Qualcomm Halts Snapdragon Dev Kit 7
Chipmaker Qualcomm has indefinitely paused production and support of its Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows, citing quality concerns. Qualcomm says the product "has not met our usual standards of excellence." The cancellation comes shortly after the recent launch of over 30 Snapdragon X-series powered PCs.
Windows RT 2.0 (Score:2)
Seems to be a bust, but this time after 4 generations.
It could be argued that... (Score:3)
...x86 is the worst possible processor architecture, but it wouldn't matter. It became the standard and there is LOTS of important, expensive x86 software out there. Backward compatibility is essential. Any new processor architecture MUST include PERFECT x86 emulation at reasonable performance. From what I've read, Snapdragon does not meet this requirement
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
...x86 is the worst possible processor architecture, but it wouldn't matter. It became the standard and there is LOTS of important, expensive x86 software out there. Backward compatibility is essential. Any new processor architecture MUST include PERFECT x86 emulation at reasonable performance. From what I've read, Snapdragon does not meet this requirement
Yeah, Apple actually added an extension to the ARM spec — a special CPU mode that implements total store ordering [sciencedirect.com] for Intel emulation purposes so that you don't have to choose between unexplained crashes and performance that tanks.
Re: (Score:2)
ARM isn't exactly a new processor architecture (was using it for my desktop in 1987), and these days x86 is a rounding error by comparison. The idea of x86 compatibility being essential is a battle that was fought and lost many years ago.
Granted there might be good reasons for not running Windows on it, but some would argue there are good reasons for not running Windows on anything.
Re: (Score:2)
ARM isn't exactly a new processor architecture (was using it for my desktop in 1987)
I also bought an Acorn Archimedes 305 in 1987 (had it upgraded it to a "340" which involved desoldering the RAM chips), it was an amazing machine running circles around 80286 and 68000 systems.
It emulated x86 at release. I used it to run Prolog2 and the TopSpeed Modula-2 compiler on MS-DOS for programming assignments(*), and also for playing around with other software such as dBase II and WordPerfect. Speed on a 4 Mbyte Archimedes under emulation was comparable to an 8088: somewhat slow but quite usable
Re: (Score:2)
They literally have Google Drive not working. That is on the 4th and most hyped generation from the second coming of ARM Windows.
Re: (Score:2)
After correcting for process, the differences between these wide superscalar processors with massive caches is negligible ... and the PITA of switchin ISAs was a silly diversion for Microsoft, for the second time. Microsoft always copies Apple in the worst possible way, they don't play to their own strengths.
I feel sorry for Qualcomm, the architecture seems solid, but there is simply no market for it.