Leaks for Windows 11 laptop with Snapdragon X Elite show a CPU that’s a serious threat to Apple’s M3::Is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite the laptop processor to watch for 2024?
Anything keeping Apple on their toes is good for everyone.
If it supports Linux I’ll consider, by that I specifically mean official OEM driver support (hopefully open source) alongside official power management utilities (hopefully GUI but TUI is fine)
These things should absolutely scream on Linux. Looking forward to playing with it. Windows hasn’t historically done all that well with non-x86 chipsets out of the gate.
If they can boot it and do power states properly. Here’s hoping…
However, the Snapdragon X Elite is not too far off the M3 Pro, as Windows Latest highlighted. It’s running at about 80% of the speed of this Apple SoC
Uhhh. 80% the speed of Apple’s second-tier laptop chip doesn’t sound impressive to me.
If its $999 it will be a threat to a $3000 apple computer.
Even better if it has linux support. Then it will become tech enthusiast candy.
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You forget the enterprise usage for Windows. Even Incremental gain is huge. With x86 emulation it definitely is a huge threat for apple.
Though I am happy Apple did it first. Competition is great for consumers. We’d never have gotten a decent ARM PC if Apple didn’t rattle Microsoft’s cage.
what’s the obsession with ARM? it’s just cool right now because Apple did it. But amd64 is just fine.
The really short version: potential power savings.
Less battery usage, no need for fans for the same or better performance… ARM is a solid upgrade to PC architecture.
I’m just over here waiting for the RISC V revolution.
Not to mention that soon after these laptops are released, apple will get out m4. So windows is about 1.5 generations behind? Very impressive.
There hasn’t been much development on the M Series since the M1. The M2 was essentially identical to the M1 with the clocks turned up and as a result worse thermals and battery life.
Whatever, pc laptops are lagging behind so much its embarrassing. When I compare my 300 kilo lenovo Legion with a 30 kilo brick for charging that gets me an hour of work tops (strangely not an exaggeration) when disconnected to a thin 2 year or macbook m1 I just wanna cry.
Performance:kg or Performance:Watt all PC laptops are complete trash compared to an M-series Macbook. However, that’s only relevant to some usecases. I generally don’t care how much my laptop weighs or how much power it uses. I just need it to have AMD hardware so Wayland works and to be able to play games decently when I’m not using it for productivity tasks.
Good for you, but pc users are not just gamers.
Edit: maybe pcs are just for gamers? Seems like serious work stuff will now be done on macs if something doesn’t change.
lol, absolutely not. Between Dell and Lenovo, like 90% of the enterprise laptop market is captured.
Why are you working on a gaming PC and expecting good battery life? It’s like using an macbook m1 and expecting good gaming performance.
You can go get a lenovo yoga or carbon and get 10hrs easy. Its a ways off the 20hrs of an m1, but it’s far from the 1 hour of ridiculousness you’ll get with a giant legion while you use a text editor.
Because I need a graphics card for work. My expectations are that the laptop doesn’t run out of battery while I’m on a zoom call with a client. Too much for my lenovo.
So an arm based laptop wouldn’t even work for you, no matter who sells it?
A good one would. Maybe one with lots of shared ram. Maybe one with a few tricks that boost graphic work. Do you know any?
My Lenovo runs most of a day on battery, while running VM’s - it uses a USB C charger.
And it’s 4 years old.
Not sure what you’re doing with a modern laptop to kill a battery like that - I hammer on machines (and phones) , screen’s never off, crank performance up (fan runs a lot), always running VM’s with services (Syncthing, Resiliosync and PiHole mostly), or building VM’s.
I’m impressed that you beat a machine harder than I do, lol.
Graphic design and I don’t believe you.
Ah, yea, design work is intensive. I kind of figured it was something along those lines.
So you have a portable workstation. Those beasts are just what you describe - heavy, massive power supplies, etc. I carried one for a short time, asked if I could downgrade! While it was nice to have the power, it was just too damn heavy (and too big). Damn thing kept my legs warm, all year round.
Anymore I don’t want anything bigger than 14", and even that is slightly larger than I prefer, because I usually have a monitor.
It’s a struggle. But then, I don’t need it to render a pixar movie. There are few cases when I need the graphic card, but I do. On the other hand a mac arm would fulfil that need (as much as I heard), because it’s got some specific bits in it that help that type of work. The moment I saw it, I knew I will replace my PC, when similar chips come out. But then they didn’t. And now, years later they might and they will be OK, while effing apple pushes the boundaries on chips. Insane. That’s the pcs job, not apples.
Promising, but since there’s no mention at all about TDP / power consumption, those Geekbench scores are kinda meaningless.
Last time I checked, these Snapdragons burning five times more electricity to reach M3 levels.
I have one of the Voltera dev kits. It’s not bad. It probably runs at almost the same speed as the m1 mini or maybe closer to the dev kit. The x86 emulation is decent. It doesn’t do well when running old games like Age of Empires 2 HD. For doing light development it is okay. The nice thing is that it is far more efficient than anything Intel puts out. Whether Qualcomm can keep the performance per watt to levels like the M series chips remains to be seen.
Only interesting if this works under Linux.
Will Windows still have a “Power mode” slider ranging from “Best battery life” to “Best performance” with this chip? This is one of the most stupid things to have to manually control. Most manufacturers have presets with different TDP or other wattage settings, fan curves etc. With MacBooks on macOS, it just does the right thing all the time by itself.
I don’t agree. I like having the control. If I want to sacrifice performance for battery on a trip, why shouldn’t I be able to?
Why would you want to micromanage it though if it works perfectly automatically?
I use a ThinkPad P14s with a Ryzen 6850U and Windows on it, and if I want a (mostly) quiet working environment I have to set it to “Best battery life” (even with wall power it’s called that), but then it hard caps at rather low wattage for the APU. Using “Best performance” or “Balanced” (the middle of the slider) raises the maximum allowed wattage, but also adjusts the fan curve to be way more aggressive and even raises the base clocks, causing more idle system power draw.
This might just be Lenovo being incompetent in properly configuring their power profiles, but I’ve had similar experiences on different laptops.
On Macs, especially with Apple Silicon, it just works. It’s quiet and preserves battery life by default, and then maximizes performance when needed. No slider required.
“works perfectly automatically” Hahahaha
Machines can’t read my mind, last I checked.
Elon is working on that
Spoken like somebody who’s never had a corporate laptop with all the big-brother-ware and anti-virus. At 10pm, having stepped away hours ago, the fan is still at full blast.
Windows 11 literally can’t compete with anything not even free opensource Linux. Windows is junkware plane and simple. It has always been and it will always be. In a single day of work I can find a good handful of windows related problems that are clearly problems and somehow Microsoft thought it was fine. A simple example bugs the bejisus out of me: go to the taskbar and select a window to maximize or bring up. It’s a crapshoot. Sometimes it works, sometimes you just have to close the window because it will never come forth ever again. Sometimes you can bring up a sub window just so you can jump to the main program so you can then jump to the actual sub window you wanted in the first place. Happens with outlook, word, excel, and even with non Microsoft software like solid works and such. Why didn’t they fix it or check functionality? Because they just don’t care and probably the people who know how to fix it are now working at another company or on Windows 13 with the same bullshit unresolved problems.
Fucking 99% complete copy, save, refresh? Seen on windows 3, 95, 98, 2000, XP, 7, 8, 10 and 11. Gonna fix it when it becomes a problem. Problem? People not buying your shit program is a problem.
Only if I cared for a Windows computer, which I don’t.
If it makes Apple better; or if it makes Linux on arm better then it makes it better all around.
They’re trying to catch up to Apple, rather than the other way round. Competition is good but they are barely going for the same markets.
Competition is good but they are barely going for the same markets.
So many people don’t get this.
The Windows market is SMB and Enterprise, which Apple essentially never went after (not since the Power PC at least, even then not so much).
It doesn’t matter if the Mac is “better” by whatever metric you want to use (I find them nicely designed) - the OS has always been as bad as Windows 11 from a usability standpoint - and I’ve used them since '85, supported them since '92.
Nevermind trying to use them in most business settings. I know a few in the SMB space, some of which are for print production, where the tradeoffs are worth it. One is for a CEO who just has to have a Mac, and he’s always complaining that he has to RDP to a Windows machine because the software they use doesn’t exist for Apple - at all.
I currently have a MacBook Air (that I inherited) … Nice to touch, but actually using it, like my iPhone and iPad, is a frustrating exercise if you want to do anything that isn’t sanctioned by the Apple High Priests.
I also have an Apple TV that’s now in a drawer. I despise having to use a second remote - despite the Apple TV using HDMI. My 10 year old DVD player can be controlled via HDMI… Come on Apple.
Apple may as well not exist in the business world. If they all disappeared today, it would be trivial to replace them, vs the reverse.
The startup world is almost entirely Apple, maybe a windows box for someone in finance who can’t be assed to learn how to do things outside of excel. If someone tried to take the macs away at any of my last five jobs, there would be riots.
Out of interest, what can’t you do with macOS that you can with Windows?
I use a Mac at work - and am the only Mac user in the company. The only reason I keep a Windows VM is because there’s some annoying compatibility issues with Excel when linking to documents on our shared drive, so if I’m doing that, I’ll do it in Windows for the benefit of the others.
To be fair, we don’t use any proprietary software, or anything like that, but for general day to day office work, my Mac is 100% capable.
Being something of a Linux novice, I tried having a go with Asahi on my M2 MacBook Air a few weeks back. After a couple of days of struggling to figure out why I couldn’t install a number of different extensions, it gradually began to dawn on me that Linux on ARM is essentially non-existent right now.
So yeah, I’m all for this speeding up development of that sort of thing, because as it stands it’s so very close to being daily usable.
Linux on ARM has existed for longer than MacOS on ARM. Do you want to know the problem? That the hardware manufacturer, Apple, didn’t provide any kind of support for it. Asahi is a community project developed by volunteers.
When Linux is supported by the manufacturer, it works like a charm, both ARM and amd64. If you need an ARM example, linux in Raspberry Pis have been running flawlessly for years.
Ah yeah, that’s a fair point.
Like I said, I’m a Linux novice. I jumped from Windows XP to OS X 10.4 back in ‘07 and have only used Macs since. But as much as I appreciate how good Apple’s hardware is, by the time my M2 Air has lost OS support I’ll be very, very keen indeed to be using something other than macOS.
And yes, I meant no shade at all to the folks behind Asahi. What they’ve managed to do so far is nothing short of astonishing. It’s just not quite at daily driver level for people who don’t really know what they’re doing. Not that they advertise it as such, of course.
