First Reviews are Live and Snapdragon X Elite Doesn't Quite Deliver on Promised Performance

[Denver]

Wow... The performance at 20w collapses... Loses in all real-world scenarios vs x86 zen4/MeteorLake competitors, including battery life.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Qualcomm has provided some latencies in their presentation which are much higher than these:

• 17 cycles for L2 hit (probably includes L1 miss)
• Latency to DRAM: 102-104 ns

Well, could be AIDA64 that's borked then.

 

[Jermelescu]

Wow... The performance at 20w collapses... Loses in all real-world scenarios vs x86 zen4/MeteorLake competitors, including battery life.

View attachment 351916

That is not true. I’ve read a lot of (mostly early) reviews and they are way too different in lots of scenarios. Give it a week and then we’ll have a better picture of the situation.

 

[Neo_Morpheus]

Intel had the most efficient desktop & laptop processors at the time, surely that helped right? Talking about Conroe so 2005/06 or slightly later.

Motorola was in charge of developing low power PowerPC cpus but bailed.

IBM took over but couldn’t justify the expense of developing such chips just for Apple, since they weren’t selling that many systems, so at that point, apple had no choice but to jump to intel, which had more efficient cpus.

The irony is that Intel own inefficient chips forced Apple to jump to Arm.

Whic is something also interesting since Apple was a founding member of Arm.

The failure of RISC to supplant x86 was clear when the Pentium Pro became the SpecInt champion.

The irony of your post is that Intel went full RISC (internally) with the Pentium.

 

[Easy Rhino]

It will only get better. x86 days are numbered.

 

[AnotherReader]

It will only get better. x86 days are numbered.

I wouldn't count x86 out just yet, but ARM is here to stay.

Motorola was in charge of developing low power PowerPC cpus but bailed.

IBM took over but couldn’t justify the expense of developing such chips just for Apple, since they weren’t selling that many systems, so at that point, apple had no choice but to jump to intel, which had more efficient cpus.

The irony is that Intel own inefficient chips forced Apple to jump to Arm.

Whic is something also interesting since Apple was a founding member of Arm.


The irony of your post is that Intel went full RISC (internally) with the Pentium.

RISC and CISC are about ISAs, i.e. programmer visible instructions. The microarchitecture doesn't define a CPU as RISC or CISC.

 

[sephiroth117]

I’m a big supporter of ARM (I mean it’s more choices and emphasis on efficiency) but I am quite unfamiliar with Qualcomm, it’s important for Mediatek and many others to join the PC arm race (no pun intended) this is where we’ll truly have a price competition and more specialized options: SoC x for gaming, y excels in productivity/CAD etc

right now if we just have this X1 SoC it’s hard to really assess. If I have just one choice, I pick a more mature macbook m3/m4, beauty of personal computers is having choice, SoC included.

 

[Denver]

It will only get better. x86 days are numbered.

It surprises me that someone has the courage to say that. It seems likely that Qualcomm will face significant financial challenges(Billion-dollar losses) and may eventually give up, because no one in their right mind is going to buy an expensive product, with less performance, compatibility, efficiency, less EVERYTHING than the competition.

It surprises me even more that such a wide core design, larger than Zen4, has such disgraceful performance. Strix-Point will arrive like a steamroller crushing everything.

 

[Easy Rhino]

It surprises me that someone has the courage to say that. It seems likely that Qualcomm will face significant financial challenges(Billion-dollar losses) and may eventually give up, because no one in their right mind is going to buy an expensive product, with less performance, compatibility, efficiency, less EVERYTHING than the competition.

It surprises me even more that such a wide core design, larger than Zen4, has such disgraceful performance. Strix-Point will arrive like a steamroller crushing everything.

Then short the stock.

 

[phanbuey]

The saddest thing... Im watching the Just Josh livestream of all these... NOT ONE WORKING LINUX ARM VERSION. 7 Laptops...

Like... what a gigantic miss.

YouTube

 

[Carillon]

Strix-Point will arrive like a steamroller crushing everything.

No please, no more steamrollers!

 

[v12dock]

I just picked one up today. I will say the my first experiences are very impressive. The emulation layer works exceptionally well. I played a bit of CS2 and it worked pretty flawless. I will post more as I explore.

 

[simlariver]

ARM based Windows was always going to be a low-end solution. I'm glad we have more credible competition in the low-end / Chromebook space for hardware but Qualcomm fucked-up by marketing this as a high-end solution.

 

[dragontamer5788]

The irony of your post is that Intel went full RISC (internally) with the Pentium.

The irony of your post is that "Reduced Instruction Set Computer" these days includes the FJCVTZS instruction, aka Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero, instruction.

Documentation – Arm Developer

developer.arm.com

CISC has won. Its better to add complexity to modern processors to do 16-bit Matrix Multiplication (aka Tensor Cores), to do AES-encryption (https://riscv.org/news/2020/12/the-design-of-scalar-aes-instruction-set-extensions-for-risc-v/), SHA1, 512-bit SIMD and more.

Complex cores are the winner. No one is "RISC" anymore (which was, at least in the 1990s, defined as having no division instruction. Instead, you used code to perform division rather than making a "complex" instruction to do so).

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RISC vs CISC has been dead for decades. Ever since ARM and RISC-V adopted AES Instructions, Javascript instructions, and SIMD, the world has gone 100% CISC.

-------

ARM is a fine instruction set in any case, but ISAs don't really matter anymore. The implementation details of the cores are far more important. Apple's implementation is pretty good (though exceptionally bulky), the Intel/AMD implementations are pretty good. Qualcomm will just have to tweak its design and figure things out.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I think the long term reviews are going to be the real answer for these. We can bench, we can give initial impressions, but what is it like to actually live with the device? I know that can be true of most things, but I think it's especially true of WOA devices.

Alpha was killed by Compaq, because they believed the lies stated by Intel with the upcoming Itanium.

PowerPC failed mostly because of Apple.

The original plan was to have an open platform (CHRP) that would accept all OS (Win NT, OS/2, Unix and MacOS)

NT and Unix were ported, OS/2 was delayed (and then canceled) and Apple pretended to be stupid and never released MacOS as originally planned (they went with the clones though.)

Everyone bailed, Apple volumes weren’t enough to sustain the development cost and ended moving to Intel.

Its more complicated than that (and I’m going by memory) but its the gist as to why PowerPC died.

I dunno, I think Apple gave up on PowerPC when it became obvious that the G5 was under-delivering. They never made a G5 MacBook Pro, I believe because it wouldn’t hit performance and thermal results, even on desktop it required way too much cooling. The writing was on the wall for PPC.

 

[Tropick]

No please, no more steamrollers!

Shared FPU is back, baby!!!

 

[A&P211]

Good for browsing, email, online banking and online shopping, netflix and prime video...
That's about it then.

I can get a AMD apu basic laptop for that, with almost the same amount of battery life, and cheaper in price.

 

[dragontamer5788]

However, it's not all doom and gloom, as the Qualcomm chip delivers an impressive memory latency of a mere 8.1 ns, compared to 100+ for the Intel based laptops

This is an unrealistic result.

AMD's on-package L3 SRAM for the x3d chips is above 10ns of latency. Something glitched out in this discussion.

Well, could be AIDA64 that's borked then.

Crap, I missed the discussion. Sorry for being late!

 

[Tek-Check]

Preliminary iGPU performance in gaming is lower than 760M, but that's not surprising, as we know this chip is not designed for gaming and Adreno iGPU needs one or two generations to evolve better. Compute graphics is not too bad at all from a few tests carried out.

https://www.notebookcheck.com/Radeon-780M-vs-Arc-8-Core-vs-SD-X-Elite-Adreno-GPU-_11564_12086_11630.247532.0.html

 

[Wirko]

This is an unrealistic result.

AMD's on-package L3 SRAM for the x3d chips is above 10ns of latency. Something glitched out in this discussion.

Yeah, 8.1 ns looks like CAS latency alone.

x86 days are numbered.

By an 8086-class (16-bit) counter?

 

[trsttte]

Well Apple could in theory wipe out the entire sub $1k Windows laptops if they weren't so greedy SoB's ~ so no you're wrong about "ARM" as a whole! Having said that, like I said in other threads, it really depends a lot on the software you use

They wouldn't need to stop being all that greedy, a slightly cheaper magic keyboard and an ipad air with a proper desktop interface would annihilate most cheap laptops.

Apple's not interested in budget machines nor the audiences they attract and the problems they bring.

They don't even need to, an ipad or ipad air if you're feeling fancy with a reasonably price keyboard and a proper desktop interface would kill most laptop. Hell, that's what smartphones started doing with apps for every service and why manufacturers saw fit to start raising the prices (they saw smartphones were reaplacing personal computers and wanted their share of the cake, samsung is on the record saying something to that effect around 2015 irc).

Apple wants to protect macbook sales but their lack of vision is really limiting what their possibilities.

The saddest thing... Im watching the Just Josh livestream of all these... NOT ONE WORKING LINUX ARM VERSION. 7 Laptops...

Tuxedo announced they were developing an ARM laptop with one of these snapdragon elite chips, they'll come eventually. If Tuxedo is doing one, some big white label oem is doing one and so there will be at least a couple on offer from the usual suspects (shenker, tuxedo, system76, etc)

They never made a G5 MacBook Pro

I don't think back then "Pro" was such a marketing gimmick like it is now

 

[Psyclown]

I’m really not surprised to see windows performing poorly when paired with a newcomer chip like this. I wouldn’t be surprised with any OS being this way really. It just needs more time.

 

[Minus Infinity]

We want Strix, we want Strix, we want Strix. What do we want? STRIX!

Hopefully fw and software updates will improve the results, I want ARM to succeed, but I always say never buy into a brand new architecture, you'll be a beta tester for a long time.

 

[user556]

IBM took over but couldn’t justify the expense of developing such chips just for Apple, since they weren’t selling that many systems, so at that point, apple had no choice but to jump to intel, which had more efficient cpus.

Intel didn't make efficient chips at all. They were fast CPUs just through brute force of having the vastly biggest budget.

 

[watzupken]

I feel the Snapdragon Elite is a significant step up from previous ARM attempts on Windows. From a software perspective, I think it will take time to refine.