks. Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization on ARM. Most games are broken with unplayable graphical glitches with Qualcomm video drivers, but fortunately not all. Most Windows recovery tools do not support ARM: no Media Creation Tool, no Installation Assistant, and recovery drives created on x64 machines aren't compatible [EDIT: see reply, I…

You ABSOLUTELY do not have to create a recovery drive from a Snapdragon based device. I've done it multiple times from x64 Windows for both a SPX and 11.

Hmm, thank you, that's good to know. Did you just apply the Snapdragon driver zip over the x64 recovery drive? It didn't work for me when my OS killed itself but I could easily have done something wrong in my panic over the machine not working. Since I only have the one Snapdragon device, I was making the assumption that it would have worked if I had a second one, but I didn't actually know that.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#44

Post by viraptor »

brokencode wrote: post #31
electroly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surface Pro 11 owner here. SQL Server won't install on ARM without hacks. Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization on ARM. Most games are broken with unplayable graphical glitches with Qualcomm video drivers, but fortunately not all. Most Windows recovery tools do not support ARM: no Media Creation Tool, no Installation Assistant, and recovery drives created on x64 machines aren't compatible [EDIT: see reply, I…

That’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.

Did it? From that list: SQL server doesn't work on Mac and there's no Apple equivalent, virtualisation is built into the system so that kind of worked but with restrictions, games barely exist Mac so a few that cared did the ports but it's still minimal. There's basically no installation media for Macs in the same way as windows in general.

What I'm trying to say is - the scope is very different / smaller there. There's a tonne of things that didn't work on Macs both before and after and the migration was not that perfect either.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#45

Post by okanat »

bitwize wrote: post #34
brokencode wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.

Because it was handled by the only tech company left that actually cares about the end user. Not exactly a mystery.

Having a narrow product line helped Apple a lot. Similarly being able to deprecate things faster than business-oriented Microsoft. Apple also controls silicon implementation. So they could design hardware features that enabled low to zero overhead x86 emulation. All in all Rosetta 2 was a pretty good implementation.

Microsoft is trying to retain binary compatibility across architectures with ARM64EC stuff which is intriguing and horrifying. They, however, didn't put any effort into ensuring Qualcomm is implementing the hardware side well. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm has no experience in making good desktop systems and it shows.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#46

Post by alphabettsy »

piskov wrote: post #40
smcleod wrote: post #37

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.

Most consumers don’t care about local LLMs anyway.

Yet the apps top the App Store charts. Considering that these are not upgradable I think the specs are relevant. Just as I thought Apple shipping systems with 8 GB minimums was not good future proofing.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#47

Post by piskov »

alphabettsy wrote: post #46
piskov wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most consumers don’t care about local LLMs anyway.

Yet the apps top the App Store charts. Considering that these are not upgradable I think the specs are relevant. Just as I thought Apple shipping systems with 8 GB minimums was not good future proofing.

What apps with local llm top app store charts?

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#48

Post by londons_explore »

drewg123 wrote: post #32

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.

For really old software, it tends not to make good use of multiple cores anyway and you can simply emulate just a single core to achieve total store ordering.

Anything modern and popular and you can probably get it recompiled to ARM64

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#49

Post by electroly »

viraptor wrote: post #44
brokencode wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.

Did it? From that list: SQL server doesn't work on Mac and there's no Apple equivalent, virtualisation is built into the system so that kind of worked but with restrictions, games barely exist Mac so a few that cared did the ports but it's still minimal. There's basically no installation media for Macs in the same way as windows in general. What I'm trying to say is - the scope is very different / smaller there. Ther…

Out of the gate, Apple silicon lacked nested virtualization, too. They added it in the M3 chip and macOS 15. Macs have different needs than Windows though; I think it's less of a big deal there. On Windows we need it for running WSL2 inside a VM.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#50

Post by bri3d »

drewg123 wrote: post #32

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.

Does anyone have benchmarks for Rosetta with TSO vs the Linux version with no-TSO? I guess it might be a bit challenging to achieve apples to apples, although you could run a test benchmark on OSX and then Asahi on the same hardware, I think?

I've always been curious about just how much Rosetta magic is the implementation and how much is TSO; Prism in Windows 24H2 is also no slouch. If the recompiler is decent at tracing data dependencies it might not have to fence that much on a lot of workloads even without hardware TSO.

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