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What do we think about the Snapdraon X Elite (ARM for windows)

Capitano

Capitano

Capitano

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Everything is pointing to it being great, synthetic benchmarks look good so far and given the power/performance it looks like it can compete with the M3/M3 Pro series

previous ARM for windows has been crap, but I feel like windows is catering towards ARM way more now. Especially with emulators and windows 12 rumours hinting at being good for ARM
 
Capitano said:
Everything is pointing to it being great, synthetic benchmarks look good so far and given the power/performance it looks like it can compete with the M3/M3 Pro series

previous ARM for windows has been crap, but I feel like windows is catering towards ARM way more now. Especially with emulators and windows 12 rumours hinting at being good for ARM
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Just yesterday I was watching a documentary on YouTube about the Amiga and how much better it's hardware was then anything else that was around at the time. It got me thinking just how popular and widespread the Motorola 68000 CPU was during the 80's and early 90's yet it very quickly went out fashion as x86 became the dominant instruction set due to backwards compatibility.

The only other serious contender since then was PowerPC which was used in Apple machines before they switched to Intel but it never got any traction from Windows users. ARM has all drawbacks that those other standards had, it would be nice to have an CPU that could run Windows applications but I suspect it would be little more then a novelty.
 
Freddie1980 said:
Just yesterday I was watching a documentary on YouTube about the Amiga and how much better it's hardware was then anything else that was around at the time. It got me thinking just how popular and widespread the Motorola 68000 CPU was during the 80's and early 90's yet it very quickly went out fashion as x86 became the dominant instruction set due to backwards compatibility.

The only other serious contender since then was PowerPC which was used in Apple machines before they switched to Intel but it never got any traction from Windows users. ARM has all drawbacks that those other standards had, it would be nice to have an CPU that could run Windows applications but I suspect it would be little more then a novelty.
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Such a shame. Motorola decided it could not push the 68000 any more and dropped it for the powerpc
 
eeii said:
Such a shame. Motorola decided it could not push the 68000 any more and dropped it for the powerpc
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The reality was although the 68000 was popular it was expensive to manufacture and wasn't all that profitable. Intel had a ton resources and manpower to rapidly improve x86 and Motorola just couldn't keep up.

As for Commodore I think had they been able to stay in business the tech they had developed for the Amiga and hardware they had in development might have eventually led them to producing GPU's and we could have had a 3rd player in that market.
 
Freddie1980 said:
Just yesterday I was watching a documentary on YouTube about the Amiga and how much better it's hardware was then anything else that was around at the time. It got me thinking just how popular and widespread the Motorola 68000 CPU was during the 80's and early 90's yet it very quickly went out fashion as x86 became the dominant instruction set due to backwards compatibility.

The only other serious contender since then was PowerPC which was used in Apple machines before they switched to Intel but it never got any traction from Windows users. ARM has all drawbacks that those other standards had, it would be nice to have an CPU that could run Windows applications but I suspect it would be little more then a novelty.
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maybe at the beginning, but the death of x86 seems very near in my opinion. Im sure it will still be around for a long time, but if these snapdragon laptops are good for battery and performance, then these x86 chips simply cant keep up efficiency wise
 
I thought I read that modern CPUs translate the external x86 instruction set requests into a risc style internal instruction set that is then run through the logic. So in actual fact while they appear externally x86 , internally they aren’t … and that one of the benefits of arm instruction set is that it’s easier to do that translation stage. ( note , I could be very wrong about the above! )

Arm on windows? I think it’ll end up being like how the iPad is at the moment. Ie decent processors and hardware but slightly held back by the os not quite letting users do all that they will want to.
 
Donnie Fisher said:
I thought I read that modern CPUs translate the external x86 instruction set requests into a risc style internal instruction set that is then run through the logic. So in actual fact while they appear externally x86 , internally they aren’t … and that one of the benefits of arm instruction set is that it’s easier to do that translation stage. ( note , I could be very wrong about the above! )

Arm on windows? I think it’ll end up being like how the iPad is at the moment. Ie decent processors and hardware but slightly held back by the os not quite letting users do all that they will want to.
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thats interesting I didnt know that, if thats the case then maybe it'll live on longer.. In that case I guess the translation layer should be the things thats improved.
both from arm to x86 and also vice versa
 
Donnie Fisher said:
I thought I read that modern CPUs translate the external x86 instruction set requests into a risc style internal instruction set that is then run through the logic. So in actual fact while they appear externally x86 , internally they aren’t … and that one of the benefits of arm instruction set is that it’s easier to do that translation stage. ( note , I could be very wrong about the above! )
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Thats the case for AMD's chips not sure about Intel. At least thats what I heard.

Software compatiblity has always been the raison d'etre for x86 and then x64 architecture it wouldn't exist otherwise its utterly illogical from a hardware perspective all those apps that run x86/x64 code natively unless and until theres an integrated application layer that can emulate it seemlessly that architecture is not going away anytime soon
 
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Interested in the snapdragon cpu.... but so many question marks and I can't get that feeling hype is still hype.

Even the sales/PR qualcomm team on YT videos changed the topics very smoothly when the word benchmarks or gaming or overall performance popped up and said its all about efficiency.

Id imagine most people play games or do heavier work load on PCs so won't bother to look at snapdragon at all.

However I am intrigued if snapdragon can get the performance well enough, with the right thermals and fan noise and that compatibility and these are no small things to accomplish and then on top of that they have to be competitive with the other CPU companies and then competitive at a price point.

If they can't get even the above right or even half of it, the hype of PCs reborn may end quickly but here are toes and fingers crossed.
 
Whenever someone says arm is fast etc I just look at my phone and see an arm CPU running a stripped down os and apps.
I could plug in a keyboard mouse and monitor to the phone or tablet but still can't do any proper video encoding, photo editing and other productivity work like I can on an x86 machine. Arm is fast because it runs stripped down software. If I put the phone browser into desktop mode I can see how much it struggles loading up anything compared to x86.
Iv not tried the apple products yet so would be good to see how M1+ fairs.
 
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