I think a lot of people don't realize the level of performance Qualcomm has reached with these. This is the closest competition to Apple's M series that we have, for the laptop form factor at least. They are better than Intel and AMD's best. I'd love to buy an X2 laptop with Linux preinstalled and supported.
The Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 with Intel Core Ultra 5 has great battery life: 10+ hours with moderate usage. I also have the Snapdragon T14s which gets about 14 hours, but I'm still waiting to get full Linux support for this two year old laptop.
Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows
I would have been totally interested in the snapdragon if Linux support was good and the hardware wasn't old at this point. I'd like a 24h laptop!
Is the M series that much better than a modern ADM/Intel? Or is it that they barely need cooling? I have an AMD laptop and Mac Mini, the Mac never makes any noise. Or is the M series just faster?
M series just always perform better than you expect. I don’t know how to explain it tbh. We use them for live streaming at work and they’re just never pushed to their limits (24gb mac minis) even as we run 7 or 8 independent HD sources + iso recordings of each one. They don’t break a sweat.
I have an m1 16gb MBpro in our fleet for editing and it runs probably as fast as the day I got it (first wave of m1’s).
The low power draw is also very impressive. Fraction of my AMD rig at home.
We get to blame OpenAI et al for this one again. AMD is using their current allocation of TSMC 3nm production to make Epyc rather than Ryzen so Ryzen is jumping from 4nm to 2nm. But 2nm Ryzen is still a few months out, and the 4nm current ones are naturally at a disadvantage when Qualcomm is using 3nm.
From what I can tell, you can get more total performance from intel/amd, but at the cost of more power draw, which besides needing more cooling also means shorter battery life.
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
Yeah, I would say that historically low power draw and low heat just haven’t been dominant priorities in the x86 world. If it can be “fixed” by pushing the fans harder and building in a bigger battery (or PSU), that’s good enough.
This is a natural major conflict with the qualities of a laptop that’s good at being a laptop, but yeah, I’d prefer that my custom built tower be efficient, cool, inaudible, and a small as reasonably possible without severely impinging expandability.
I’ve heard of people building desktops around mobile x86 CPUs soldered onto ITX/mATX boards, which sounds like it might be the solution that mainstream manufacturers don’t want to give us. Even a modest desktop cooling solution is vastly more capable than what can be fit into a laptop and so should keep such a CPU chilly with ease.
On paper, the M series is faster. It's not the same situation as when AMD and Intel were suprised by Apple, though. All of the tricks that made people go for the M1 Macs and think amd64 is dead are now also available on amd64.
Price-wise, you're still often better off with amd64. People like to compare the top-end chips, but the competition for a huge slab of amd64 is a small laptop running an iPhone CPU, not the M6 Ultra or whatever the latest and greatest is today. After Apple followed the rest of the industry, the launch price advantage of the Neo quickly grew smaller, especially outside of the USA. If you want a 15 inch laptop, you're pretty deep into high end prices the moment you consider a Macbook.
In practice, getting the M series to run Linux takes longer than it takes Qualcomm to release a Linux build that works, and amd64 takes a few months of actual vendor support rather than enthusiasts hacking away for free, so in that sense the M series is still behind.
With the help of vibe coding it might take a lot shorter time to get m series working on Linux. Though the quality of code is not guaranteed to be perfect.
I have a beefy AMD system and recently bought a macbook pro M5 pro. I'm still blown away by how much faster the M5 is than my AMD tower, while producing no heat or noise.
I’m glad we’re finally getting more competitors to Intel/AMD.
Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.
If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.
It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
They hate being under someone else’s thumb and Qualcomm had real control over that. They couldn’t stand it and wanted out. Which is just as well, because clearly Qualcomm could’ve been doing better. Apple cut the power usage of the chip and it’s reportedly better than the Qualcomm one.
> It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?
Imagine NVIDIA on steroids. Think bad documentation, opaque code, and everything being locked down. The customer gets squeezed for more money (especially egregious if you don't have enough scale they won't even bother engaging).
Onavo is correct: Qualcomm are extremely notorious for aggressive IP enforcement. They're the Oracle of hardware. In particular they held critical CDMA patents which were required for making a modem which worked in the US.
They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.
If Apple cared about quality, they wouldn't have gotten rid of Qualcomm modems, and forced people to use the inferior Intel modems. I always avoided by iPhone models with Intel modems starting around the 6S era.
I'd have assumed Qualcom are looking at the Steam Deck / Steam Machine and Steam OS, and thinking:
"I might want some of that."
And looking at the direction Microsoft is going, and thinking:
"Shackling our laptop and desktop chip sales to this is a bad idea."
The entire landscape outside of the Raspberry Pi is a shitshow in terms of "Just download a distro for your device class and arch and it'll work."
Arm SystemReady appears to be a slow push in the right direction from the opposite end.
A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.
Let me appropriate and rephrase a sentence from earlier in the thread: "performance per watt doesn't matter at all if the combination of the machine's feature set, both in hardware and software, as well as form factor, is essentially useless to you".
I have seen this far too many times on HN. A design that put Performance Per Watt first is how you extract more multicore performance when you are fundamentally limited by cooling.
Gud lorde, don't be daft. PPW matters until it hits a point where any optimizations above that line are of much less importance to some people (e. g. me) than other specs. Not to speak of necessary attributes completely absent from your PPW dream machine, which indeed negates PPW considerations on a per device/device-class basis. Which excludes optimizations for microprocessor series. It ain't rocket science.
basically: "I want WSL for my overpriced toaster, I'm totally fine with the keyboard lacking most of the essential keys, pretty please. whispers expletive against Apple whilst making sure no one can hear him"
But that's not answering my question? What do you expect to get from today's ARM chips that's fundamentally impossible otherwise? And how is that a step forward?
Again, a computer isn't a chip with nothing else.
In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.
The comment you're replying to is implying that in an ARM world nothing is standard, portable, or compatible by default. Think about smartphones: Every single one a bespoke board with bespoke hardware.
In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.
I know I will never switch to ARM willingly. There is no advantage, only vendor lock-in. I feel that x86's openness was an accident, and we should try to keep x86 alive as long as possible.
It actually was an accident, enabled by IBM using off the self parts unlike their previous computers, and Compaq's clean room reverse engineering of the BIOS.
ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.
There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.
One key frustration is it’s typically not possible to have an arm distribution that boots across most arm boards, because they have incompatible boot loaders. Ie you have a raspberry pi image and a banana pi image and an orange pi image and the rock pi S image that are all different from each other. There have been some attempts at UEFI on arm that would address this, but it’s nowhere near as consistent or compatible as on the x86 platform side.
>And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors
What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.
I had Fujutsu laptops that were far lighter and smaller than Airs, touchscreens in the late 90s, convertibles, 2 in ones, touch bars (Thinkpad). Plenty of designs that don't build around ATX type specs, and things that do (open frame cases, and the vast array of expansion cards that benefit from it). PCs that snap onto a monitor. Things Apple copied or hasn't gotten around to yet then claim then as revolutionary. Apple has more integration and can be more strategic (when they don't need bailing out), but as one company they do far less exploration.
There have been a few cool ideas from PC makers I'll grant you that, but looking at the offerings from the 4-5 largest PC makers today it basically looks like it did 20 years ago.
I'll also grant that Apple has gotten more boring with age - the G4 imac is still the coolest computer I've seen to this day. Just so outrageously out there. Current offerings are efficient but a bit boring. Apple Silicon could make something like the trashcan design work, when it basically failed with x86 PC components.
Having said all that I wouldn't mind seeing an ecosystem of ARM-based components even if they followed the ATX standard. Being able to buy an ARM-compatible motherboard and upgrade my ARM-based CPU and pair it with separate RAM and SSD's would be nice!
I'm more on the Apple hater side, but they getting lazy is simply not true.
For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.
Check this chart. Single core performance is where Apple has dominated the most. Qualcomm is above every non-Apple competitor including desktop chips, and only 5% behind the fastest M5 MacBook Air (this chip is going into Air-class laptops). Yes, M6 is coming, but X2 has been available for months already.
For Geekbench in particular, expect to gain a few percent in Linux vs. Windows. Of course, you should always look at your workload. The thing that causes me to wait for my computer the most is build times, where the multi-core benchmarks are more interesting than single core benchmarks, and these look like they could make for interesting low power dev boxes when/if proper Linux support lands.
"Desktop chip" hasn't been a meaningful variable for single-thread performance in more than a decade. A single core can't use more than a given amount of power or it would melt and laptops have that much in their power budget.
Where a desktop's TDP is actually useful is for multi-thread performance, and naturally the multi-thread chart is topped by Threadrippers.
Moreover, Geekbench is rubbish in general. For example, it has Threadripper 9980X with a <50% higher multi-thread score than Ryzen 9 9950X even though it has twice the memory bandwidth and four times as many of the same cores and you have to look pretty hard to find a real multi-threaded workload where it's not significantly more than twice as fast:
Yes, where desktops differ is not so much the chips but rather the cooling capability. You have the space to have proper air flow and water cooling etc. So that do give quite a bit of performance.
that's x2 plus. look for benchmarks of the x2 elite extreme, which currently is selling with 48gb ram for $1370: <a href="https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-zenbook-a16-16-3k-oled-touchscreen-laptop-snapdragon-x2-elite-extreme-2026-48gb-memory-512gb-storage-copilot-pc-zabriskie-beige/JJGHGSGFLJ/sku/6674414" rel="nofollow">https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-zenbook-a16-16-3k-oled-...
20% slower than the M5 is still a great result. I'm still using an M1 macbook pro, and it's more than fast enough for editing film, browsing the internet and writing code.
i wish that wasn't literally the only X2 EE system we could buy! (as i said a while ago in this submission, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823752">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823752)
nothing wrong with it! looks fine! just: there should be other products with the nice core. i could really use a 10-14" tablet. i mean, after all, ROG Flow 13 with a Strix Halo was not even that late after launch! dense is doable!
This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
A lot of people do see the graphs. But reality is - unless they cooperate with lkml and merge it there is no point. Ubuntu has the only beta ISO for it - works not very good for the Lenovo. Qualcomm does not provide any support. Then people won't buy.
modeless · · focus · HN ↗
purpleidea · · focus · HN ↗
raegis · · focus · HN ↗
Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows
But I still get more than 10 hours on a charge.purpleidea · · focus · HN ↗
ezst · · focus · HN ↗
purpleidea · · focus · HN ↗
ezst · · focus · HN ↗
Also, that's on Ryzen AI 7 PRO 450, you might be getting even more out of the Panther Lake alternative.
¹ <a href="https://www.notebookcheck.net/Excellent-business-laptop-with-64-GB-RAM-Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-Gen-7-AMD-Review.1328170.0.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.notebookcheck.net/Excellent-business-laptop-with...
diebillionaires · · focus · HN ↗
edg5000 · · focus · HN ↗
Forgeties79 · · focus · HN ↗
I have an m1 16gb MBpro in our fleet for editing and it runs probably as fast as the day I got it (first wave of m1’s).
The low power draw is also very impressive. Fraction of my AMD rig at home.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
thayne · · focus · HN ↗
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
cosmic_cheese · · focus · HN ↗
This is a natural major conflict with the qualities of a laptop that’s good at being a laptop, but yeah, I’d prefer that my custom built tower be efficient, cool, inaudible, and a small as reasonably possible without severely impinging expandability.
I’ve heard of people building desktops around mobile x86 CPUs soldered onto ITX/mATX boards, which sounds like it might be the solution that mainstream manufacturers don’t want to give us. Even a modest desktop cooling solution is vastly more capable than what can be fit into a laptop and so should keep such a CPU chilly with ease.
jeroenhd · · focus · HN ↗
Price-wise, you're still often better off with amd64. People like to compare the top-end chips, but the competition for a huge slab of amd64 is a small laptop running an iPhone CPU, not the M6 Ultra or whatever the latest and greatest is today. After Apple followed the rest of the industry, the launch price advantage of the Neo quickly grew smaller, especially outside of the USA. If you want a 15 inch laptop, you're pretty deep into high end prices the moment you consider a Macbook.
In practice, getting the M series to run Linux takes longer than it takes Qualcomm to release a Linux build that works, and amd64 takes a few months of actual vendor support rather than enthusiasts hacking away for free, so in that sense the M series is still behind.
notenlish · · focus · HN ↗
mastermage · · focus · HN ↗
zik · · focus · HN ↗
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MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.
Danox · · focus · HN ↗
It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
tredre3 · · focus · HN ↗
Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?
Onavo · · focus · HN ↗
pjc50 · · focus · HN ↗
They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
MobiusHorizons · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
The Intel models were worse, but they weren’t bad as far as I know.
ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗
Nexxxeh · · focus · HN ↗
And looking at the direction Microsoft is going, and thinking: "Shackling our laptop and desktop chip sales to this is a bad idea."
The entire landscape outside of the Raspberry Pi is a shitshow in terms of "Just download a distro for your device class and arch and it'll work."
Arm SystemReady appears to be a slow push in the right direction from the opposite end.
ksec · · focus · HN ↗
A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.
spankibalt · · focus · HN ↗
ksec · · focus · HN ↗
spankibalt · · focus · HN ↗
ksec · · focus · HN ↗
Which is fine. Have a great day.
spankibalt · · focus · HN ↗
avadodin · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Finally the end of IBM PC clones is taking shape.
ezst · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
ezst · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.
ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗
In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
leoedin · · focus · HN ↗
There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.
avadodin · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
MobiusHorizons · · focus · HN ↗
MSFT_Edging · · focus · HN ↗
If ARM processors are regularly incompatible and segmented, we all lose out and end up in isolated silos.
Kon5ole · · focus · HN ↗
What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.
vid · · focus · HN ↗
Kon5ole · · focus · HN ↗
I'll also grant that Apple has gotten more boring with age - the G4 imac is still the coolest computer I've seen to this day. Just so outrageously out there. Current offerings are efficient but a bit boring. Apple Silicon could make something like the trashcan design work, when it basically failed with x86 PC components.
Having said all that I wouldn't mind seeing an ecosystem of ARM-based components even if they followed the ATX standard. Being able to buy an ARM-compatible motherboard and upgrade my ARM-based CPU and pair it with separate RAM and SSD's would be nice!
kmarc · · focus · HN ↗
For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.
HumblyTossed · · focus · HN ↗
dmitrygr · · focus · HN ↗
Not very close at all, not even to the two-year-old model, it appears
<a href="https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-plus-loses-to-m4-in-4-out-of-5-cpu-and-gpu-tests/" rel="nofollow">https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-plus-loses-to-m4-in-4-out...
modeless · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
lern_too_spel · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
Where a desktop's TDP is actually useful is for multi-thread performance, and naturally the multi-thread chart is topped by Threadrippers.
Moreover, Geekbench is rubbish in general. For example, it has Threadripper 9980X with a <50% higher multi-thread score than Ryzen 9 9950X even though it has twice the memory bandwidth and four times as many of the same cores and you have to look pretty hard to find a real multi-threaded workload where it's not significantly more than twice as fast:
<a href="https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-threadripper-9970x-9980x-linux/9" rel="nofollow">https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-threadripper-9970x-9980x...
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deryilz · · focus · HN ↗
dmitrygr · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/19122559" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/19122559
<a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/14591329" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/14591329
yup... still laughably behind by nearly 20%. And that is behind the M5, not even the current M6
josephg · · focus · HN ↗
20% slower than the M5 is still a great result. I'm still using an M1 macbook pro, and it's more than fast enough for editing film, browsing the internet and writing code.
modeless · · focus · HN ↗
himata4113 · · focus · HN ↗
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cromka · · focus · HN ↗
I think we have a different definition of what laughably means. Especially since A16 is 25% ahead of M5 in multithreaded.
You're still trying to deliver your original point after you were told you use the wrong reference and you're not doing a good job.
jauntywundrkind · · focus · HN ↗
nothing wrong with it! looks fine! just: there should be other products with the nice core. i could really use a 10-14" tablet. i mean, after all, ROG Flow 13 with a Strix Halo was not even that late after launch! dense is doable!
trombuance · · focus · HN ↗
mrpippy · · focus · HN ↗
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
limagnolia · · focus · HN ↗
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faust201 · · focus · HN ↗
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