Could Arm's legal battle with Qualcomm over technology licences stop Copilot+ PCs from really taking off?
Nearly two years on and there's still no sign of the two companies coming to an agreement.
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Qualcomm revealed X Elite's benchmark scores
- Thread starter sunny5
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I don't know if any of you have seen this ARM lawsuit against Nuvia/Qualcomm, but this throws a wrench into the mix.
This is old. With the number of system vendors with working product that has lined up at Computek, it is a little dubious also. Smells like AMD , Intel , or both FUD being thrown around to freeze buyers for a couple of months until AMD/Intel can ship their versions.
If Arm was going to file an injunction that had a major chance of sticking they would have done it. Product has already shipped. Qualcomm and Arm has likely haggling with enough progress that Arm isn't going there. Arm can very likely still get retroactive damages if they win later. At the end of the day Arm mainly wants to get paid. Like the old commercial " You can pay me now , or you can pay me later". Either way they would be happy.
Arm's stock is up so this isn't as big of an animosity play as when it looked like Nvidia was going to gobble up Arm. ( that would been even more horrible for market forces with the AI bubble in full flight. Besides Nvidia has used the money on a much more worthy cause anyway (expanding the business Nvidia was already in). ). Even without the money that Qualcomm probably should have sent, Arm is making more now then they were.
It would be far more sensible for both sides if they would settle this without a trial. Qualcomm can be arrogantly stubborn so there is a decent chance they won't.
If Arm loses, then I suspect they will be happy to assist Mediatek, AMD, and Nvidia attack Qualcomm's Windows 'beachhead' with a substantive counter attack (who are willing to pay ) . And if Qualcomm doesn't already have a Arm v9 license... then Qualcomm would have probably pissed away any discount they might have gotten. Qualcomm's hand waving is that they had already bought a v8 license so they didn't need to pay again. At some point they'll need something new and won't be able to claim they already bought it.
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" ... The Oryon CPU cores have hardware assists in place to improve x86 floating point performance. And to address what’s arguably the elephant in the room, Oryon also has hardware accommodations for x86’s unique memory store architecture – something that’s widely considered to be one of Apple’s key advancements in achieving high x86 emulation performance on their own silicon. ..."
Since this is Arm 8.7, there is some standard stuff to close some of the semantic gaps with some aspects of x86 (e.g., floating point). It wouldn't be hard for Microsoft PRISM update to follow the standard and not have to 'fork' for several non-standard work arounds.
More unclear just how far off the standard the memory store ordering assumption gap mitigations are.
I'll have one of the Elite Surface pro's in my hand later in the week, so I'll run some real world comparisons. Hoping to replace my 12.9" iPad - love the hardware, frustrated by the OS.
you'll have a much better productivity device, but a very mid to crappy tablet
Just reposting this link from another thread, it seems more relevant here…
www.tomshardware.com
Snapdragon X Elite in the wild is allegedly slower than iPhone 12 — first benchmarks of Samsung Book4 Edge disappoint
Wait for firmware updates before condemnation
Just reposting this link from another thread, it seems more relevant here…
Snapdragon X Elite in the wild is allegedly slower than iPhone 12 — first benchmarks of Samsung Book4 Edge disappoint
Wait for firmware updates before condemnation
From the article.
"... The CPU never boosted above 2.52 GHz in the Reddit tests. This is an obvious concern as the Elite X advertises boost clocks up to 4.0 GHz. ...
... but this doesn't line up with other GeekBench scores for the Samsung laptop arriving today with some of the faster scores in the Copilot+ lineup.
....
However, multiple GeekBench tests of various Snapdragon X Elite models coming in today also report single-core scores in the 1700s-1800s, well below the iPhone 12 benchmark.
"
This may or may not look like a representative sample . Of course, this is all buried half way into the article after propping up the headline hype.
The system is getting about the same performance on battery and plugged in. If there is a firmware setting for 'performance or battery' it could be a configuration trade-off. Faster than M3 but get Intel/AMD battery life or way better than Intel/AMD battery life but not faster than M1 would be a trade-off.
P.S. the 'max battery' is likely going to push this system back toward its server core optimization origins. Was isn't going to include being focused on single core drag racing.
P.P.S. if go to the GeekBench test list currently ( 6/15-14 past when article published) can see that there are several > 2000 entries in there also. The standard deviation here is quite large. ( even a 960 ST score on the current front page.
SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD. Galaxy Book4 Edge - Geekbench
Benchmark results for a SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD. Galaxy Book4 Edge with a Snapdragon X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm Oryon processor.
browser.geekbench.com
)
P.P.P.S. On the recent Samsung models' entries, the motherboard identifier is varying for same "Book 4 Edge" models.
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It may be old, but it's a legal conflict which, as far as I know, has not yet been resolved. So why do you claim it must be AMD/Intel FUD to discuss it now?
Indeed, it would put the system builders on the horns of a devilish dilemma if they wished to create a system that would sell. Sub-M1 levels of ST performance is not ideal for a premium product, even if the MT scores are sustained by the 12 performance cores.
Strange.. The test of Dave2D on YouTube is far more positive for emulation and games (only a 10% performance hit). Also video editing is good.
Let's wait and see until more reviews come out.
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Tom's hardware is also positive:
I just tested Asus’ first Snapdragon X Elite laptop and it (mostly) blows away the MacBook Air M3
This thing toasts the M3 MacBook Air!
It seems logic is overrated. It's slightly faster in multi-core performance, because it has 2 times the cores than the M3, and so much slower in single core performance, but it "blows away" the M3?
And the only benchmark are GeekBench and HandBrake? Sigh… Internet is a waste of time these days.
And the only benchmark are GeekBench and HandBrake? Sigh… Internet is a waste of time these days.
Nothing new. One digests the plethora of information from the internet and forms ones own opinion
. Tom's hardware is just one of many to come and the article clearly states it is an early verdict. The two youtube video's mentioned in posts above are also early impressions and somewhat in contradiction with each other while in all cases the same Asus Vivobook is reviewed.We'll just have to wait until more information surfaces to get a more balanced opinion.
That the Mx SoC has 8 cores is Apple's choice. Maybe the MBA is an outlier and laptops at that price point have more than 8 cores.
But it's within the same price range.
The Air has much better single core, which is more important for this class of laptops in my opinion. And the Air is fanless which again, is really nice.
Traditionally thin and light notebooks are not good performers in the processing department.
Base Mx SoC are purpose built for thin and light portables.
The X Elite/Pros are targeted at a diverse range of form factors, and so it it logical to think that it will have to make compromises to meet those needs.
I think this is the reason why we are seeing GB6 benchmark all over the place recently for the X Elite/Pro SoCs.
IMHO, Apple's approach is better, as SoCs are designed based on end product needs, instead of the other way around.