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Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

qualcomm.com

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Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#161

Post by jasoneckert »

adrr wrote: post #138
jasoneckert wrote: post #8

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.

If you read anything online, you'll realize that the battery life 'is' great. For example, LTT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#162

Post by rock_artist »

wmf wrote: post #66
brokencode wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For one thing Apple dropped 32-bit before they transitioned to ARM while Windows compatibility goes back 30 years.

Actually, the Macho file format was multiarch by design (On Windows we're still stuck with Program Files (x86))..

Anyway, before dropping 32bit, they've dropped PowerPC.

Another consideration, Apple is the king of dylib, you're usually dynamically linking to the OS frameworks/libs. so they can actually plan their glue smarter so the frameworks would still work in native arch. (that was really important with PPC->Intel where you also had big endian...)

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#163

Post by ndiddy »

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.

One reason is that Apple sold subsidized devkits to developers starting around 6 months before Apple Silicon launched, while the X Elite devkit was not subsidized, came with Windows 11 Home (meaning that you had to pay another $100 to upgrade to Pro if you were an actual professional developer who needed to join the computer to your work domain), and didn't ship until after months after X Elite laptops started shipping. As a result, when the X Elite launched basically everything had to run under emulation.

I think another reason is Apple's control over the platform vs Microsoft's. Apple has the ability to say "we're not going to make any more x86 computers, you're gonna have to port your software to ARM", while Microsoft doesn't have that ability. This means that Snapdragon has to compete against Intel/AMD on its own merits. A couple months after X Elite launched, Intel started shipping laptops with the Lunar Lake architecture. This low-power x86 architecture managed to beat X Elite on battery life and thermals without having to deal with x86 emulation or poor driver support. Of course it didn't solve Intel's problems (especially since it's fabricated at TSMC rather than by Intel), but it demonstrated that you could get comparable battery life without having to switch architectures, which took a lot of wind out of X Elite's sails.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#165

Post by kangs »

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #148
adrr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they added low power cores to it, its probably isn't great. Chip design was for originally for datacenters.

Didn't laptops with Snapdragon X Elite CPUs have pretty good battery life? https://www.pcworld.com/article/2375677/surface-laptop-2024-... X2 Elite shouldn't be that different I think.

they do but not extraordinary either.

ive a x elite and a bunch of other laptops

i like the mba 13 (but barely) and the zbook 395+

the x elite is just a bit slow,.incompatible and newer x86 battery life isnt far off

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#166

Post by STKFLT »

hmottestad wrote: post #123

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.

You can probably pretty easily just say Prime==Performance and Performance==Efficiency, but I think the "Prime" branding is kind of a carry over from Snapdragon mobile chips where they commonly use three tiers of core designs rather than the two. They still want to advertise the tier 2 cores as fast so T3 is efficiency, T2 is performance, T1 is Prime.

As an example, the Snapdragon 700-series had Prime, Gold, and Silver branding on it's cores.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#167

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

typpilol wrote: post #17
jasoneckert wrote: post #8

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 ;-)

How's the compatibility? Are there any apps that don't work that are critical?

X Elite does not have AVX instructions (they are emulated instead)

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#168

Post by MisterTea »

Here's my big question: are there datasheets/programmers manuals available or is this yet another proprietary mess of a SoC that ships undocumented Linux drivers with binary blobs? No thanks.

I will not spend money on hardware no one can reliably patch or write drivers for. I also want other operating system maintainers to be able to write drivers and get booting.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#169

Post by my123 »

canucker2016 wrote: post #154
wmf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposedly 128 GB although I doubt vendors will ship that much.

the snapdragon x2 elite extreme (X2E-96-100) SoC supports "128GB+" but qualcomm hasn't specified what the max limit is. this soc also has higher memory bandwidth (228GB/s over 192-bit bus) than the x2 elite. also see https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-elite-extreme-die-package...

128GB is what they can ship using RAM chips available today, but the SoC supports more.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#170

Post by HumanOstrich »

electroly wrote: post #49
viraptor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nested virtualization is not required for WSL2 or Hyper-V VMs. It's only required if you want to run VMs from within WSL2 (Windows 11 only) or Hyper-V VMs within Hyper-V VMs.
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