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Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

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Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#81
post #80
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (admittedly cynical) interpretation is that they are dropping support for desktop Linux completely and shipping Android drivers instead.

I thought “Android drivers” were Linux drivers?

I think the situation is:

Old situation: "Android drivers" are technically Linux drivers in that they are drivers which are built for a specific, usually ancient, version of Linux with no effort to upstream, minimal effort to rebase against newer kernels, and such poor quality that there's a reason they're not upstreamed.

New situation: "Android drivers" are largely moved to userspace, which does have the benefit of allowing Google to give them a stable ABI so they might work against newer kernels with little to no porting effort. But now they're not really Linux drivers.

In neither case does it really help as much as you'd hope.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#83
post #27

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

How's the WSL2 support on these Aarch64 Windows systems?

I'm not a huge fan of working in WSL, because I actively dislike the Windows GUI.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#84
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.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#85

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

Unfortunately games are the most common demanding multithread applications. Studios throw a binary over the fence and then get dissolved. Seems to be the way the entire industry operates.

Maybe more ISA diversity will incentivize publishers to improve long-term software support but I have little hope.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#86
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple chips are ARM chips.

“ARM chip” is a pretty broad umbrella. Apple’s M-series is based on the ARM ISA, the microarchitecture is Apple’s own design, and the SoCs are built with very different cache hierarchies, memory bandwidth, and custom accelerators. I was simply using Apple as an example of another big player.

Well so is the snapdragon X elite, including the older snapdragons (anyone remember scorpion cores on QSD8x50?)

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#87
post #80
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (admittedly cynical) interpretation is that they are dropping support for desktop Linux completely and shipping Android drivers instead.

I thought “Android drivers” were Linux drivers?

Android drivers don't support Wayland etc.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#88
post #27

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

Not surprising considering I haven't seen a programming manual or actual datasheet for these things in the first place. Usually helps if you tell the community how to interact with your hardware ..

That ended 10-20 years ago. The best you can hope for now is vendor-provided drivers.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#89
post #27

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

How's the WSL2 support on these Aarch64 Windows systems? I'm not a huge fan of working in WSL, because I actively dislike the Windows GUI.

I have both Ubuntu and Docker Desktop set up in WSL2 on my X Elite laptop, they both work great, no issues (at least none that I have run into).

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#90
post #76
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it is too slow to run Age of Empires 2: DE multiplayer. More than ten year old Laptops with Intel chips are faster there.

I suspect that's due to the GPU and not due to Prism, because they basically just took a mobile GPU and stuffed it into a laptop chip. Generally performance seems to be on par with whatever a typical flagship Android devices can do. Desktop games that have mobile ports generally seem to run well, emulation is pretty solid too (e.g. Dolphin). Warcraft III runs OK-ish.

The GPUs don't go toe-to-toe with current gen desktop GPUs but they should be significantly better than the GTX 650, a mid range desktop GPU from 2012, the game (2019) lists as recommended. It does sound like something odd is going on than just lack of hardware.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Snapdragon+X+...

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+6...

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