The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme trounces Nvidia's chip in single core CPU performance. It beats Intel and AMD's best, too. It has unified memory. It's the only CPU in the same league as Apple's M-series in both CPU performance and power efficiency. And it's available in laptops today, not later this year. People are sleeping on Qualcomm.
Garbage operating system support. If you can’t do Linux support it’s a bit pointless because there’s two platforms for this that matter: Linux and Darwin.
Qualcomm is like AMD was for GPUs for like decades. Lots of announcements and people on the Internet are huge fans based on web pages they’ve read but if you try to make it work it’s a nightmare.
Snapdragon X Elite doesn’t work on Linux so it’s a pointless platform. Enthusiasts have made M1 work better. Literally have old Macs running rather than use Qualcomm.
Yep, very much this. I don't bother looking to them for anything in this space because the hostility they show towards general Linux support appears to be rooted in principle and appears to be very much deliberate. It almost feels like Linux support would run counter to how they want their processors to be used.
Whether this is true or not, it's pretty safe to assume anything based on their stuff is not for me.
It's the usual issue with Qualcomm SoCs being designed as bespoke embedded platforms as opposed to standard general-purpose compute. So Linux support for these chips ends up being heavily vendor specific, i.e. it's not just Qualcomm it's also the platform OEMs.
I assume because most windows installs are corporate IT garbage that if anyone cared about performance they could just turn off one of the three endpoint protection services or tune the backup service down and get better results than processor upgrades.
It trounces ARM's old CPU design. The X925 used in this Nvidia chip is 2 years old. X930 or C1 has shipped with Mediatek Dimensity 9500 which is what the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 / X2 Elite should be compared to. Although Qualcomm still has a lead in performance, but it is increasingly shrinking.
But perhaps more importantly. Nvidia seems to be doing a lot better with its ecosystem. Nvidia has much better distribution channels and partners building on top of their PC Gaming GPU. It also have gaming developers relations that is unmatched by any in the industry.
Qualcomm has so far failed to execute this, both in PC and on there Server CPU side.
I'm not sure they are sleeping. I have an older version and it can run games and other things just fine, its just over priced and not properly cooled. The driver/firmware support from Lenovo / Qualcomm is purely garbage. You're lucky to get a driver update to fix anything. For months it just overheated and video would start corrupting but that got fixed finally. You cant just go to Qualcomm's website and download new drivers even though it looks like you can - they really dont get how modern GPU's work on Windows - a driver updates to optimize for games is really something important because of how Windows is but the experience is pulling teeth. If the systems were Neo priced (500-700 USD) and had a cooling fan I'd be all on board with these systems. Right now, AMD with unified memory is just the better deal for the $1200 (2025) systems to run Windows and an average workload.
Seems like not? Judging based on https://github.com/qualcomm-linuxsomething is happening, although I can't say how much. They definitively seem awake at least.
The problem with these chips on Linux is that something has been happening for months but you still end up needing to download special editions of ARM Linux images to get these devices to work properly.
Some distros still need extracting Qualcomm firmware from Windows to get Linux to work properly. Audio remains a challenge, like x86 Linux decades ago. Apparently camera stuff works these days but produces images of subpar quality.
These issues also occur on normal Linux. My experience with my Lenovo+Intel laptop was that it took three months after release for the firmware to work properly (and the Nvidia drivers took much longer, but that's my fault for buying something containing Nvidia hardware). Intel managed to do what Qualcomm did in months rather than years.
I hope Qualcomm finally sorts this shit out, I really do, but with the prices of computers these days, I'm going to need to see quite the discount before I'll consider buying anything with a Snapdragon.
one of the biggest issue i see is the devicetree nonsense. It makes every single laptop and bios version very unique and requires a lot of housekeeping. There are also big chunks of work (as i understand it) to be done around hibernate and decent suspend support.
My experience (wanted to use x13s as daily sriver) is that there was good progress for about a year, until jhovold was leading the charge, but something expired and qualcom as far as i can tell forgot that some progress should happen on x1 and x8c as well as x2.
It feels deeply unfortunate that even with Windows on AArch64 requiring ACPI that it still doesn’t suffice for Linux, unlike on x86.
And I know a lot of that lies on the vendors, but it does feel unfortunate (from a standardisation/conformance/certification point of view) that Windows requiring it doesn’t make it easy to boot other OSes!
They have original thoughts! It's just that those employees get squashed by other divisions or having to meet short term quarterly profits it seems.
There's also the whole giant trillion dollar company doesn't want to invest and let small ideas grow. They only focus on things that move the needle, which isn't much at the size.
Had Microsoft executed and invested, they could have made a come back imo in both search, mobile & hardware. Unfortunately major lack of leadership or they just don't want those areas.
Unless the chip was called Copilot, they are not thinking anything about it. If was called Copilot, they'd have already figured out how to shove it down your throat.
Qualcomm is a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, you don’t fool me twice” kind of situation. So many horrible experiences in the past that people are going to be hesitant.
Qualcomm are trying harder now it seems. But it will take time to repair their reputation in the PC market.
They burned me with the first gen Snapdragon X Elite. Before the various laptops with it were out they promised Linux support. Here we are, years alter, still no fully OOTB support. Ironically, the GPU firmware were just mainlined in the kernel 4 months ago, but they still haven't done the same for the 1st gen X elite.
Tuxedo computers tried and didn't succeed either.
I will never buy Qualcomm again. I avoid them on phones as well by just buying Apple. They do not support their hardware beyond the release.
> I avoid them on phones as well by just buying Apple
To each their own, but I don't recall Apple ever mainlining any of their drivers on Linux. You're rightfully angry on the laptop side of things, but Apple is much worse than Qualcomm when it comes to open source support for their phones.
Qualcomm probably shouldn't have promised Linux support in the first place. Everyone seems to love Apple's hardware even though you're practically stuck with macOS. Had Qualcomm just stuck to Windows-only, they would've probably received a much better reception by the tech press.
Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux support for some of their chips but they're not working fast enough and I don't think the latest chips are there yet unfortunately.
I've been keeping an eye on the state of Linux on the first gen of X Elite and it's sad that the potential is not fully materialized outside WoA. Take a look at what peeps are going through:
Too bad Qualcomm provides shit drivers for Linux, never updates any of their drivers (had a Samsung/Qualcomm phone with drivers years behind the equivalent Google Pixel phone), etc... They are the absolute worst actor in the entire computing world, don't care how fast their chip is.
Why do people care so much about single core performance? We are all professionals here and I bet most of our workloads are multi core. I get that these new arm chips from Apple and Qualcomm are great at one thing at a time, but for professional workloads high end x64 chips still cannot be beaten on the desktop.
outside of anything else, amdahls law means that as the parallel performance grows, we become _more_ limited by the inherently serial code, and thus single core performance, not less.
Given that single core performance is "harder" (can't just throw more cores/sockets at the problem), it's also critically important.
What x86 chips have the same or higher number of cores in the form factors that these chips are available in and are also more performant?
Strix Halo is 16 cores. Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX is 24. Apple is 18. Qualcomm is something similar too but I can’t recall. NVIDIA is 20.
Until you get to threadripper/epyc or Xeon territories (completely different form factors and TDPs) the arm chips are ahead on both power and perf than the x86. And even when you get to those areas, arm is equivalent or out performs them as can be seen by the recent neoverse x3 and Vera benchmarks.
Single core performance is the biggest factor for most day-to-day use of a computer, the stuff I do on a laptop. It's more important than peak multi core performance for web browsing and games. I only care about multi core performance when I'm compiling, and I usually do heavy compiles on a remote machine rather than on my laptop.
Technically speaking, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, which is where this came from and that company came from ex-Apple engineers wanting to do what Apple said no for their chips.
Dreams for PS4 used point splatting and has a very unique look as a result. The splats were created from distance fields instead of being scanned, so they don't look like modern gaussian splats. They have a painterly look instead. https://youtu.be/2ltgkcoQzow
Single-core CPU performance is going to be fully 20% slower than Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. People are sleeping on Qualcomm's latest. It's the only chip out there to approach Apple's single core CPU performance and power efficiency.
Yes but you’re assuming that whatever they put into our environment will target that perfectly. I’m concerned there’ll be other effects and that such releases aren’t reversible.
They are releasing sterile males of one specific species, infected with a naturally occurring bacteria that naturally infects them in the wild as well. It's hard to imagine a more targeted or less objectionable method than this. If you won't accept this method then you're essentially arguing we should never attempt to reduce the invasive mosquito population by any means, which I will have to respectfully but strongly disagree with.
I can imagine many ways this can backfire. The simplest is - the targeting you’re assuming may not be actually what happens. It may be that some number of bugs released are different and have an unintended side effect. What gives this private organization the right to run this experiment on all of us? Will they assume liability?
If you mean that seriously: homo sapiens came into existence in Africa, existed solely there for a long time (generating lots of genetic diversity) and then spread throughout the world in multiple waves. It's complicated by the fact that there was no single location and population that became homo sapiens- it was more like a network of locations and populations that evolved concurrently (there was genetic exchange between them as they evolved from their predecessor species).
Depending on how you define it, I could see "parts of Africa" as being "native" but that doesn't really help this discussion.
It's the clearest possible example of the fact that simply "eradicating non-native species" is anything _but_ simple, and will have unforeseen implications and consequences. I doubt that modeless intended to advocate for the culling of the majority of humanity, but that was technically what they did. Similarly, SilverElfin correctly points out the high probability of unforeseen consequences of "just" changing the species make-up of a large component of the food web.
WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
A more apt analogy: I don't consider North Sentinel Island to be part of the modern world, since there is no relevant innovation going on there, it has no influence on the rest of the world, and there is nothing to be learned there.
You miss debug.com, wish there was an equivalent for the modern era, find out that windbg does almost all these things today, and say there's nothing of value there.
I say this as something who does all the things you described debug.com as doing, in this modern era.
Maybe so, but that's not what you claimed. You claimed that WinDbg "does not assemble or disassemble", when of course it does. Try to be more accurate with your claims if you want serious people to take you seriously.
Actually, I didn't even get to this part of your message, windbg absolutely can patch currently running programs. It does all the things you think it can't do.
Okay, but is it not what you wished for, "a similar tool for the modern era"?
edit: I see I simul-posted with u/modeless, but I can't remove it now that there's a (duplicate) reply. Maybe mods can remove or at least collapse mine (their ID is one lower so they were first)
WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
If OP wanted to know whether WinDbg and debug.com can be considered feature-similar, they could have read my first comment [1], where I specifically said that debug.com is a "debugger, *assembler*, and *disassembler*". Of those three features, WinDbg provides one.
It seems they've been stopping short of completion. Once the next gen chip is released, they are done and stop working on fixing issues.
Hopefully, with some time this gets better as it's not like they have to start from scratch with each generation. But it does leave a sour taste in my mouth that they quit so early before finishing.
I hope Linux support for these chips matures quickly. Qualcomm's laptop chips are the only serious competitor to Apple's M-series in single core performance and power efficiency. Intel and AMD are both far behind.
I hope not just Linux support for these chips matures - but that the rest of the fabless chip vendors get a leg up as well, because .. The world needs non-Apple/-Qualcomm variants of this hardware architecture, imho.
Doesn't really seem like a bait and switch to me. He legitimately designed and produced and sold the first thousand from his dorm room. Is your complaint that he left the dorm room before hitting $1M revenue from it? Seems irrelevant.
I recently found out about the Radxa Dragon Q6A. A Qualcomm chip with faster CPUs, a good GPU, a DSP and AI accelerator, and a hardware video encoder seems very compelling. It even supports Windows if you want that for some reason.
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