Snapdragon X Elite Reviews

[Armageus]

Apparently AMD are looking into it. Would benefit them in the server space as well although the likes of Amazon might prefer to stick with their in-house chip.

Seems unlikely.

They've already looked into it on a couple of occasions (K12, and Opteron A1100) and cancelled the product both times.

AMD K12 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Opteron - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In the Server space Epyc and the "Compact" Zen4c variants are dominating anyway (with Zen5c versions including a 192 Core, 384 thread model already planned), so I can't see AMD bothering to invest much in that direction

 

[humbug]

i know i know..... "according to" MLID K12 never really died, AMD put it on the back burner, because just in case and apparently just in case has arrived, but its all or nothing for AMD, if they can get it done good and quick they'll do it, if not they wont. Its still kind of a gamble for them, one that they think will only pay off if it hits hard and fast.

 

[X x X]

Seems unlikely.

They've already looked into it on a couple of occasions (K12, and Opteron A1100) and cancelled the product both times.

AMD K12 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Opteron - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In the Server space Epyc and the "Compact" Zen4c variants are dominating anyway (with Zen5c versions including a 192 Core, 384 thread model already planned), so I can't see AMD bothering to invest much in that direction

selling well but apparently intel still holds huge market share

 

[KompuKare]

selling well but apparently intel still holds huge market share

Yes, but if the worry is that corporate buyers playing it safe* by choosing the worse a x86 vendor for servers (and Intel are so far behind Epyc its almost comical), then how many of those "playing it safe" buyers would be interested in ARM vs x86?

The truly huge hypervisors are rolling their own ARM chips anyway and with ARM actually creating licensable server chip designs that will only become more common. (AI is similar in many ways - why pay Nvidia's huge margins when the barriers to entry in AI aren't that huge for the big players who can create and maintain their own software stack?)

*"nobody ever got fired for buy from Big Blue" was the saying from about IBM when they were so huge days - Intel are just a different shade of blue.

 

[Tinek]

*"nobody ever got fired for buy from Big Blue" was the saying from about IBM when they were so huge days - Intel are just a different shade of blue.

My organisation was just replacing old intel servers that went eol with new hardware. The first reaction of people that have the most power was "We go Intel as always, they are the best." without even doing any reading about it. I had to stop it and then we sat down on a relatively short meeting to just compare power use, performance and price of same brand with Intel Vs AMD. They next question was "Are AMD stable? We heard for years everything is crashing"... Right. More talk about simple logic and eventually we ordered best hardware for us, based on AMD CPUs. But this just shows the mentality hammered by Intel PR over generations and explain a lot went market share changes slowly even with superior products. And by the way, we had later similar talk about laptops till we got one as sample and compared directly 1:1 after which they ordered few hundred Ryzen based ones instead.

 

[KompuKare]

My organisation was just replacing old intel servers that went eol with new hardware. The first reaction of people that have the most power was "We go Intel as always, they are the best." without even doing any reading about it. I had to stop it and then we sat down on a relatively short meeting to just compare power use, performance and price of same brand with Intel Vs AMD. They next question was "Are AMD stable? We heard for years everything is crashing"... Right. More talk about simple logic and eventually we ordered best hardware for us, based on AMD CPUs. But this just shows the mentality hammered by Intel PR over generations and explain a lot went market share changes slowly even with superior products. And by the way, we had later similar talk about laptops till we got one as sample and compared directly 1:1 after which they ordered few hundred Ryzen based ones instead.

The iron of the stability thing after the 13900K/KS and 14900K/KS: Intel still have not made a proper statement about the crashing and silicon degradation aside from quickly pointing finger at motherboard manufacturers. Although latest excuse was "microcode but for the 14900K".

Meanwhile all the benchmarks they "won" at what we know are settings with questionable stability are still out there. The media have almost totally ignored this, we can only thank UE5 for actually going CRC on their decompression for finding this.

 

[jigger]

My organisation was just replacing old intel servers that went eol with new hardware. The first reaction of people that have the most power was "We go Intel as always, they are the best." without even doing any reading about it. I had to stop it and then we sat down on a relatively short meeting to just compare power use, performance and price of same brand with Intel Vs AMD. They next question was "Are AMD stable? We heard for years everything is crashing"... Right. More talk about simple logic and eventually we ordered best hardware for us, based on AMD CPUs. But this just shows the mentality hammered by Intel PR over generations and explain a lot went market share changes slowly even with superior products. And by the way, we had later similar talk about laptops till we got one as sample and compared directly 1:1 after which they ordered few hundred Ryzen based ones instead.

Many big firms I know of have fell foul from operating with this mantra.

 

[DanF]

bit more of a technical look at power settings and results, explains why results across different tests are a bit weird

 

[Blackjack Davy]

My organisation was just replacing old intel servers that went eol with new hardware. The first reaction of people that have the most power was "We go Intel as always, they are the best." without even doing any reading about it. I had to stop it and then we sat down on a relatively short meeting to just compare power use, performance and price of same brand with Intel Vs AMD. They next question was "Are AMD stable? We heard for years everything is crashing"... Right. More talk about simple logic and eventually we ordered best hardware for us, based on AMD CPUs. But this just shows the mentality hammered by Intel PR over generations and explain a lot went market share changes slowly even with superior products. And by the way, we had later similar talk about laptops till we got one as sample and compared directly 1:1 after which they ordered few hundred Ryzen based ones instead.

Its just iinertia in the corporate space in general all the council PC's are gradually being replaced here they're all DELL and they're all... Intel. Its the general userbase as well Steam hardware shows 60% still clinging onto Intel.

 

[Armageus]

Its just iinertia in the corporate space in general all the council PC's are gradually being replaced here they're all DELL and they're all... Intel. Its the general userbase as well Steam hardware shows 60% still clinging onto Intel.

The problem is still the corporate offerings are slim. Hp desktop Minis or Lenovo tiny there's often only 1 or 2 SKUs with AMD processors and 10+ options with Intel chips.
Whether that's intel giving backhanders or AMD not having enough manufacturing capacity for the OEM desktop parts, I don't know.

 

[Scramz]

Iv had the Surface Laptop 7 X Plus variant for a few days now and I am super impressed with the performance of the CPU. I have been using it all day for work with a mixture of some emulated apps. The emulation performance is very impressive, so much so, you would never know you were emulating and its very performant. The emulation performs better than Apples Rosetta did on M1s release when I early adopted into that. Adobe Reader Pro and Discord is as fast emulated as my work machine native (12600k).

Its a joy to finally be using a Windows laptop that is super snappy (snappier than my work machine) and runs cool with no fan noise. And a longer battery as a bonus.

I don't see any reason to buy the X Elite over the X Plus for the large jump in cost unless you need the extra 2 cores.

 

[nomadd]

Iv had the Surface Laptop 7 X Plus variant for a few days now and I am super impressed..

Please book the following dates in your diary for the creation of your Buyer's Remorse threads:

Mid-July (Zen 5)
Mid-Sept (Lunar Lake)
Mid-Oct (Apple M4 Macbook Pro & Air)
Mid-Oct (Arrow Lake)

 

[Mesai]

Please book the following dates in your diary for the creation of your Buyer's Remorse threads:

Mid-July (Zen 5)
Mid-Sept (Lunar Lake)
Mid-Oct (Apple M4 Macbook Pro & Air)
Mid-Oct (Arrow Lake)

Why though? The MB is the only actual competitor when it comes to on-battery performance, and those are going to be way more expensive, especially when you have to pay £200 for the privilege of having at least 16GB of RAM.

 

[Scramz]

Please book the following dates in your diary for the creation of your Buyer's Remorse threads:

Mid-July (Zen 5)
Mid-Sept (Lunar Lake)
Mid-Oct (Apple M4 Macbook Pro & Air)
Mid-Oct (Arrow Lake)

No need. Got it well under rrp so recouping money is easy (not that I would have a reason to sell).

I’d bet zen 5, Lunar and Arrow will not compete with current ARM chips on power efficiency/power/heat.

I hate MacOS.

 

[r22snapper]

Please book the following dates in your diary for the creation of your Buyer's Remorse threads:

Mid-July (Zen 5)
Mid-Sept (Lunar Lake)
Mid-Oct (Apple M4 Macbook Pro & Air)
Mid-Oct (Arrow Lake)

I'm sure this time will be the one that x86 finally cracks battery life, modern standby and unplugged performance... Meanwhile these devices seem to be reviewing better with people who are going a bit more in depth than running emulated games on a youtube vid. Funny that.

 

[nomadd]

The MB is the only actual competitor when it comes to on-battery performance..

I think Lunar Lake will surprise you.

 

[alex24]

Have any of the reviews covered ARM support and situation for these chips on GNU/Linux operating systems?

 

[nomadd]

Meanwhile these devices seem to be reviewing better with people who are going a bit more in depth than running emulated games on a youtube vid. Funny that.

I've watched literally every review that's out there - all from respected reviewers. General consensus is that X Elite is "OK", but not much better both on and off battery than many of the chips Intel and AMD already ship. From Just Josh:

At high power draws, these Snapdragon laptops offer the same power efficiency as Intel’s current Core Ultra. They do reach this diminishing marginal returns point at slightly higher power draws though. This makes them only incrementally better than those with Intel and far behind Apple’s M3 MacBooks.

None of these new laptops come close to the CPU performance offered by larger laptops with Intel, AMD, or Apple's highest end chips. This is especially so for graphics. In gaming or 3D rendering, these laptops just aren’t going to cut it.

The reviewers all state that they tested the gaming performance only because Microsoft and Qualcomm made such huge claims for it - claims that no one can seem to replicate. Funny that.

 

[nomadd]

Have any of the reviews covered ARM support and situation for these chips on GNU/Linux operating systems?

Josh and his team tried a native Linux install on their livestream, but immediately ran into issues. Alex Ziskind ran up a complete dev. environment including WSL 2 and toolchains that had native ARM support.

 

[Mesai]

I think Lunar Lake will surprise you.

Maybe, but Intel talk up their products every year and they’re never there.

Their latest mobile chips are an improvement in terms of efficiency. x86 is inherently less efficient so it’ll take a lot to compete with ARM in that space.