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Technology Hardware IT

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite Chips Promise Major PC Performance (pcworld.com) 9

Qualcomm unveiled a new laptop processor designed to outperform rival products from Intel and Apple on Tuesday, stepping up its long-running effort to break into the personal computer market. From a report: Qualcomm formally launched the Snapdragon X Elite, the flagship platform of its Snapdragon X family that leverages its Oryon CPU core, and promises to double -- yes, double -- the performance of some of the most popular 13th-gen Core chips from AMD and Intel. Sound familiar? It should. Qualcomm promised the same with its earlier Snapdragon 8-series chips, and really didn't deliver. But after buying chip designer Nuvia in 2021, Qualcomm is trying again, hoping that its superpowered Arm chips can once again make Windows on Arm PCs a competitor to conventional X86 PCs when they launch in mid-2024. And they'e talking some big numbers to prove it.

Qualcomm sees Oryon first going into PCs (as the engine of the Snapdragon X Elite platform) but then moving into smartphones, cars, "extended reality" devices, and more, Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon is expected to say today. [...] To begin with, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is manufactured on a 4nm process node, versus the Intel 4 process node of Intel's Meteor Lake. (The two process technologies aren't directly comparable, though they're close enough for most purposes.) Oryon is a tri-cluster design. Historically, that has meant prime, performance, and efficiency cores, with each type of core taking on their own role depending upon the task. However, it appears that Qualcomm and its X86 rivals may have swapped strategies; as Intel adopts performance and efficiency cores, Qualcomm has chosen AMD's path. There are twelve cores within the Snapdragon X Elite, all running at 3.8GHz. Well, most of the time. If needed one or two of the cores can boost to 4.3GHz, the turbo boost strategy that's become common on the PC. The 64-bit Oryon CPU will be paired with 42Mbytes of total cache, and a memory controller that can access eight channels of LPDDR5x memory (64GB in total) with 130GBps memory bandwidth, executives said. It will be a single die, not a chiplet design.

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Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite Chips Promise Major PC Performance

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  • by OneOfMany07 ( 4921667 ) on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @05:55PM (#63950909)

    That's about all their old systems were "good" at (Krait). They'd run the ancient benchmark and claim to have made progress. Meanwhile ignoring stuff like SPEC which might mimic real workloads.

  • Windows on ARM has no market share because developers don't buy them as toys to play with.

    When I was at MS Build when the Windows on ARM laptops debuted, I was first disappointed that Qualcomm decided not to seed developers like Samsung had done earlier with even a basic WoA PC, but I was willing to drop up to about $800 on an ARM laptop as a toy. Then I learned the specs and adjusted that to $500. Not only didn't Qualcomm or MS seed developers, they didn't even have more than 3 ARM laptops in the building.
    • Windows on ARM has no market share because developers don't buy them as toys to play with.

      When I was at MS Build when the Windows on ARM laptops debuted, I was first disappointed that Qualcomm decided not to seed developers like Samsung had done earlier with even a basic WoA PC, but I was willing to drop up to about $800 on an ARM laptop as a toy. Then I learned the specs and adjusted that to $500. Not only didn't Qualcomm or MS seed developers, they didn't even have more than 3 ARM laptops in the building. I considered ordering one on Amazon but the prices were far too high to take seriously.

      Fast forward five years. I still have never seen WoA because MS is locked into Qualcomm and their mini-qualcomm PC for development which should cost $200-$300 costs $500 plus shipping.

      As a developer, I often early adopt and design tech and recommend tech to influencers. I have recommended against WoA because it's clear by locking into Qualcomm, Microsoft isn't taking the platform seriously. There should be vendors everywhere competing on making the best performance per dollar WoA laptops. But it's not happening.

      Um, WoA under Parallels 18 is now an MS-Supported Configuration on any Apple Silicon Mac.

      https://support.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]

      Easy way to play with WoA on a highly-performant ARM platform.

  • If it had quality mainline Linux drivers. But coming from Qualcomm, that's hardly a possibility.

  • The summary makes it read like the Qualcomm chip will help the intel chip double its power. It also reads like AMD makes intel's Core chips.

    "and promises to double -- yes, double -- the performance of some of the most popular 13th-gen Core chips from AMD and Intel."

    Come on, basic reading skills, editors!

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