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…
…but you’ve got Microsoft writing the OS.
Power draw is not all hardware.
Relevant Chipsandcheese article
https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter/
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.
I wonder what’s the Linux experience/support on this laptop
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.
In theory yes, in practice I’m not so sure. Risc-V is BSD, so whatever company chooses to make it, can change it as they like and completely ruin compatibility.
I don’t think it will work, because the BSD license doesn’t protect it from whatever abuse any maker feels like.
I do follow it as a potential alternative, and alternatives are always nice.That makes absolutely no sense. No company is going to go through all the trouble of making an entirely different processor that will need all new toolchains when risc-v is free. It’s a monumental undertaking. MAYBE china, but who cares? Don’t buy chinese chips.
They will make it incompatible exactly for the purpose of it being incompatible for proprietary purposes, the history of IT is riddled with examples of this being the goto strategy to maintain complete control of the ecosphere you create Apple is probably the best example of this. CPU has been an exception only because they traditionally aren’t designed by the product companies.
So just use another chip… the whole point of RISCv is that anyone can make chips.
risc-v is maturing at a breakneck pace:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/18/24181278/framework-laptop-risc-v-laptop-isa-arm-amd-intel-x86
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.
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.
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 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.
I’m not interested in anything that’s “Co-Pilot enabled.”
So, you’re done with computer hardware?
