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Today, we saw independent benchmarks of Qualcomm's new 4nm chip that provided 50% (Geekbench) to 100% (Cinebench) more multicore performance than M2, while usin

Today, we saw independent benchmarks of Qualcomm's new 4nm chip that provided 50% (Geekbench) to 100% (Cinebench) more multicore performance than M2, while using 23W. And it can efficiently encode AV1. Maybe M4 will catch up.

scarface_74 3y ago
Well, benchmarks are nice. But a processor is not an end user product. How do you think this is going to be as a product once you put it in a PC running Windows - especially as Microsoft struggles trying to get third party apps on ARM and MS’s own substandard x86 emulator
- JohnTHaller 3y ago
  I had a Thinkpad X13s for a while that worked quite well except for a video issue (used pawn shop purchases are a risk like that). Firefox, Edge, and MS Office worked great natively on ARM. LibreOffice worked just fine via the MS x86 emulator. And the X13s had the old Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 with less than half the performance. Granted, I wasn't doing any heavy lifting with it the month I had it. I mainly got it to test out my PortableApps.com stuff running under ARM. I'm doing it now on a Macbook Air M1 with Windows 11 running under UTM.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    The entire value proposition of Windows is wide array of application support for every little niche app you could possibly want. You just named a few apps that are on Macs.
    - JohnTHaller 3y ago
      I got it to handle 3 things: a laptop I can use as a laptop for basic stuff and to use to remote in to my development desktop at home, a Windows ARM machine I can test my Windows x86/x64/ARM64 software on, and a Mac to test out my software running under macOS via Wineskin. It's a little clunky but it works for all 3. My original set was a regular full-fat Windows laptop, a super-cheap used Galaxy Book Go Gen1, and a used Intel Mac Mini. I later replaced the Windows laptops with the Thinkpad 13s. If it hadn't had video issues, I'd still be using that. But a used base model Macbook Air M1 serves the purpose for now. I'll likely switch back to an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and a Windows laptop of some sort later as I much prefer a Windows laptop to my current Macbook.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  I don't use Windows. The Raspberry Pi has great Linux support, and the Linux Geekbench scores were even higher than in Windows. Unfortunately, I couldn't find Linux Geekbench scores in the 23W configuration.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    To a first approximation - no one cares about how well a Qualcomm desktop chip runs Linux. The consumer market is Windows and Macs
    - lern_too_spel 3y ago
      Linux is 10% of desktop/laptop share and even higher of laptop share, given that very few people use ChromeOS on desktops.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        Just a quick Google search shows 3%.
        lern_too_spel 3y ago
        My previous comment explains why you interpreted your Google search incorrectly. ChromeOS is Linux. https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/03/07/windows-losing-market-share-us-historic-low-57/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/03/07/windows-losing-market-...
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        This also shows the power of marketing. ChromeOS is a subset of Linux -- it doesn't do anything you couldn't always have done with Ubuntu. But for years people said that normal people don't want Linux, it doesn't run their apps, they can't use it. One company shows up with a marketing budget and it's got triple the market share and is now up to the level that Mac traditionally held when all of the things "nobody makes for Linux" because "nobody uses it" supported that. We're also at the point where things like bank websites don't "officially" support Linux, but as a general rule they don't have any problems on it, and if they did have problems it would be a problem the bank has to deal with instead of a problem the customer has to deal with.
- ralfn 3y ago
  I can not fathom the level of incompetence by vendors to want to install Windows on ARM devices. 1. The only reason you make people deal with Windows is backwards compatibility. 2. When you advertise it as a Windows laptop people will expect to be able to run their apps (they expect backwards compatibility). RIP your reputation and support inbox. Yes, it will be harder to sell when it runs Linux. But it's the correct expectations management and at least it will suck less. Oh well. This is what Google will do with their Chromebooks. Windows on ARM has the same future as the Windows Phone.
  - shawnz 3y ago
    Have you tried x86 emulation on Windows for ARM? It works just fine for me.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      It's slower and one of the main things people want Windows to run is games. Also, games are one of the things emulation systems are most likely to break, because games use all kinds of weird performance hacks and come with heinous anti-cheat systems.
      - shawnz 3y ago
        Have you tried it though? I use it primarily for games and I've never had an issue with it
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Intel and AMD should get ahead of the curve and put some real support behind desktop linux, which has an actual path to ARM adoption for a much larger portion of its software. But then again at least one of them should have been doing that 20 years ago.
cosmotic 3y ago
Are these Qualcomm chips in products shipping next month?
huytersd 3y ago
It’s like different parts of the TSMC factory are in competition with each other. What a surreal situation.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  TSMC doesn’t care. It’s like an arms dealer, it will happily sell to both sides.
fh9302 3y ago
What you didn't mention is that the Snapdragon X Elite has 12 high performance cores, making it a M2 Max competitor and not an M2 competitor, at least on the CPU side. The GPU is disappointing with no ray tracing support.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  The M2 Max has a TDP of 79 W. I gave the Snapdragon's results at 23 W. The 80 W configuration scored even higher. Where did you see that there was no ray tracing support? Qualcomm introduced hardware accelerated ray tracing in the previous generation.
bananapub 3y ago
I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that Qualcomm's pre-production benchmarks are of no value and the actual performance of real devices will be worse than Apple.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  That's quite a limb to be standing on if you expect performance to decrease by half.
  - LUmBULtERA 3y ago
    To be fair, I don't think many would have trusted that Apple's M1 chips were going to be as good as they were before they were actually in consumers hands. I'll reserve judgement too until that's the case.
brokencode 3y ago
That’d be pretty incredible if it plays out in reality once products are released. Though it sounds too good to be true. I’m skeptical since Qualcomm has failed for years to catch up to Apple processors in the smartphone market. So why would their first effort in desktop processors be so much better?
- SekstiNi 3y ago
  There's actually a good reason. In short, a large portion of the apple silicon team ended up leaving a few years ago to could start a new company named Nuvia. Their goal was to produce high performance chips for the enterprise/server market, and they had some very aggressive performance targets [1]. Then, in early 2021 Qualcomm ended up acquiring Nuvia, and these new chips are the first showings of this acquisition. Naturally there's a lot of hype since said team represents a lot of the talent that made apple silicon so good in the first place. [1]: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15967/N2.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15967/N2.png
  - brokencode 3y ago
    Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project. It is no doubt promising that Qualcomm has brought in more talent, but it still takes time and effort to turn that into a best-in-class product. I’m not saying it’s impossible, though I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.
    - ASinclair 3y ago
      > Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first Doesn't that also describe what Qualcomm has been doing?
      - brokencode 3y ago
        Sure, but they’ve been behind the whole time. It’s not like they’ve been trading blows each generation with Apple. If the premise is that Qualcomm hired a team of super talented engineers who can build a product that competes with Apple, then those engineers will still need time to develop a product. Again, maybe their new processors will be everything they claim. It’s possible for this to happen. I’m just not willing to buy into the hype yet.

scarface_74 3y ago

Well, benchmarks are nice. But a processor is not an end user product. How do you think this is going to be as a product once you put it in a PC running Windows - especially as Microsoft struggles trying to get third party apps on ARM and MS’s own substandard x86 emulator

JohnTHaller 3y ago
I had a Thinkpad X13s for a while that worked quite well except for a video issue (used pawn shop purchases are a risk like that). Firefox, Edge, and MS Office worked great natively on ARM. LibreOffice worked just fine via the MS x86 emulator. And the X13s had the old Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 with less than half the performance. Granted, I wasn't doing any heavy lifting with it the month I had it. I mainly got it to test out my PortableApps.com stuff running under ARM. I'm doing it now on a Macbook Air M1 with Windows 11 running under UTM.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  The entire value proposition of Windows is wide array of application support for every little niche app you could possibly want. You just named a few apps that are on Macs.
  - JohnTHaller 3y ago
    I got it to handle 3 things: a laptop I can use as a laptop for basic stuff and to use to remote in to my development desktop at home, a Windows ARM machine I can test my Windows x86/x64/ARM64 software on, and a Mac to test out my software running under macOS via Wineskin. It's a little clunky but it works for all 3. My original set was a regular full-fat Windows laptop, a super-cheap used Galaxy Book Go Gen1, and a used Intel Mac Mini. I later replaced the Windows laptops with the Thinkpad 13s. If it hadn't had video issues, I'd still be using that. But a used base model Macbook Air M1 serves the purpose for now. I'll likely switch back to an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and a Windows laptop of some sort later as I much prefer a Windows laptop to my current Macbook.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
lern_too_spel 3y ago
I don't use Windows. The Raspberry Pi has great Linux support, and the Linux Geekbench scores were even higher than in Windows. Unfortunately, I couldn't find Linux Geekbench scores in the 23W configuration.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  To a first approximation - no one cares about how well a Qualcomm desktop chip runs Linux. The consumer market is Windows and Macs
  - lern_too_spel 3y ago
    Linux is 10% of desktop/laptop share and even higher of laptop share, given that very few people use ChromeOS on desktops.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Just a quick Google search shows 3%.
      - lern_too_spel 3y ago
        My previous comment explains why you interpreted your Google search incorrectly. ChromeOS is Linux. https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/03/07/windows-losing-market-share-us-historic-low-57/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/03/07/windows-losing-market-...
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        This also shows the power of marketing. ChromeOS is a subset of Linux -- it doesn't do anything you couldn't always have done with Ubuntu. But for years people said that normal people don't want Linux, it doesn't run their apps, they can't use it. One company shows up with a marketing budget and it's got triple the market share and is now up to the level that Mac traditionally held when all of the things "nobody makes for Linux" because "nobody uses it" supported that. We're also at the point where things like bank websites don't "officially" support Linux, but as a general rule they don't have any problems on it, and if they did have problems it would be a problem the bank has to deal with instead of a problem the customer has to deal with.
ralfn 3y ago
I can not fathom the level of incompetence by vendors to want to install Windows on ARM devices. 1. The only reason you make people deal with Windows is backwards compatibility. 2. When you advertise it as a Windows laptop people will expect to be able to run their apps (they expect backwards compatibility). RIP your reputation and support inbox. Yes, it will be harder to sell when it runs Linux. But it's the correct expectations management and at least it will suck less. Oh well. This is what Google will do with their Chromebooks. Windows on ARM has the same future as the Windows Phone.
- shawnz 3y ago
  Have you tried x86 emulation on Windows for ARM? It works just fine for me.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    It's slower and one of the main things people want Windows to run is games. Also, games are one of the things emulation systems are most likely to break, because games use all kinds of weird performance hacks and come with heinous anti-cheat systems.
    - shawnz 3y ago
      Have you tried it though? I use it primarily for games and I've never had an issue with it
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Intel and AMD should get ahead of the curve and put some real support behind desktop linux, which has an actual path to ARM adoption for a much larger portion of its software. But then again at least one of them should have been doing that 20 years ago.

cosmotic 3y ago

Are these Qualcomm chips in products shipping next month?

huytersd 3y ago

It’s like different parts of the TSMC factory are in competition with each other. What a surreal situation.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
TSMC doesn’t care. It’s like an arms dealer, it will happily sell to both sides.

fh9302 3y ago

What you didn't mention is that the Snapdragon X Elite has 12 high performance cores, making it a M2 Max competitor and not an M2 competitor, at least on the CPU side. The GPU is disappointing with no ray tracing support.

lern_too_spel 3y ago
The M2 Max has a TDP of 79 W. I gave the Snapdragon's results at 23 W. The 80 W configuration scored even higher. Where did you see that there was no ray tracing support? Qualcomm introduced hardware accelerated ray tracing in the previous generation.

bananapub 3y ago

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that Qualcomm's pre-production benchmarks are of no value and the actual performance of real devices will be worse than Apple.

lern_too_spel 3y ago
That's quite a limb to be standing on if you expect performance to decrease by half.
- LUmBULtERA 3y ago
  To be fair, I don't think many would have trusted that Apple's M1 chips were going to be as good as they were before they were actually in consumers hands. I'll reserve judgement too until that's the case.

brokencode 3y ago

That’d be pretty incredible if it plays out in reality once products are released. Though it sounds too good to be true. I’m skeptical since Qualcomm has failed for years to catch up to Apple processors in the smartphone market. So why would their first effort in desktop processors be so much better?

SekstiNi 3y ago
There's actually a good reason. In short, a large portion of the apple silicon team ended up leaving a few years ago to could start a new company named Nuvia. Their goal was to produce high performance chips for the enterprise/server market, and they had some very aggressive performance targets [1]. Then, in early 2021 Qualcomm ended up acquiring Nuvia, and these new chips are the first showings of this acquisition. Naturally there's a lot of hype since said team represents a lot of the talent that made apple silicon so good in the first place. [1]: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15967/N2.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15967/N2.png
- brokencode 3y ago
  Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project. It is no doubt promising that Qualcomm has brought in more talent, but it still takes time and effort to turn that into a best-in-class product. I’m not saying it’s impossible, though I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.
  - ASinclair 3y ago
    > Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first Doesn't that also describe what Qualcomm has been doing?
    - brokencode 3y ago
      Sure, but they’ve been behind the whole time. It’s not like they’ve been trading blows each generation with Apple. If the premise is that Qualcomm hired a team of super talented engineers who can build a product that competes with Apple, then those engineers will still need time to develop a product. Again, maybe their new processors will be everything they claim. It’s possible for this to happen. I’m just not willing to buy into the hype yet.