Linux support is still basically non-existent for the first gen, and they made all this deal about supporting Linux and the open source community. This is to say, don't trust them
That'd definitely fit the Qualcom pattern of trying to force you to update by not upstreaming their linux drivers.
This is one place where windows has an advantage over linux. Window's longterm support for device drivers is generally really good. A driver written for Vista is likely to run on 11.
As someone who has used the Snapdragon X Elite (12 core Oryon) Dev Kit as a daily driver for the past year, I find this exciting. The X Elite performance still blows my mind today - so the new X2 Elite with 18 cores is likely going to be even more impressive from a performance perspective!
I can't speak to the battery life, however, since it is dismal on my Dev Kit ;-)
Surface Pro 11 owner here. SQL Server won't install on ARM without hacks. Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization on ARM. Most games are broken with unplayable graphical glitches with Qualcomm video drivers, but fortunately not all. Most Windows recovery tools do not support ARM: no Media Creation Tool, no Installation Assistant, and recovery drives created on x64 machines aren't compatible [EDIT: see reply, I might be mistaken on this]. Creation of a recovery drive for a Snapdragon-based Surface (which you have to do from a working Snapdragon-based Surface) requires typing your serial code into a Microsoft website, then downloading a .zip of drivers that you manually overwrite onto the recovery media that Windows 11 creates for you.
Day-to-day, it's all fine, but I may be returning to x64 next time around. I'm not sure that I'm receiving an offsetting benefit for these downsides. Battery life isn't something that matters for me.
You ABSOLUTELY do not have to create a recovery drive from a Snapdragon based device. I've done it multiple times from x64 Windows for both a SPX and 11.
Hmm, thank you, that's good to know. Did you just apply the Snapdragon driver zip over the x64 recovery drive? It didn't work for me when my OS killed itself but I could easily have done something wrong in my panic over the machine not working. Since I only have the one Snapdragon device, I was making the assumption that it would have worked if I had a second one, but I didn't actually know that.
Did it? From that list: SQL server doesn't work on Mac and there's no Apple equivalent, virtualisation is built into the system so that kind of worked but with restrictions, games barely exist Mac so a few that cared did the ports but it's still minimal. There's basically no installation media for Macs in the same way as windows in general.
Out of the gate, Apple silicon lacked nested virtualization, too. They added it in the M3 chip and macOS 15. Macs have different needs than Windows though; I think it's less of a big deal there. On Windows we need it for running WSL2 inside a VM.
Apple already went through this before with PowerPC -> x86. They had universal binaries, Rosetta, etc. to build off of. And they got to do it with their own hardware, which includes some special instructions intended to help with emulation.
Having a narrow product line helped Apple a lot. Similarly being able to deprecate things faster than business-oriented Microsoft. Apple also controls silicon implementation. So they could design hardware features that enabled low to zero overhead x86 emulation. All in all Rosetta 2 was a pretty good implementation.
Microsoft is trying to retain binary compatibility across architectures with ARM64EC stuff which is intriguing and horrifying. They, however, didn't put any effort into ensuring Qualcomm is implementing the hardware side well. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm has no experience in making good desktop systems and it shows.
Have I had any app compatibility issues?
To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: "No."
The Prism binary emulation for x86 apps that don't have an ARM equivalent has been stellar with near-native performance (better than Rosetta in macOS). And I've tried some really obscure stuff!
Does anybody know if the X2 supports the x86 Total store ordering (TSO) memory ordering model? That's how Apple silicon does such efficient emulation of x86. I'd think that would be even MORE important for a Windows ARM64 laptop where there is so much more legacy x86 software going back decades.
Does anyone have benchmarks for Rosetta with TSO vs the Linux version with no-TSO? I guess it might be a bit challenging to achieve apples to apples, although you could run a test benchmark on OSX and then Asahi on the same hardware, I think?
I've always been curious about just how much Rosetta magic is the implementation and how much is TSO; Prism in Windows 24H2 is also no slouch. If the recompiler is decent at tracing data dependencies it might not have to fence that much on a lot of workloads even without hardware TSO.
For really old software, it tends not to make good use of multiple cores anyway and you can simply emulate just a single core to achieve total store ordering.
Anything modern and popular and you can probably get it recompiled to ARM64
Their top model still only has "Up to 228 GB/s" bandwdith which places it in the low end category for anything AI related, for comparison Apple Silicon is up to 800GB/s and Nvidia cards around 1800GB/s and no word if it supports 256-512GB of memory.
Yet the apps top the App Store charts. Considering that these are not upgradable I think the specs are relevant. Just as I thought Apple shipping systems with 8 GB minimums was not good future proofing.
Today Qualcomm CEO stated[0] that the combination of Android and ChromeOS, e.g. Android Computers, will be available on Snapdragon laptops. Maybe these X2 CPUs will be in those laptops.
For people complaining about battery control and android emulation on linux, ChromeOS is a boon.
You effectively get an actual Linux distro + most of android, with a side of Chrome. It's way closer to "a real computer" than an iPad for instance, and only loses to the Surface Pro/Z13 line in term of versatility IMHO.
It really wasn't bad, my only deal breakers were keyboard remapping being non existent and the bluetooth stack being flaky.
“Multi-day” battery life sounds wild! That’s probably the biggest thing for users. It would be good for Apple to get some competition because their M-chips seemed so far away from everything else.
When laptop OEMs stop catering to the lowest common denominator corporate IT purchasers (departments which don't care about screen quality, speaker quality, or much of anything else outside of does the spec sheet on paper match our requirements and is it cheap).
These all have nightmarish support. They're not a big deal for Qualcomm so the driver support is garbage. And you're stuck on their kernel like one of those Raspberry Pi knock offs. It's just really hard to take them seriously.
I'm holding my breath though. I have a Samsung Edge 4 laptop and I didn't find the battery life impressive - prob got around 6 hours under coding / programming tasks. GPU performance is terrible too.
I feel like I'm constantly charger-tending all my non-Apple silicon laptops.
M-series instant wake from sleep is also years ahead of the Windows wakeup roulette, so even if this new processor helps with time away from chargers... we still have the Windows sleep/hibernate experience.
Linux support is still basically non-existent for the first gen, and they made all this deal about supporting Linux and the open source community. This is to say, don't trust them
The truth is much more subtle than "nonexistent" IMO [1].
Clearly it's a priority because the support for ChromeOS/android support is a big headline this year.
[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...
Also worth noting that not all the bits needing support are inside of the Snapdragon, so specific vendor support from Dell, Lenovo etc is required.
My (admittedly cynical) interpretation is that they are dropping support for desktop Linux completely and shipping Android drivers instead.
That'd definitely fit the Qualcom pattern of trying to force you to update by not upstreaming their linux drivers.
This is one place where windows has an advantage over linux. Window's longterm support for device drivers is generally really good. A driver written for Vista is likely to run on 11.
As someone who has used the Snapdragon X Elite (12 core Oryon) Dev Kit as a daily driver for the past year, I find this exciting. The X Elite performance still blows my mind today - so the new X2 Elite with 18 cores is likely going to be even more impressive from a performance perspective!
I can't speak to the battery life, however, since it is dismal on my Dev Kit ;-)
How's the compatibility? Are there any apps that don't work that are critical?
Surface Pro 11 owner here. SQL Server won't install on ARM without hacks. Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization on ARM. Most games are broken with unplayable graphical glitches with Qualcomm video drivers, but fortunately not all. Most Windows recovery tools do not support ARM: no Media Creation Tool, no Installation Assistant, and recovery drives created on x64 machines aren't compatible [EDIT: see reply, I might be mistaken on this]. Creation of a recovery drive for a Snapdragon-based Surface (which you have to do from a working Snapdragon-based Surface) requires typing your serial code into a Microsoft website, then downloading a .zip of drivers that you manually overwrite onto the recovery media that Windows 11 creates for you.
Day-to-day, it's all fine, but I may be returning to x64 next time around. I'm not sure that I'm receiving an offsetting benefit for these downsides. Battery life isn't something that matters for me.
You ABSOLUTELY do not have to create a recovery drive from a Snapdragon based device. I've done it multiple times from x64 Windows for both a SPX and 11.
Hmm, thank you, that's good to know. Did you just apply the Snapdragon driver zip over the x64 recovery drive? It didn't work for me when my OS killed itself but I could easily have done something wrong in my panic over the machine not working. Since I only have the one Snapdragon device, I was making the assumption that it would have worked if I had a second one, but I didn't actually know that.
That’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.
Did it? From that list: SQL server doesn't work on Mac and there's no Apple equivalent, virtualisation is built into the system so that kind of worked but with restrictions, games barely exist Mac so a few that cared did the ports but it's still minimal. There's basically no installation media for Macs in the same way as windows in general.
Out of the gate, Apple silicon lacked nested virtualization, too. They added it in the M3 chip and macOS 15. Macs have different needs than Windows though; I think it's less of a big deal there. On Windows we need it for running WSL2 inside a VM.
Because Apple controls verything vs Windows/Linux world where hundres (thouthands?) of OEM create things?
Apple already went through this before with PowerPC -> x86. They had universal binaries, Rosetta, etc. to build off of. And they got to do it with their own hardware, which includes some special instructions intended to help with emulation.
Because it was handled by the only tech company left that actually cares about the end user. Not exactly a mystery.
Having a narrow product line helped Apple a lot. Similarly being able to deprecate things faster than business-oriented Microsoft. Apple also controls silicon implementation. So they could design hardware features that enabled low to zero overhead x86 emulation. All in all Rosetta 2 was a pretty good implementation.
Microsoft is trying to retain binary compatibility across architectures with ARM64EC stuff which is intriguing and horrifying. They, however, didn't put any effort into ensuring Qualcomm is implementing the hardware side well. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm has no experience in making good desktop systems and it shows.
Have I had any app compatibility issues? To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: "No."
The Prism binary emulation for x86 apps that don't have an ARM equivalent has been stellar with near-native performance (better than Rosetta in macOS). And I've tried some really obscure stuff!
Most apps for dev work actually work; - RStudio - VS Code - WSL2 - Fusion 360 - Docker
Only major exception is: - Android Studio's Emulator (although, the IDE does work)
Not a single benchmark even against the previous generation. Just a "legendary leap in performance".
Bigly fast, trust them!
Does anybody know if the X2 supports the x86 Total store ordering (TSO) memory ordering model? That's how Apple silicon does such efficient emulation of x86. I'd think that would be even MORE important for a Windows ARM64 laptop where there is so much more legacy x86 software going back decades.
Does anyone have benchmarks for Rosetta with TSO vs the Linux version with no-TSO? I guess it might be a bit challenging to achieve apples to apples, although you could run a test benchmark on OSX and then Asahi on the same hardware, I think?
I've always been curious about just how much Rosetta magic is the implementation and how much is TSO; Prism in Windows 24H2 is also no slouch. If the recompiler is decent at tracing data dependencies it might not have to fence that much on a lot of workloads even without hardware TSO.
For really old software, it tends not to make good use of multiple cores anyway and you can simply emulate just a single core to achieve total store ordering.
Anything modern and popular and you can probably get it recompiled to ARM64
Their top model still only has "Up to 228 GB/s" bandwdith which places it in the low end category for anything AI related, for comparison Apple Silicon is up to 800GB/s and Nvidia cards around 1800GB/s and no word if it supports 256-512GB of memory.
Most consumers don’t care about local LLMs anyway.
Yet the apps top the App Store charts. Considering that these are not upgradable I think the specs are relevant. Just as I thought Apple shipping systems with 8 GB minimums was not good future proofing.
Looking at the Mac App Store in the US, no they don't. There's not an LLM app in sight (local or otherwise).
What apps with local llm top app store charts?
Today Qualcomm CEO stated[0] that the combination of Android and ChromeOS, e.g. Android Computers, will be available on Snapdragon laptops. Maybe these X2 CPUs will be in those laptops.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/phones/android/ive-seen-it-its-inc...
Does anyone buy these?
For people complaining about battery control and android emulation on linux, ChromeOS is a boon.
You effectively get an actual Linux distro + most of android, with a side of Chrome. It's way closer to "a real computer" than an iPad for instance, and only loses to the Surface Pro/Z13 line in term of versatility IMHO.
It really wasn't bad, my only deal breakers were keyboard remapping being non existent and the bluetooth stack being flaky.
ChromeOS is popular in schools and for extremely locked down, managed corporate devices.
“Multi-day” battery life sounds wild! That’s probably the biggest thing for users. It would be good for Apple to get some competition because their M-chips seemed so far away from everything else.
Careful; the multi-day claims may depend on having an unrealistically huge battery, or being active only sporadically across the time period.
Why can't I scroll on this page with the trackpad? Mouse scroll and arrow scroll both work fine.
Who is likely to package this into existing lines, from the majors? Is this a future lenovo/thinkpad carbon?
I would assume it'll follow the path as the first X Elite.
MS put out surface & surface laptop with it, Lenovo did do the ThinkPad X1 with it, and Dell put it in the XPS line.
X1 Carbon is part of the Intel Evo Platform. These are co-developed with Intel and therefore this line is exclusive to them.
X13s was confirmed to be sunset, another T14s is the most likely candidate among the ThinkPads.
It's likely to be in Thinkpads (unless Lenovo lost so much money on the X Elite that they ragequit ARM).
Any thermal design power data? It's difficult to evaluate their efficiency claims (work per watt) without it.
why is it so hard for these companies to do any kind of descent marketing? more importantly, when do we get descent macbook air competitors?
> when do we get descent macbook air competitors
When laptop OEMs stop catering to the lowest common denominator corporate IT purchasers (departments which don't care about screen quality, speaker quality, or much of anything else outside of does the spec sheet on paper match our requirements and is it cheap).
This is just a laptop cpu, not an end consumer product…
These all have nightmarish support. They're not a big deal for Qualcomm so the driver support is garbage. And you're stuck on their kernel like one of those Raspberry Pi knock offs. It's just really hard to take them seriously.
Ironically M1 chip is better supported on Linux.
I'm holding my breath though. I have a Samsung Edge 4 laptop and I didn't find the battery life impressive - prob got around 6 hours under coding / programming tasks. GPU performance is terrible too.
I feel like I'm constantly charger-tending all my non-Apple silicon laptops.
M-series instant wake from sleep is also years ahead of the Windows wakeup roulette, so even if this new processor helps with time away from chargers... we still have the Windows sleep/hibernate experience.
how much ram can these support ?
Supposedly 128 GB although I doubt vendors will ship that much.
Those memory bandwidth numbers are making me proud of being a LPDDR4 holdout.