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Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

qualcomm.com

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Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#181

Post by Findecanor »

menaerus wrote: post #130
magic_hamster wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple silicon also has special hardware support for x86-64's "TSO" memory order (important for multithreaded code) and half-carry status flag.

BTW. A more common term for what Rosetta does is "binary translation". A "transpiler" typically compiles from one high-level language to another, never touching machine code.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#182

Post by simjnd »

ed_blackburn wrote: post #177

I just want an ARM Linux MiniMac equivalent. At a reasonable price.

I you're willing to go back a few generations, Asahi Linux supports the Mac Mini (M1, M2 and M2 Pro). Support is missing for USB-C displays (it has HDMI) and Thunderbolt, but other than that you can have an awesome experience on these (and probably get yourself a good deal these days)

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#183

Post by electroly »

pjmlp wrote: post #125
electroly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On Windows nested virtualization already existed before WSL, all the kernel and device drivers security features introduced on Windows 10, and made always enabled on Windows 11, require running Hyper-V, which is a type 1 hypervisor. So it is rather easy having to deal with nested virtualization, even those of us that seldom use WSL.

Yes, nested virtualization has existed for a long time... on Intel. On Windows, it is not supported on ARM. For a long time it wasn't even supported on AMD! They added AMD nested virtualization support in Windows Server 2022!

Note that when the Windows host is invisibly running under Hyper-V, your other Hyper-V VMs are its "siblings" and not nested children. You're not using nested virtualization in that situation. It's only when running a Hyper-V VM inside another Hyper-V VM. WSL2 is a Hyper-V VM, so if you want to run WSL2 inside a Windows Hyper-V VM which is inside your Windows host, it ends up needing to nest.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#184

Post by Y_Y »

kangs wrote: post #165
ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Looks like the shift key isn't too reliable either.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#185

Post by overfeed »

renewiltord wrote: post #42

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.

> And you're stuck on their kernel like one of those Raspberry Pi knock offs. It's just really hard to take them seriously.

Qualcomm has beem mainlining Snapdragon X drivers to the 6.x kernel tree for over a year now. There have been multiple frontpage HN posts about this in the past 12 months.

Webcam/mic/speaker support may be a WIP depending on your model, but snapdragon X Elite has been booting Linux for months now, using only drivers in Linus' tree. The budget chips (Snapdragon X Plus) have far less direct support form Qualcomm, but some independent hackers have put in heroic effort to make those run Linux too.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#187

Post by throawayonthe »

bri3d wrote: post #50
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 tra…

i mean, FEX runs on a linux host both with and without TSO, can be compared directly

(the downstream asahi kernel supports TSO)

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#188

Post by ewoodrich »

pjmlp wrote: post #129
rossy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a ChromeOS device a few years ago and it was great. I think they get an underserved bad reputation from being the locked-down devices you're forced to use in schools, but a personal ChromeOS device is a capable computer that can run any Android app or desktop Linux app. Though having said that, in the past year I've replaced ChromeOS with desktop Linux (postmarketOS) and I love it even more now. 4GB of RAM was…

Not really any, Crostini has plenty of restrictions. Cool if one wants to CLI stuff alongside Web and Android apps, but that is as far as it goes for GNU/Linux, with many yes but. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/1792b43f...

I've used VS Code on ChromeOS with the GPU acceleration flag for many, many years without any issues on a couple different devices (x64 and more recently, arm64). It can even hide the window chrome so looks 1:1 with VS Code on any other platform. And many other GUI Linux apps where the Android version feels too much like a toy in comparison, it's an incredibly versatile feature for dev work.

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#189

Post by rkangel »

jeroenhd wrote: post #171
MisterTea wrote: post #168

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.

I haven't dug deep, but it looks like Qualcomm has been working on merging code into the Linux kernel: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-X2-Elite-Linux-8EG5 With them only merging upstream now, it'll be a while before you can actually use Linux on these devices. You can build your own kernel from upstream, but it's probably a better idea to wait until Arch or Gentoo package the necessary pre-configured kernels.…

Or Fedora, which tracks kernels pretty closely (e.g. this Fedora, running the normal update channel is on 6.16)

Re: Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

#190

Post by skavi »

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.

They were joking. The dev kit didn’t have a battery.
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