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Qualcomm revealed X Elite's benchmark scores
- Thread starter sunny5
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I laugh every time I see CineBench being discussed as some valid performance for a regular joe office/web/email/facebook use case. And regular joe is the one who uses Macbook Air and he is the one who will use Surface Laptop. Regular joe does not benefit from CPU/GPU performance but from write/read performance.
And Surface Laptop with SD X Plus costs as much as Macbook Air M2 so you gotta keep that in mind when doing benchmarks. SD X Elite undercuts corresponding MBA 13 by $100 and MBA 15 by $200. So there is your difference in performance adjusted by price discount.
EDIT: Just watched the whole video, comparison with M3 Pro & Max makes no sense. M3 Pro is $300 more while M3 Max is $600 more compared to top trim Surface Laptop 15" with Elite X 64GB 1TB 3.8GHz. If you opt for 32GB/1TB or 16/1TB 3.4GHz that price difference between 12 core M3 Pro becomes as much as $700
And Surface Laptop with SD X Plus costs as much as Macbook Air M2 so you gotta keep that in mind when doing benchmarks. SD X Elite undercuts corresponding MBA 13 by $100 and MBA 15 by $200. So there is your difference in performance adjusted by price discount.
EDIT: Just watched the whole video, comparison with M3 Pro & Max makes no sense. M3 Pro is $300 more while M3 Max is $600 more compared to top trim Surface Laptop 15" with Elite X 64GB 1TB 3.8GHz. If you opt for 32GB/1TB or 16/1TB 3.4GHz that price difference between 12 core M3 Pro becomes as much as $700
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yes, but for work, price is not a factor , time is. Factor is what you have at your disposal if you want arm windows
So who needs windows+gpu power they stick with x86 devices. These are just macbook air competitors thats all
I want it to work, but I'm thinking that it's going to start out as a disaster and will take a generation or two to actually be useful.
From my point of view , they are trying since SQ1 and SQ2, doesnt matter whos working, people come and go in a company. Qualcomm worked with Microsoft for some generations and was a garbage experience in person.
The only difference is now, a lot of OEM are jumping, so maybe this way developers are also in it and PRISM should be a far better emulation. Couple of weeks remains
Honestly from a Mac user perspective, the good thing about these chips is that will most likely lead Apple to give 12/16GB RAM to the M4 Base Models and bump up the Pro lineup to 32GB.
Plus, we are still waiting to see the 32GB model pricing for these Elite chips.
Thus far I have seen the new models with OLED panels and some other things, but I'm not quite convinced yet on this. We ned to see Prism in action and still yet to see some really good redesign when it comes to the windows laptop space.
As always the Lenovo Thinkpad looks like a really good option too.
Plus, we are still waiting to see the 32GB model pricing for these Elite chips.
Thus far I have seen the new models with OLED panels and some other things, but I'm not quite convinced yet on this. We ned to see Prism in action and still yet to see some really good redesign when it comes to the windows laptop space.
As always the Lenovo Thinkpad looks like a really good option too.
I get your point, but I think most of would still opt for a Mac either case
I really don't know no one who would want ARM windows. They might want killer battery life so salesman would steer them to ARM Windows for it (if battery life turns out to be great at all, that remains to be see). But someone going oh I want ARM Windows will be a rare sight of a superfan.
Most of Mac Air users have no clue what's running inside their machines, they don't care and really they shouldn't because they got no options. But in case of Windows their customers would be even more clueless what's inside. Probably like single percenters would know that's ARM running their laptop while other 97% would still have no clue. And that's a big number of people compared to Mac crowd.
Intel Inside was genius marketing from Intel perspective as they knew people have no idea what's actually running their PCs. And even with Intel inside tagline they still had no clue what actual model was inside, and they just couldn't care less. If they didn't care whats actually inside despite huge Intel marketing campaign its a given they will have no clue whats inside in Surface or every other future Windows laptop. Intel will try to blend the lines between x86/ARM by marketing AI with their upcoming chip trying to fight off Copilot AI
This is already the 4th or 6th generation depending on how you count. The Surface RT and Surface 2 ran on ARM chips on super limited Windows RT from back in 2012/2013. Those were arguably a disaster. The Surface Pro X launched in 2019 with the SQ1 SoC with a few teething troubles like no x64 emulation. Not a disaster but nobody cared or payed attention. The SPX got a SQ2 update and the SP9 got an ARM variant with the SQ3. In the meantime Windows 11 added x64 emulation and a lot of the kinks got ironed out. I have an SQ1 SPX. It's already very usable and useful with it's only real flaw being that x64/x86 emulation can be too slow for heavier apps which is largely a result of the SQ1 being not that fast to begin with. And the battery life could be better. Snapdragon X sounds like it fixes both those issues.
Jeans from Shein are much cheaper than jeans from Levi’s.
If you pay for **** design and **** quality that’s on you. Don’t expect Levi’s to drop their prices down to Shein levels.
I know but Microsoft has never been serious until now. They've played so much, never spending the money to do things well, never caring enough to do things well.
I hope that they'll have a good experience for users, but I believe that will take time. Apple and Google haven't been particularly good lately, either.
To be honest it’s all just so much marketing bumpf, there is no need for Snapdragon X Elite to be faster than a specific Apple chip. It’s clear that comparing oranges to oranges they’re per-core significantly slower. But as long as they have competitive speed vs the best of Intel/AMD and impressive battery life they will be a breath of fresh air to the Windows market.
Exactly.
What matters most for Qualcomm is the idle watt, and perf/watt vs AMD & Intel.
Best post in this entire thread. Most Mac users (M silicon) are never CPU constrained and neither will most windows users with the new snapdragon chips. What is does is bring windows laptop back on par with Apple and provides users with long battery life.
Good for everyone.
According to latest findings the snapdragon's best performers are slower than M3 and run as hot as the worst Intel.
These are not on par with Apple in many ways. They might have a good NPU but that's irrelevant for most users.
The M4 leaves these chips far behind.
The performance does matter for the x86-64 compatibility part.
" ... Microsoft says that Prism isn’t just a new name for the same old translation technology. Translated apps should run between 10 and 20 percent faster on the same Arm hardware after installing the Windows 11 24H2 update, offering some trickle-down benefits that users of the handful of Arm-based Windows 11 PCs should notice even if they don’t shell out for new hardware. The company says that Prism's performance should be similar to Rosetta's, though obviously this depends on the speed of the hardware you're running it on. ..."
Microsoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs
Prism layer is one of several under-the-hood overhauls in Windows 11 24H2.
arstechnica.com
The new PRISM optimizations are getting a 20% uplift but the comparisons between this generation hardware and the last generation that Microsoft shipped are in the 2x range ( 200% ). The 'raw' CPU performance matters. Even without the PRISM updates there is going to be uplift over the previous generation.
For native stuff , yes. Native email, browsing , etc. The bragging game between geekbench gaps in performance largely missing the point for general apps. But if your translation system has 'overhead', then the CPU increase is relatively critical to offset that overhead. ( And it isn't about magic pixie dust corner case opcodes. Rosetta likely will have an edge in narrow apples-to-apples contexts were it is same code in both systems. There is a 'fast enough' element here. )
The sales pitch of "it is substantially slower than x86 , but the battery life is much better" really didn't get much traction.
RT got entangled with Windows Phone. ( folks are forgetting that Microsoft was in flailing around on phones in a major way back then . )
" ... First unveiled in January 2011 at Consumer Electronics Show, the Windows RT 8 operating system was officially launched alongside Windows 8 on October 26, 2012, ..."
Windows RT - Wikipedia
" ... On February 11, 2011, at a press event in London, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced a partnership between their companies in which Windows Phone would become the primary smartphone operating-system for Nokia, ...
...
On September 2, 2013, Microsoft announced a deal to acquire Nokia's mobile phone division outright,
...
Microsoft laid off the Microsoft Mobile staff in 2016
...."
Windows Phone - Wikipedia
They spent mulitple billions on buying Nokia. In some dimensions they put in 'too much' effort. It is just all too broadly focused on mulitple battlefronts. It is as much dilution of effort more so than lack of effort.
Between that and myopic focus on 32-bit Windows legacy compatibility that non 64-bit thing was on 'purpose'. Most of the off-the-shelf phone market was also focused on 32-bit with certain Android submarkets also. To a large extent the entanglement with Phones kept a large focus on using generally available phone SoCs. ( Qualcomm was a major player there. Willing to sell a SoC. )
Windows 1-2 were much either. Took MS until 3.0 to get decent. It isn't just "Arm" where it takes more than a few versions for them to get stuff worked out.
Windows 11 dropped the 32-bit kernel and some 90's vintage compatiblity features. Dragging along multiple boat anchors and a mountain baggage matters.
SQ1 , SQ2 , SQ3 ... those were largely really weak rebadges with very limited 'tweaks' to the baseline.
They spent $6B buying Nokia along the way (only to let it all go just several years later). It wasn't spending money. It was about spending money 'smartly'.
P.S. back when Qualcomm has a custom server divsision if MS had given them $2B to do a scaled down version for PCs perhaps Qualcomm could have held onto to their custom team ( and had to dump to ignore Broadcomm sniffing around) and wouldn't have had to go buy Nvidia to get started. That have been more than twice as less as the $6B they pumped down the drain.
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I mean it is a great feature without a doubt but we need to wait and see how this plays out with world scenarios for people who have been using old applications in the finance and 'spreadsheet' world so to speakThe performance does matter for the x86-64 compatibility part.
" ... Microsoft says that Prism isn’t just a new name for the same old translation technology. Translated apps should run between 10 and 20 percent faster on the same Arm hardware after installing the Windows 11 24H2 update, offering some trickle-down benefits that users of the handful of Arm-based Windows 11 PCs should notice even if they don’t shell out for new hardware. The company says that Prism's performance should be similar to Rosetta's, though obviously this depends on the speed of the hardware you're running it on. ..."
Microsoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs
Prism layer is one of several under-the-hood overhauls in Windows 11 24H2.
The new PRISM optimizations are getting a 20% uplift but the comparisons between this generation hardware and the last generation that Microsoft shipped are in the 2x range ( 200% ). The 'raw' CPU performance matters. Even without the PRISM updates there is going to be uplift over the previous generation.
For native stuff , yes. Native email, browsing , etc. The bragging game between geekbench gaps in performance largely missing the point for general apps. But if your translation system has 'overhead', then the CPU increase is relatively critical to offset that overhead. ( And it isn't about magic pixie dust corner case opcodes. Rosetta likely will have an edge in narrow apples-to-apples contexts were it is same code in both systems. There is a 'fast enough' element here. )
The sales pitch of "it is substantially slower than x86 , but the battery life is much better" really didn't get much traction.
Obviously this would be a great feature on Day 1 these machines being available, but knowing Microsoft we are looking at a product that we'll need to see a case by case scenario.
Rosetta has worked absolutely amazing in terms of battery life and performance when it came out. Heck I remember using the Classic Teams at the time with it and didn't have any performance hiccups on the M1 Air, whereas the x86 version running on native hardware was really really bad.
I’ve learned that the only benchmarks that matter are the ones that show Apple is better