Read more.These are Windows laptops powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs.
Read more.These are Windows laptops powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs.
So this is effectively a Windows type device with a similar chip to an M1 powered fruity device...
Let's see if people rave about them as much as M1 chips (which I seriously doubt)
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
Not quite, this is an udpdated version of the old 7c and 8c chips from 2019 which are pretty poor performing in all honesty (think versus celeron sort of range), at least with the current windows on arm and it's emulation.
Having said that at those prices I doubt we should really complain about performance too much and in all honesty if this had a 2in1 form factor I might have considered grabbing one to play around with.
I said effectively.... you will never get apples to apples. 8 cores and up to 16 gig ram means it's as close as you'll get for a well known manufacturer with Windows ARM on board. I've argued all along the market for an M1 powered Windows ARM based machine is tiny - Apple only does it because they have everything to do it, and because Intel couldn't give them the kind of chip they needed
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
The 7c and 8c are the bottom of the range snapdragon for laptops, the 8cx and then the 'custom' sq2 are higher up the ladder and even then aren't really performance comparable to apple's cpu due to basically being 'upscaled mobile cpu's' rather than being designed for desktop, this doesn't exactly help performance. Hopefully the rumours of samsung/amd and MS doing a custom chip are true, it's needed because snapdragon is currently lacking outside mobile cpu's.
To be fair to windows on arm, part of the issue is the need to support legacy code (for businesses) unlike on os-x where apple can basically just throw out anything they don't like every few years (not to mention unix at it's core works differently). Having said that, and while I'm not saying it's 100% accurate, it's also been shown via using a mac m1 and parallels that a LOT of the performance issues on windows for arm is on the cpu side because it performs considerably better in a vm than the snapdragon cpu's do without using a vm.
You do know the M1 is basically an upscaled mobile cpu don't you?
I'm not arguing but as you've said Windows ARM is a dog. A lot of the M1's performance increase is due to use of on die RAM and custom silicon to accelerate certain x86 emulation. But nobody is interested on the Windows side in accelerating x86 because they can just buy x86 cheap enough
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
While both use the arm architecture, the m1 is designed with 'desktop' in mind, rather than upscaling a mobile cpu (its basically just clocks and tdp's changed) to work with a desktop os like with snapdragon, it's different imo.
The extra x86 emulation has come up in other threads (the two of us have might have even covered it before) and as I've said there, you have to blame qualcomm (even ms to a point) for not adding in some sort of 'x86 co-processor' like apple did (the difference between specifically designing for desktop because their a series doesn't have it). I said about adding an 'x86 co processor' well before the m1 was released and I'm not a 'cpu design guru', it was just common sense if you still need to emulate x86 like you do in windows ARM, so no idea why it wasn't done by people who do it for a living.
I'd personally say windows arm is a dog on current 'desktop' snapdragon cpus and I'd like to see how it would perform with hardware specifically designed for the job like the m1 was for os-x.
I think we have...
Like I've said a number of times, Windows ARM and the Snapdragons is kinda trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist. People just don't bother with either really, those who want great x86 performance buy an x86 cpu. ARM linux distros run so much better anyhoo. Of course, if someone could be bothered to actually seriously make a Windows ARM specific cpu it could all be different, but the market just isn't there.
Apple only went down this route because it believed it had to, both because Intel was not helping them, and something to differentiate them from Windows AND x86. The fact that basically everything they make will soon be running a very simple OS to maintain as it's all on one architecture is a bonus as well...
I've spoken to people who seem to know a hell of a lot more about this than I do, and the same answer keeps coming back why nobody designs a kick-ass ARM based cpu for Windows ARM and it's quite simple. The market isn't there. People just buy x86 and "normal" Windows and they aren't bothered with the ARM flavour one little bit because the cons totally outweigh the pros
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
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