10mo ago

Leaks for Windows 11 laptop with Snapdragon X Elite show a CPU that’s a serious threat to Apple’s M3

www.techradar.com 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?

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?

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Anything keeping Apple on their toes is good for everyone.

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.

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.
  
  Sounds to me like it’ll be almost on par with a base M2, so roughly in line with the $999 M2 MacBook Air.
- 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.
- 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.

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...

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)

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.

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.

Only interesting if this works under Linux.

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.
  
  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.

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.

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