Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite - looks like the Windows world’s answer to Apple Silicon

[TEUser2K1]

Snapdragon X Plus will bring ARM to 'even more' Windows laptops, still said to beat Apple M3

Qualcomm just announced the Snapdragon X Plus, a second Windows chip that seems to be more affordable, but still powerful.

9to5google.com

 

[altair21]

Although the general perception around here often seems to be that macbook/iphone/ipad whatever are overpriced - catch is that would make pretty much every premium laptop or android overpriced too

I mean you gotta admit those memory/storage upgrades and base model prices are bullshit , like most peeps dont even realize that it costs Apple just about the same if not outright cheaper for memory in those unified chips as they would have for the memory upgrades if they went with the traditional RAM and CPU separate model (this is a good thread for explanation)

Which brings me back to what triggered this originally. What software restriction , if any have you faced on Mac os?
I could in fact counter-argue that windows is more restrictive in comparison

Would love to hear about this honestly, is there any usecase where you felt Linux/MacOS was better aside from the general open source and ease of use when installing packages? but for me, its not about how restrictive Mac is (iPhone def is), its how restrictive their hardware is,

Arent you assuming two things in a bollywood 80s movie Black/White vein viz:

- Customers are idiots

they are not idiots (well, some definitely are), they just dont give a **** until its too late and its a precedent in the market/monopoly .

- Corporations are outright evil

Evil in the comic sense? no, but they definitely are scum, I don't know what's so hard about admitting that, like you do realize that be it HP/Apple or any OEM which locks you behind their bullshit, once anything goes wrong, its just e-waste which would otherwise have been a perfectly usable device?

In the example of proprietary ink that you quoted, there are two facets that you are disregarding:

1) locked inkjets are disproportionately cheap for the customer
Proprietary Ink model was adopted to create units that could be sold at cost or even at loss.
That makes it a positive proposition for households that print infrequently as many such households are ok with a high variable cost per print.. but not OK with a upfront high cost

(Inkjets are oft available for 2.2 -2.5K excl GST. Once you factor in channel costs, shipping & duty , the proceeds for manufacturer would be to the tune of <1000 INR. Inkjets are complex mechanical devices and the only way they sell so cheap is because of proprietary ink)

yeah and this for me is a predatory practice, unfortunately most consumers dont really check out the caveats that comes with it, and its not like the HP is really that cheap, they mostly cost around the same, I can send you as many threads as you want about it (this describes most of my beef with HP),

Barring outright monopolies or oligopolies, I think you will find it hard, if not impossible to find examples of a company being able to get away with what you are assuming to be the norm

I dont know about you but if I cancel a subscription and my ink gets locked or if I update my firmware/software and the printer refuses to work with my ink, I'mma call it bullshit no matter how you package it

No, it is not that simple. Unified memory is not just same memory for CPU and GPU. From I remember, in a Mac

Yeah, agreed they are on the same chip but thats it, there's no advantage as such unless you count the reduced distance between the SOC and the SSD which might have a little bit of difference, Last I checked any decent gen 4 SSD can beat M3's speeds from what I read.

• SSD and memory controllers are on the SoC.
• Memory is on the SoC, right next to the CPU and GPU cores.
• SSD and SoC are connected via high bandwidth channels.
• As SSD can deliver data instantaneously, OS need not keep large amount of data in memory. This is why Apple says that 8GB on Mac is like 16GB on PC (I do hate 8GB Macs that are sold for 1L or more).

Does it help in real world performance? It did work really well when Apple started migration to M1. Application load time, compilation and rendering was so much more faster. Apple Mx chips showed clear difference in speeds 'in real world usage'. It's a win either way for users.

That's more because of the Arm arch and not because SSD was soldered to the board but I think we got it mixed up, I can't really offer you an apples-to-apples comparison for this.

Those who won't need lot of power will get really long battery life and the laptop can be ridiculously thin and lightweight. Those who want lot of power will get that power and it will not be at the cost of battery life. Those who want extraordinary amount of power can still go with Wintels but those laptops need like 300W or more power to operate at that level and battery won't even last an hour.

yeah agreed, my point is not dissing on mac hardware, I'll happily admit that they have the best hardware on the laptop market, my point is their anti-consumer practices and increasing bullshit does not justify the pros they bring but thats just me, I'll take a 8-9 hour battery backup laptop with same weight/size/form factor over a potential glorified paperweight because a company decided to say **** you to its consumers

Coming back to unified memory. Usually, RISC needs more memory to operate as it can only load one instruction per execution. As memory needs to be loaded more number of times, I believe Apple came up with this idea of unified memory architecture and ways to reduce time taken to load data to memory from SSD and then from memory to CPU cores. This is just my thought.

yeah, unified memory has its benefits, now will they be apparent in most day-to-day usage if you are not a video content editor or a gamer? Nah, atleast for now, even conventional hardware can more than keep up with unified memory, its mostly useful, if you want to load/stuff a lot of stuff quickly. it just cuts out the middle man in between, thus leading to faster loading times, essentially what you said but limited to some very few usecases in daily usage.

Also relevant Louis Rossman video where he shows how a simply NAND short can **** up your entire mac.

View attachment 195395
This is going to be the defining factor though:
View attachment 195396 View attachment 195397

essentially, 12-15 hours of backup? really decent ngl, it all depends on the pricing though for me personally

 

[desiibond]

Yeah, agreed they are on the same chip but thats it, there's no advantage as such unless you count the reduced distance between the SOC and the SSD which might have a little bit of difference, Last I checked any decent gen 4 SSD can beat M3's speeds from what I read.

That's more because of the Arm arch and not because SSD was soldered to the board but I think we got it mixed up, I can't really offer you an apples-to-apples comparison for this.

I think you missed what I said. "I said that even without memory on SoC, Dell XPS matches Mac's memory performance or is at least almost as fast as Macs. If PC SIs can make use of bandwidth offered by memory on SoC, they will make Macs look slow." At this time, Neither Apple nor PCs can make the other's memory look slow. Memory bandwidth for DDR5 is about 65Gbps at 5600MHz and memory bandwith in M3 is whopping 150Gbps. This difference is mainly due to placement of memory. The reason why we do not see much difference in performance between premium laptops of both sides is because though there is bandwidth to utilise, memory itself cannot deliver data at that speed to CPU/GPU. DDR5 can hit up to 8400Mbps? Correct me if I am wrong here. If Apple was able to source memory and place modules in a way that it can utilize full bandwidth of 150Gbps, we would have seen them destroy competition in memory benchmarks. The day is not far though when memory on SoC pulls ahead. With memory controllers getting better and better, memory itself getting faster and faster, a memory with multiple modules and lanes will soon hit that bandwidth limits. It is lot harder though for memory on SoC. There is lot of room to improve for memory m and with each generation, memory bandwidth too is expanding. M1 and M2 had 200Mbps bandwidth and M3 has 150Mbps. Is it because Apple saw that there is no point in giving that much of bandwidth when it cannot be used? I don’t know. I think even 100Gbos would be enough. But then, they have to show numbers na.

Edit: M3 Max will have 300Gbps memory bandwidth. M2 Max had 400Mbps. General rule is to increase bandwidth as per the number of CPU and GPU cores. In laptops and desktops with dedicated GPU, GOU has its own VRAM with separate lanes to CPU (PCIe lanes). When you have everything in one SoC and using same memory, bandwidth will play a crucial role. Putting memory on the SoC is the best way to have that much needed total bandwidth that does not get bottlenecked by race conditions from cpu and GPU. This is why Apple seem to be increasing bandwidth as the cores count go up. With that much bandwidth, there is enough room for CPU and GPU cores to utilise memory.

yeah, unified memory has its benefits, now will they be apparent in most day-to-day usage if you are not a video content editor or a gamer? Nah, atleast for now, even conventional hardware can more than keep up with unified memory, its mostly useful, if you want to load/stuff a lot of stuff quickly. it just cuts out the middle man in between, thus leading to faster loading times, essentially what you said but limited to some very few usecases in daily usage.

It actually helps budget and midrange laptops.

Remember the days before UFS? How every phone used to lag and midrange phones used to become so slow and unusable? I had S3 with eMMC, also had Nexus 6. Both lagged to varying extent. eMMC 5.1 has 250 MB/s read speed and 125 MB/s write speed, while the latest UFS 4.0 has 4200 MB/s read speed and 2800 MB/s write speed. (taken from partition wizard.com). Now, in real world, the difference is visible even in a sub-20k phone. The difference was so much that every phone started using UFS storage.

I had a late 2014 Mac mini. It was pretty fast the first year and then started to slow down just like a PC. I upgraded its HDD to SSD and it was a lot faster. Same was with 2018 MBP. It is solid laptop and is fast but when you compare it with MacBook Air or iMac, the speed difference was visible (MBP was lot faster even for normal tasks). Now, if you use M1 Air or M3 pro max ultra whatever MBP, you will not notice difference in normal use, unless you get that shitty 8GB M1 Air. Given that Windows is actually lighter than MacOS (proof: Windows 10 on my Mac mini runs way way way faster than macOS on the same), biggest benefit is to budget and midrange users. They don't have to worry about lag as the laptop ages.

Performance on battery. See the below screenshot. This is massive for productivity. When both are on full power, SB16 was matching and beating the MBP. See what happens when on battery, especially when battery levels are not high. The only way this fails is if Qualcomm and OEMs get greedy and induce visible difference between midrange and premium laptops.

 

[superczar]

@altair21

This thread is going a little all over the place and completely outside the original topic
So i will keep my response restricted


1) On your point on printers - no one likes it if their printer gets locked for proprietary ink and such.
However with the traditional/established pricing model, it would be silly to expect HP or anyone to sell full blown ink printers for a price of 3K (e.g. just the bw+color print heads alone cost close to that and no one will ever argue that a fairly complex piece of tech for 1500/- is overpriced)

Every manuf does this , not just HP. Gillette started this with their razors - its in fact formally called the razor-razorblade business model.
To complain post-facto that cartridges are locked and expensive is disingenuous to say the least.

2) On your point on MacOS being restrictive/ non-restrictive
I'll repeat that MacOS is not restrictive, and in fact windows is a lot more restrictive (not to mention inconsistent) but you dont hear anyone complaining about that

Since you wanted examples, here are three that i faced just within the last days:

1)try disabling the Antimalware service executable chances are you will find you cannot do it even via the group policy editor on win pro- As in of course you can disable it on the screen but windows wont honor its own policy
2) Forced updates : My ally hung while I was on a commute leaving me no option but to force restart - you probably already know what happened next. Lets just say that the battery and time were both drained out while windows did its thing!
3) try accessing any Windows platform App (UWP app from MS store) , hell try accessing even the folder they sit in and tell me what you find


To repeat something i have said earlier, folks who buy a mac do so for their relative merits while being aware of the demerits. Most, if not all, know very well that a 16GB upgrade on a dell /HP will cost half (or less) than that on a mac yet they choose otherwise. Some (like I) make this mistake repeatedly.

More often than not, they also tend to be older buyers who couldn't care less about the so called show-off factor of a Mac.
Most, probably all have also used Windows extensively
Many also tend to be active or at least erstwhile Linux users ! Wonder why that is?

 

[altair21]

@altair21

This thread is going a little all over the place and completely outside the original topic
So i will keep my response restricted


1) On your point on printers - no one likes it if their printer gets locked for proprietary ink and such.
However with the traditional/established pricing model, it would be silly to expect HP or anyone to sell full blown ink printers for a price of 3K (e.g. just the bw+color print heads alone cost close to that and no one will ever argue that a fairly complex piece of tech for 1500/- is overpriced)

I think you got my point wrong, any printer you get from a brand like Epson wont be that much more expensive, and its not just cheaper options as you have pointed out, even their more premium models come with the same bullshit, you can search on reddit for as many threads about it as you want. And this is just one example, I can give you multitude of other usecases, where OEM bullshit is over the top but I agree with you, this is not the thread for it.

Every manuf does this , not just HP. Gillette started this with their razors - its in fact formally called the razor-razorblade business model.
To complain post-facto that cartridges are locked and expensive is disingenuous to say the least.

Nope its not, I can write entire pages on it but a quick reddit search will be far better for you to get some context on. Plus I'm lazy

2) On your point on MacOS being restrictive/ non-restrictive
I'll repeat that MacOS is not restrictive, and in fact windows is a lot more restrictive (not to mention inconsistent) but you dont hear anyone complaining about that

I never said MacOS is restrictive, please read my reply again, I said Apple and its Hardware choices are restrictive. I mean come on, even you will agree its ****ing bullshit that my whole mac is ****ed if my NAND fails, I already linked you a Louis Rossman video where he shows just how it happens, and the worst thing because of how its soldered on the board, a short on the NAND will fry your entire motherboard and again if Louis is too much of a shill for you, you'll find countless threads on reddit repeating the same thing I said ad nauseam.

And lets even forget this, have you seen the memory/storage upgrades that Apple offers, Apple doesnt even offer top of the line SSDs and yet will happily charge you over 10 times its cost in upgrades. Need I say more? I can wax lyrical about the bullshit that an iPhone comes with, but again not the for this.

Since you wanted examples, here are three that i faced just within the last days:

1)try disabling the Antimalware service executable chances are you will find you cannot do it even via the group policy editor on win pro- As in of course you can disable it on the screen but windows wont honor its own policy
2) Forced updates : My ally hung while I was on a commute leaving me no option but to force restart - you probably already know what happened next. Lets just say that the battery and time were both drained out while windows did its thing!
3) try accessing any Windows platform App (UWP app from MS store) , hell try accessing even the folder they sit in and tell me what you find

I have never defended Windows, in fact link me a thread here and I'll happily rant for hours against windows in it and I'll repeat what I have said before, look into debloated windows, it'll change your life for windows laptops, I can help out in DMs if you want.

To repeat something i have said earlier, folks who buy a mac do so for their relative merits while being aware of the demerits. Most, if not all, know very well that a 16GB upgrade on a dell /HP will cost half (or less) than that on a mac yet they choose otherwise. Some (like I) make this mistake repeatedly.

and I said, the merits of mac does not justify the bullshit Apple brings and the precedent it sets in the market, I'll repeat my quote once again, if enough folks instead of going along with whatever bullshit Apple brings, just said, "**** off, I ain't buying this", we would have a way better market along with more consumer rights, I never said it doesnt have its merits, I just said its merits atleast for me does not cancel out the bullshit that comes with it.

More often than not, they also tend to be older buyers who couldn't care less about the so called show-off factor of a Mac.
Most, probably all have also used Windows extensively
Many also tend to be active or at least erstwhile Linux users ! Wonder why that is?

And there are many, who buy just to get that shiny Apple logo, wanna bet which group has more peeps in it?


@desiibond , I agreed with all your points, but my point was you wont feel the difference between a traditional memory model and the unified one, I mean will it affect speeds when you are doing something ridiculous like editiing multiple 4k video projects? heck yea, will you feel the difference in general day to day usage or even intensive stuff? Heck no, Unified memory comes into play when you need to quickly load in assets or whatever in VRAM and you need to quick access to it, And even then while its fast, its not that fast. in 99% of usecases you wont need it, atleast on a mac, I'd rather have the flexibility of memory upgrades.

Check out Digital FOundry's review of Ratchet and Clank, which is the game which heavily relies on PS5's unified memory arch for its asset streaming and see how it compares to the PC port and yes while the difference is there and PS5 is faster, atleast for me its not significant enough to forego the flexibility of memory upgrades, if memory serves me, on a souped up system with a top-end Gen 4 NVME, the loading times were just a couple of seconds apart, certainly not enough to notice in daily usage considering the fact, you wont ever saturate your memory like this unless you are gaming or video editing.

And you can check out video editing benchmarks on PC vs Mac to get an idea how they compare. But anyways what I wanted to say was. I'd rather Snapdragon stick with the traditional approach than go with a unified memory model like in the Elite.

 

[superczar]

I think you got my point wrong, any printer you get from a brand like Epson wont be that much more expensive

No i i didn't.
There are two categories of inkjets that are available regardless of brand.
The razor/razorblade model i.e. cheap upfront (3-4K) and expensive proprietary cartridges

or non locked but understandably expensive upfront (10K+)
I'd be curious to know if there are any non-locked but cheap upfront models - if you see any, please do share here as they would surely make for a good buy

And there are many, who buy just to get that shiny Apple logo, wanna bet which group has more peeps in it?

Are you talking specifically about the 16-25 demographic in India or as a whole? If its the latter, think again!


Do Macbooks (or other apple products) come with BS and compromises - Yes, of course
Is there anything else i can buy that does not involve a compromise? I think not.

Having said that, I am too much of a geek to not keep trying other brands and models too - which I almost constantly do , even rn, there are more PCs of varied makes chugging along in my house than apple

Over the last few decades (literally - and yes, I am old ) , I have , from personal experience, seen more consistency/ longevity and overall lower cost of ownership with their products.
So forgive me if I do not care about SM influencer opinions - I do believe that the days of genuine reviews and product assessment on the interwebs is sadly well past us

On a more pertinent note, I have no special love for apple or macbooks. they are all tools at the end of the day!
Its in the same vein as would buy Makita or Dewalt or Stanley but will skip Black & Decker. But if B&D launches a new good sub-line then why not?
As with power tools, I'll gladly switch camps for computing tools when I find something worthwhile and as good for the same price or less.... hence my interest in this thread

 

[booo]

Just heard this in level1techs episode...

Qualcomm responds to benchmark cheating allegations — Snapdragon X Elite/Plus benchmarks claimed to be fraudulent (Updated)

Seriously concerning news for Qualcomm's latest

www.tomshardware.com

 

[KAKAN]

Just heard this in level1techs episode...

Qualcomm responds to benchmark cheating allegations — Snapdragon X Elite/Plus benchmarks claimed to be fraudulent (Updated)

Seriously concerning news for Qualcomm's latest

www.tomshardware.com

Wow, that sounds kinda bad. And not unexpected. I think they did that previously for one of their mobile chips too? I remember seeing it all over the news back then, as well.

Honestly, I want them to succeed, if nothing, at least it'll make Intel perhaps focus more on lower power division. Their upcoming Lunar Lake sounds nice, wonder how it'll compare. Regardless, this is a really exciting time to be in if you're a spectator and a terrible time if you're a consumer looking to buy their next device haha

My only gripe with the whole ARM thing is how little standards there are for messing around with stuff. BIOS, for one. And most of the firmware is also closed source. Not the Linux kernel ofcourse, those are GPL'd.

It's weird when you consider that Qualcomm only supports chipsets for, what, 2 to 3 years(?) while Intel/AMD support older generations for much longer, for e.g., even 5th generation Intel CPUs got the microcode update for patching those nasty exploits of some time ago. I wonder how good compatibility will be in the long-term. People run 10 to 15 year old laptops quite easily still, I wonder how it'll turn out for Qualcomm/ARM devices.

 

[TEUser2K1]

Upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X Elite

Latest SoC is getting traction on Windows-based laptops, and we’re also consistently upstreaming to mainline Linux. See areas of focus and try our Debian installer.

www.qualcomm.com

"...company details exactly which X Elite features have already been merged into mainline with Linux 6.8 and 6.9, as well as which features will be merged into mainline in Linux 6.10 and 6.11

working closely with upstream communities on an open problem with the UEFI-based BIOS while booting with devicetrees. The problem is that, when you have more than one devicetree blob (DTB) packed into the firmware package flashed on the device, there is no standard way of selecting a devicetree to pass on to the kernel. OEMs commonly put multiple DTBs into the firmware package so it will support devices with slightly different SKUs, so we’re keen to solve this problem...

 

[CeyeN]

As per some leaks, it looks like the battery life has doubled. This is getting exciting. We will actually know more on Monday during MS conference, They will showcase the new surface models with these chips, Even Asus is supposed to announce a few Snapdragon laptops.

Dell leak details next-gen Windows on Arm chips, 29-hour laptops, and more

The summer of Windows on Arm is nearly upon us.

www.theverge.com

 

[ze_cook]

Excited about running linux on these laptops, and IMO mainstream linux distros are more ready for arm64 integration (due to raspi and other SBCs). My asus vivobook 14 oled gets far more battery life running ubuntu, compared to windows. The whole system power draw is ~4w, when reading a pdf with brightness set at 2 ticks (10%?), but this is with a 2.8k 90hz oled panel. Hoping for lower idle power consumption (probably won't go much lower with a display like this) and far better load/lite load power consumption.

 

[Kaleen Bhaiya]

I am of the opinion that Windows will not achieve that much backup. The amount of processes in the background, heavy GUI and how much AI(Adrak, Ilaichi) MS wants to shove down our throats means it will still drain battery.
That is not to say it won't improve from the current backup. Maybe with time, we can see gradual improvements in battery backup.

 

[rootyme]

Excited about running linux on these laptops, and IMO mainstream linux distros are more ready for arm64 integration (due to raspi and other SBCs). My asus vivobook 14 oled gets far more battery life running ubuntu, compared to windows. The whole system power draw is ~4w, when reading a pdf with brightness set at 2 ticks (10%?), but this is with a 2.8k 90hz oled panel. Hoping for lower idle power consumption (probably won't go much lower with a display like this) and far better load/lite load power consumption.

Agree, linux battery life is getting better than Windows. Try Fedora without snaps or flatpaks.

 

[TinTinSnowy]

DoA

 

[altair21]

according to leaked benchmarks online, Elite X is slower than an iphone 12, really hoping its just an underclocking issue as reported

 

[r4hul]

according to leaked benchmarks online, Elite X is slower than an iphone 12, really hoping its just an underclocking issue as reported

I think that is in the case of galaxy book as the top end snapdragon elite version is only available in galaxy book.
What I see from the reviews is that samsung did not properly optimised it's galaxy book.

 

[altair21]

I think that is in the case of galaxy book as the top end snapdragon elite version is only available in galaxy book.
What I see from the reviews is that samsung did not properly optimised it's galaxy book.

yeah, thats why I'm hoping its a case of Samsung ****ing around rather the SD's fault, I'll wait for more laptop reviews but shit aint looking good
Dave2D review of Asus Vivobook S15

 

[r4hul]

yeah, thats why I'm hoping its a case of Samsung ****ing around rather the SD's fault, I'll wait for more laptop reviews but shit aint looking good

Asus vivobook review is quite good. I liked the performance etc but need a long term review also to see how they do. Since these are first gen products they are bound to have some issues.

 

[altair21]

A much better review by notebookcheck and yeah, shit aint looking good at all.

 

[Kaching999]

But those who are looking for efficient mobile gaming this not the answer the new benchmarks suggest that the gaming performance is going to be worse than the last gen ryzen mobile processers.