Comment by ndiddy
7 days ago
It's a shame that this didn't end up going anywhere. When Qualcomm was doing their press stuff prior to the Snapdragon X launch, they said that they'd be putting equal effort into supporting both Windows and Linux. If anyone here is running Linux on a Snapdragon X laptop, I'd be curious to know what the experience is like today.
I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. They have similar performance/battery life, and run cool (so you can use the laptop on your lap or in bed without it overheating), but have full Linux support today and you don't have to deal with x86 emulation. If anyone needs a thin & light Linux laptop today, they're probably your best option. Personally, I get 10-14 hours of real usage (not manufacturer "offline video playback with the brightness turned all the way down" numbers) on my Vivobook S14 running Fedora KDE. In the future, it'll be interesting to see how Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips compare to Snapdragon X2.
The iGPU in Panther Lake has me pretty excited about intel for the first time in a long time. Lunar Lake proved they’re still relevant; Panther Lake will show whether they can actually compete.
Lunar Lake had integrated RAM, right? Given certain market realities right now, it could be a real boon for them if they keep that design.
I'm typing this from a snapdragon x elite HP. It's fine really but my use is fairly basic. I only use it to watch movies, read, browse, and draft word and excel, some light coding.
No gaming - and I came in knowing full well that a lot of the mainstream programs don't play well with snapdragon.
What has amazed me the most is the battery life and the seemingly no real lag or micro-stuttering that you get in some other laptops.
So, in all, fine for light use. For anything serious, use a desktop.
Running Linux?
WSL or Docker is the only way to run Linux on these, it seems :(
Windows 11 with all the bloatware removed isn't a terrible experience though.
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What is it about it that makes it unsuited for anything serious? The way you describe it, the only thing it's not suited for is gaming, which is not generally regarded as serious.
Many people including myself do serious work on a macbook, which is also ARM. What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?
> What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?
Everything else around the cpu. apple systems are entirely co-designed (cpu to work with the rest of the components and everything together to work with mac os).
While i'd love to see macbook-level quality on other brands (looking at you, lenovo) tight hardware+software co-design (and co-development) yields much better results.
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I was incredibly excited when they announced the chip alongside all kinds of promises regarding Linux support, so I pre-ordered a laptop with the intention of installing Linux later on. When reports came out that single core performance could not even match an old iPhone, alongside WSL troubles and disappointing battery life, I sent it back on arrival.
Instead I paid the premium for a nicely specced Macbook Pro, which is honestly everything I wanted, safe for Linux support. At least it's proper Unix, so I don't notice much difference in my terminal.
Forget equal effort: Start off with hardware docs.
Equal effort is far more likely from Qualcomm than hardware docs. They don't even freely share docs with partners, and many important things are restricted even from their own engineers. I've seen military contractors less paranoid than QCOM.
I'd have to say that full hardware documentation, even under NDA, is prerequisite to claim equal effort. The expectation on a desktop platform (that is, explicitly not mobile, like phones or tablets) is that development is mostly open for those who want to, and Qualcomm's business is sort of fundamentally counter to that. So either they're going to have to change those expectations (which I would prefer not to happen), provide more to manufacturers, or expect that their market performance will be poor.
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Qualcomm could've become "the Intel of the ARM PC" if they wanted to, but I suspect they see no problem with (and perhaps have a vested interest in) proprietary closed systems given how they've been doing with their smartphone SoCs.
Unfortunately, even Intel is moving in that direction whenever they're trying to be "legacy free", but I wonder if that's also because they're trying to emulate the success of smartphone SoC vendors.
I don't know if the prospect of being the "Intel of ARM" is very appealing when you can manufacture high-margin smartphone SOCs instead. The addressable market doesn't seem to be very large; any potential competition is stifled by licensing on both Microsoft and Softbank's side.
The legend of Windows on ARM is decades old, and people have been seriously trying to make it happen for at least the past two decades. They're all bled dry. Apple is the only one who can turn a profit, courtesy of their sweetheart deal with Masayoshi Son.
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The extent PCs are open is an historical accident, that most OEMs would rather not repeat, as you can see everywhere from embedded all the way to cloud systems.
If anything, Linux powered devices are a good example on how all of them end up with OEM-name Linux, with minimal contributions to upstream.
If everyone would leave Windows in droves, expect regular people to be getting Dell and HP Linux at local PC store, with the same limitations as going outside their distros with binary blobs, and pre-installed stuff.
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> I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips.
Depends why the Snapdragon chips were relevant in the first place! I got an ARM laptop for work so that I can locally build things for ARM that we want to be able to deploy to ARM servers.
Surprising. Cross compilation too annoying to set up? No CI pipelines for things you're actually deploying?
(I'm keen about ARM and RISC-V systems, but I can never actually justify them given the spotty Linux situation and no actual use case)
Cross compilation is a pain to set up, especially if you're relying on system libraries for anything. Even dynamically linking against glibc is a pain when cross compiling.
Linux on arm is probably the most popular computing device platform in the world.
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We do have ARM CI pipelines now, but I can only imagine what a nightmare they would have been to set up without any ability to locally debug bits that were broken for architectural reasons.
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It's more surprising to me that software isn't portable enough that you can develop locally on x86-64. And then have a proper pipeline that produces the official binaries.
Outside the embedded space, cross-compilation really is a fool's errand: either your software is not portable (which means it's not future-proof), or you are targeting an architecture that is not commercially viable.
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Do the Lunar Lake chips have the same incredible standby battery times as the Snapdragon X's? That's where the latter really shines in my opinion.
I have a couple generation back amd laptop that can 'standby' for months.. its called S4 hibernate. Although at the same time its set for S3 and can sit in S3 for a few days at least and recover in less time than it takes to open the screen. The idea that you need instant wakeup when the screen has been closed for days is sorta a niche case, even apple's machines hibernate if you leave the screen closed for too long.
That isn't to say that modern standby/s2-idle isn't super useful, because it is, but more for actual use cases where the machine can basically go to sleep with the screen on displaying something the user is interacting with.
Roughly the same on my Intel Lenovo. It’s a great little machine. And Linux runs nicely.
Yea, Lunar Lake made hit into ARM, but Panther Lake should be even stronger hit
Better efficiency of X86 mobiles CPUs does negate much of the advantage of ARM laptops. It's just not worth the trouble of going through a major software transition.
One thing that I find suspicious is the large delta in single thread score between ARM and X86 currently. The real world performance does not suggest that big of a difference in actual use. The benchmarks suggest a 25% performance delta but in actual use the delta seems to be less than 10%. Of course Apple Silicon has the efficiency crown very much locked down
Since they have become a marketing target the benchmarks have become much less useful.