141–150 of 223 posts
18 cores = 12 Prime and 6 Performance Cores Not sure what a prime core is. For comparison the M4 Pro can go as high as 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.
Looks like some benchmarks have started leaking: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Snapdragon-8-Elite-Gen-5-perfo... Mind you, Geekerwan managed to push the A19 Pro to 4019 in Geekbench 6 by using active cooling. https://youtu.be/Y9SwluJ9qPI
Who is likely to package this into existing lines, from the majors? Is this a future lenovo/thinkpad carbon?
Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung
Looking at the SOCs used, only Dell, Microsoft, and Samsung used the 2nd fastest SoC, the X1E-80-100 - the Dell and Microsoft laptops could be configured with 64GB soldered.
Samsung also used the fastest SoC (the only OEM to do so), the X1E-84-100. From a search of their USA website, you're stuck with only 16GB on any of their Snapdragon laptops. :(
I'd hope whichever OEM(s) uses the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme SoC (X2E-96-100) allows users to configure RAM up to 64GB or 128GB.
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Sorry, but "CLI stuff" is not "as far as it goes" with desktop Linux apps on ChromeOS. ChromeOS provides Wayland and PulseAudio servers to the apps as well so GUI and audio works too. It even synchronises file associations and installs a ChromeOS-like GTK theme into the container. The Linux GUI apps I had installed back when I used it felt completely native.
Without hardware acceleration and sound issues depending on the model, that is why I linked the page, as I was expecting such reply.
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Apple had a great translation layer (Rosetta) that allows you to run x64 code, and it's very fast. However, Apple being Apple, they are going to discontinue this feature in 2026, that's when we'll see some Apple users really struggling to go fully arm, or just ditch their MacBook. I know if Apple does follow through with killing Rosetta, I'll do the latter.
It's a transpiler that takes the x86-64 binary assembly and spits out the aarch64 assembly only on the first run AFAIK. This is then cached on storage for consecutive runs.
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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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Because Apple controls verything vs Windows/Linux world where hundres (thouthands?) of OEM create things?
I agree with you on the Windows side. Linux is different. Decades of being tied to x86 made the OS way more coupled with the processor family than one might think. Decades of bugfixes, optimizations and workarounds were made assuming a standard BIOS and ACPI standards. Specially on the desktop side. That, and the fact that SoC vendors are decades behind on driver quality. They remind me of the NDiswrapper era. Also,…
This doesn't pass the smell test when Linux powers so many smart or integrated devices and IoT on architectures like ARM, MIPS, Xtensa, and has done so for decades.
I didn't even count Android here which is Linux kernel as first class citizen on billions of mostly ARM-based phones.
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Does Remote Desktop into the Surface work well? When I'm home, I often just remote desktop into my laptop. I'm wondering if remoting into ARM Windows is as good?
Yes everything in user space works as expected. Note that NT has supported non-x86 processors since 1992.
As someone who has used the Snapdragon X Elite (12 core Oryon) Dev Kit as a daily driver for the past year, I find this exciting. The X Elite performance still blows my mind today - so the new X2 Elite with 18 cores is likely going to be even more impressive from a performance perspective! I can't speak to the battery life, however, since it is dismal on my Dev Kit ;-)
Unless they added low power cores to it, its probably isn't great. Chip design was for originally for datacenters.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2375677/surface-laptop-2024-...
X2 Elite shouldn't be that different I think.
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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.
I'd guess the M3 features aren't required for nested virtualization, and it was more of a sw design decision to only add the support when some helpful hardware features were shipped too. Eg here's nested virtualization support for ARM on Linux in 2017: https://lwn.net/Articles/728193/
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 tra…