Technology @lemmy.world filister @lemmy.world 5 mo. ago

Snapdragon X Elite Reviews are Out: Solid Performance and Great Battery Life | Beebom

beebom.com Snapdragon X Elite Reviews are Out: Solid Performance and Great Battery Life

Copilot+ PCs have started shipping and early reviews are out for the Snapdragon X Elite processor. We have collated all the reviews in one place.

46 comments

Most of the reviews I've seen so far are a bit lukewarm. Performance and bettery is good, but they're barely better than what Intel and AMD offer. They promised 20+ hours battery life, we get around 12-13 which is in line with other chips.

The screenshots in the article are from Dave2D's video which compared gaming laptops to the X Elite. Laptops without a dedicated GPU could outperform it in battery, and are usually cheaper. Not to mention the new generation of chips are reportedly way more efficient. Kind of underwhelming.
- I think people believe that the ARM ISA brings a power efficient design but what really made Apple able to sip power on the M1 was a decade of phone processor design experience and full control of the software stack.
  
  The people working on Snapdragon X Elite are supposedly the same people that worked on the M1 and M2 chips. They made their own company to make ARM chips before being acquired by qualcomm. I was hoping for similar gains...
  
  I thought it was the deal with (what was it, TSMC?), they got the new nm generation first?
- Performance and bettery is good, but they're barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.
  
  And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.
- Relevant Chipsandcheese article
  
  https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter/
I wonder what's the Linux experience/support on this laptop
- Literally what I was wondering, lol. My first thought was "how well does it run Debian?"
  
  OTOH, I really don't want to contribute to a sale that may make MS or the hardware manufacturers think people want this AI crap. I just want a beefy ARM laptop that runs Linux lol.
  
  They’re apparently working on it. Tuxedo already got a prototype and Qualcomm has been apparently contributing code to the mainline Linux kernel to guarantee support
  
  Well, actually, what if I want AI "crap" capability with my Linux ARM laptop?
  
  The TOPS on those systems are no joke. Consider that it's 1/2 the performance of an RTX 2060 in a slim laptop form factor.
  
  Edit: The performance variance is still the same. 2060 can do almost 13 TFLOPS fp16 or about 102 TOPS measured (this figure is on other sites too, this is what I can find atm). SD Elite X can do 45 TOPS. Not bad, considering existing x86_64 CPUs with an NPU do 10-16 TOPS.
  
  So the way MS is using it is incredibly dumb, but hardware wise, it’s just a NN-optimized tile on the CPU. That is going to be a great thing for democratizing access to serious machine learning hardware. In that respect, it’s actually pretty awesome, despite the fact that It’s annoying that the initiative is tied so closely to MS.
- I wanted an Arm based Linux netbook or laptop for many years ever since the multi-core Smartphones came out around 2008.
  Already back then the Intel based Netbooks were laughably bad compared to Arm, and couldn't even play video properly, while you could do that with ease even on early smartphones with Arm at 1080p.
  
  But for some reason Arm has given Linux very little love with their GPU drivers, and AFAIK they still don't support it well, so now I say go fuck yourself.
  Arm is NOT a good company for Linux. How they missed that opportunity for a strong market entry for over a decade I simply cannot fathom.
  
  If AMD made an Arm CPU with Radeon graphics, that would be cool. Because AMD has good open source drivers on Linux, and has generally good Linux support.
  
  You're right. We shouldn't use proprietary bullshit and hope the corporations do the right thing.
  
  RISC-v is the way.
  
  Why would AMD make an ARM CPU? The power efficiency isn't related to the instruction set.
- BIOS locked to Windows keys. Tuxedo is promising a Linux version of the same SOC soon, though.
  
  Can we please make vendor-locked bootloaders illegal, for repairability and consumer choice and all that? There's literally no reason for it, except to lock in customers.
- Qualcomm paid Canonical a hefty sum to make sure chipsets were supported. It went upstream to kernel, but I don't think it's even in the 6.10 release last I checked. DKMS job for now I'm assuming?
  
  https://canonical.com/blog/qualcomm-and-canonical-announce-strategic-collaboration
- None, locked out.
  
  Surely they're not going to give the game away on the first generation ?
  
  To end the PC and turn it into a phone. Surely they would let people run linux for gen 1 & gen 2 and only then lock the bootloader. And maybe keep a triple priced version with an unlockable bootloader until the alternative OS community dies of attrition.
I'm not interested in anything that's "Co-Pilot enabled."
- So, you're done with computer hardware?
  
  There's always Linux.
  
  Are you suggesting that all computer hardware is going to be branded as such?
  
  Have you ever heard of Arch
  
  Liiiiiiiinuuuuux
Okay but what about app compatibility?
- They have something akin to Apple's Rosetta 2 that's pretty much the same hit performance-wise.
  
  Yeah, I’m curious to see how this plays out Rosetta 2 was scary good.
I think the wave of hype sort of overshadowed a couple of key points about these chips:

Performance & efficiency aren't leaps & bounds ahead of the Intel & AMD crowd

ARM Windows laptops are still Windows laptops

Battery life is hardware and software.
Man, that's a bummer. I've been really unimpressed with Intel's laptops the past few years.
- What's the bummer?
  
  Maybe they were tryna reply to the other comment saying the chip isn't that good

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