10 ms·
As someone who has used the Snapdragon X Elite (12 core Oryon) Dev Kit as a daily driver for the past year, I find this exciting. The X Elite performance still
by jasoneckert 1y ago
As someone who has used the Snapdragon X Elite (12 core Oryon) Dev Kit as a daily driver for the past year, I find this exciting. The X Elite performance still blows my mind today - so the new X2 Elite with 18 cores is likely going to be even more impressive from a performance perspective!
I can't speak to the battery life, however, since it is dismal on my Dev Kit ;-)
- typpilol 1y agoHow's the compatibility? Are there any apps that don't work that are critical?
- jasoneckert 1y agoHave I had any app compatibility issues? To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: "No." The Prism binary emulation for x86 apps that don't have an ARM equivalent has been stellar with near-native performance (better than Rosetta in macOS). And I've tried some really obscure stuff!
- tobias3 1y agoFor me it is too slow to run Age of Empires 2: DE multiplayer. More than ten year old Laptops with Intel chips are faster there.
- nulld3v 1y agoI suspect that's due to the GPU and not due to Prism, because they basically just took a mobile GPU and stuffed it into a laptop chip. Generally performance seems to be on par with whatever a typical flagship Android devices can do. Desktop games that have mobile ports generally seem to run well, emulation is pretty solid too (e.g. Dolphin). Warcraft III runs OK-ish.
- zamadatix 1y agoThe GPUs don't go toe-to-toe with current gen desktop GPUs but they should be significantly better than the GTX 650, a mid range desktop GPU from 2012, the game (2019) lists as recommended. It does sound like something odd is going on than just lack of hardware. https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Snapdragon+X+Elite+-+X1E78100+-+Qualcomm+Adreno+GP&id=5096 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Snapdragon+X+... https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+650&id=2155 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+6...
- TiredOfLife 1y agoThat something odd is called GPU drivers. Even Intel struggled (they recently announced that they are dropping all gpu driver older than Alchemist development) to get games running on their iGpus
- nulld3v 1y agoThere are also some architectural differences between mobile & desktop GPUs which may impact games that are not optimized for the platform: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/the-snapdragon-x-elites-adreno-igpu https://chipsandcheese.com/p/the-snapdragon-x-elites-adreno-...
- GeekyBear 1y agoThat's certainly not what the reviews say. Adobe apps that ran fine on Rosetta didn't work at all on Prism. https://www.pcmag.com/articles/how-well-does-windows-on-arms-prism-emulation-work-we-tested-with-31-apps# https://www.pcmag.com/articles/how-well-does-windows-on-arms...
- Derbasti 1y agoSame here. I've not had any issues with my Surface Pro 11.
- christopher8827 1y agoMost apps for dev work actually work; - RStudio - VS Code - WSL2 - Fusion 360 - Docker Only major exception is: - Android Studio's Emulator (although, the IDE does work)
- nulld3v 1y agoYeah, I too was surprised to find the dev experience very good: all JetBrains IDEs work well, Visual Studio appears to work fine, and most language toolchains seem well supported.
- MBCook 1y agoJetBrains stuff (love it!) is built on Java, so I’m not terribly surprised. I don’t know how much native code there is though. Plus they’ve been through the Apple Silicon change, so it’s not the first time they’ve been on non-x86 either.
- electroly 1y agoSurface Pro 11 owner here. SQL Server won't install on ARM without hacks. Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization on ARM. Most games are broken with unplayable graphical glitches with Qualcomm video drivers, but fortunately not all. Most Windows recovery tools do not support ARM: no Media Creation Tool, no Installation Assistant, and recovery drives created on x64 machines aren't compatible [EDIT: see reply, I might be mistaken on this]. Creation of a recovery drive for a Snapdragon-based Surface (which you have to do from a working Snapdragon-based Surface) requires typing your serial code into a Microsoft website, then downloading a .zip of drivers that you manually overwrite onto the recovery media that Windows 11 creates for you. Day-to-day, it's all fine, but I may be returning to x64 next time around. I'm not sure that I'm receiving an offsetting benefit for these downsides. Battery life isn't something that matters for me.
- brokencode 1y agoThat’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.
- wmf 1y agoFor one thing Apple dropped 32-bit before they transitioned to ARM while Windows compatibility goes back 30 years.
- rock_artist 1y agoActually, the Macho file format was multiarch by design (On Windows we're still stuck with Program Files (x86)).. Anyway, before dropping 32bit, they've dropped PowerPC. Another consideration, Apple is the king of dylib, you're usually dynamically linking to the OS frameworks/libs. so they can actually plan their glue smarter so the frameworks would still work in native arch. (that was really important with PPC->Intel where you also had big endian...)
- winocm 1y agoYou also get "Program Files (ARM)" (including a complementary "SysArm32") on older arm64 systems too.
- ack_complete 1y agoIronically, the app I've had the most trouble with is Visual Studio 2022. Since it has a native ARM64 build and installation of the x64 version is blocked, there are a bunch of IDE extensions that are unavailable.
- puzzlingcaptcha 1y agoX Elite does not have AVX instructions (they are emulated instead)
- OptionOfT 1y agoWait, you got one of those Dev kits? How? I thought they were all cancelled. Edit: apparently they did end up shipping.
- wtallis 1y agoThey got cancelled after they started shipping, and even people who received the hardware got refunded.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- adrr 1y agoUnless they added low power cores to it, its probably isn't great. Chip design was for originally for datacenters.
- ZuLuuuuuu 1y agoDidn't laptops with Snapdragon X Elite CPUs have pretty good battery life? https://www.pcworld.com/article/2375677/surface-laptop-2024-review-a-new-era-for-windows-laptops.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2375677/surface-laptop-2024-... X2 Elite shouldn't be that different I think.
- jasoneckert 1y agoIf you read anything online, you'll realize that the battery life 'is' great. For example, LTT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0
- Novosell 1y agoReading youtube videos are ya?
- skavi 1y agoThey were joking. The dev kit didn’t have a battery.
- wmf 1y ago