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Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC
- andrewaylett 11mo agoWhile I almost certainly wouldn't have done more than wished for one, it's a shame they're not getting any return for their effort.
- ndiddy 11mo agoIt's a shame that this didn't end up going anywhere. When Qualcomm was doing their press stuff prior to the Snapdragon X launch, they said that they'd be putting equal effort into supporting both Windows and Linux. If anyone here is running Linux on a Snapdragon X laptop, I'd be curious to know what the experience is like today. I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. They have similar performance/battery life, and run cool (so you can use the laptop on your lap or in bed without it overheating), but have full Linux support today and you don't have to deal with x86 emulation. If anyone needs a thin & light Linux laptop today, they're probably your best option. Personally, I get 10-14 hours of real usage (not manufacturer "offline video playback with the brightness turned all the way down" numbers) on my Vivobook S14 running Fedora KDE. In the future, it'll be interesting to see how Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips compare to Snapdragon X2.
- ori_b 11mo agoForget equal effort: Start off with hardware docs.
- AlotOfReading 11mo agoEqual effort is far more likely from Qualcomm than hardware docs. They don't even freely share docs with partners, and many important things are restricted even from their own engineers. I've seen military contractors less paranoid than QCOM.
- zettabomb 11mo agoI'd have to say that full hardware documentation, even under NDA, is prerequisite to claim equal effort. The expectation on a desktop platform (that is, explicitly not mobile, like phones or tablets) is that development is mostly open for those who want to, and Qualcomm's business is sort of fundamentally counter to that. So either they're going to have to change those expectations (which I would prefer not to happen), provide more to manufacturers, or expect that their market performance will be poor.
- Wowfunhappy 11mo agoIf they don't provide hardware documentation for Windows either (a desktop platform), how can it be a prerequisite for equal effort?
- userbinator 11mo agoQualcomm could've become "the Intel of the ARM PC" if they wanted to, but I suspect they see no problem with (and perhaps have a vested interest in) proprietary closed systems given how they've been doing with their smartphone SoCs. Unfortunately, even Intel is moving in that direction whenever they're trying to be "legacy free", but I wonder if that's also because they're trying to emulate the success of smartphone SoC vendors.
- bigyabai 11mo agoI don't know if the prospect of being the "Intel of ARM" is very appealing when you can manufacture high-margin smartphone SOCs instead. The addressable market doesn't seem to be very large; any potential competition is stifled by licensing on both Microsoft and Softbank's side. The legend of Windows on ARM is decades old, and people have been seriously trying to make it happen for at least the past two decades. They're all bled dry. Apple is the only one who can turn a profit, courtesy of their sweetheart deal with Masayoshi Son.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo agoWell that would have an obvious solution. Go make RISC-V CPUs for phones etc. until you get good enough at it to be competitive in laptops, at which point Microsoft gets interested in supporting you and you get to be the Intel of RISC-V without dealing with Softbank.
- pjmlp 11mo agoThe extent PCs are open is an historical accident, that most OEMs would rather not repeat, as you can see everywhere from embedded all the way to cloud systems. If anything, Linux powered devices are a good example on how all of them end up with OEM-name Linux, with minimal contributions to upstream. If everyone would leave Windows in droves, expect regular people to be getting Dell and HP Linux at local PC store, with the same limitations as going outside their distros with binary blobs, and pre-installed stuff.
- summa_tech 11mo ago
- foxandmouse 11mo agoThe iGPU in Panther Lake has me pretty excited about intel for the first time in a long time. Lunar Lake proved they’re still relevant; Panther Lake will show whether they can actually compete.
- bytehowl 11mo agoLunar Lake had integrated RAM, right? Given certain market realities right now, it could be a real boon for them if they keep that design.
- christophilus 11mo agoRoughly the same on my Intel Lenovo. It’s a great little machine. And Linux runs nicely.
- Marsymars 11mo ago> I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. Depends why the Snapdragon chips were relevant in the first place! I got an ARM laptop for work so that I can locally build things for ARM that we want to be able to deploy to ARM servers.
- wryun 11mo agoSurprising. Cross compilation too annoying to set up? No CI pipelines for things you're actually deploying? (I'm keen about ARM and RISC-V systems, but I can never actually justify them given the spotty Linux situation and no actual use case)
- mort96 11mo agoCross compilation is a pain to set up, especially if you're relying on system libraries for anything. Even dynamically linking against glibc is a pain when cross compiling.
- aallaall 11mo agoLinux on arm is probably the most popular computing device platform in the world.
- wryun 11mo agoWhich doesn't mean that it's easy to use an ARM device in the way I'd want to (i.e. as a trouble-free laptop or desktop with complete upstream kernel support).
- fweimer 11mo agoIt's more surprising to me that software isn't portable enough that you can develop locally on x86-64. And then have a proper pipeline that produces the official binaries. Outside the embedded space, cross-compilation really is a fool's errand: either your software is not portable (which means it's not future-proof), or you are targeting an architecture that is not commercially viable.
- timpera 11mo agoDo the Lunar Lake chips have the same incredible standby battery times as the Snapdragon X's? That's where the latter really shines in my opinion.
- StillBored 11mo agoI have a couple generation back amd laptop that can 'standby' for months.. its called S4 hibernate. Although at the same time its set for S3 and can sit in S3 for a few days at least and recover in less time than it takes to open the screen. The idea that you need instant wakeup when the screen has been closed for days is sorta a niche case, even apple's machines hibernate if you leave the screen closed for too long. That isn't to say that modern standby/s2-idle isn't super useful, because it is, but more for actual use cases where the machine can basically go to sleep with the screen on displaying something the user is interacting with.
- laylower 11mo agoI'm typing this from a snapdragon x elite HP. It's fine really but my use is fairly basic. I only use it to watch movies, read, browse, and draft word and excel, some light coding. No gaming - and I came in knowing full well that a lot of the mainstream programs don't play well with snapdragon. What has amazed me the most is the battery life and the seemingly no real lag or micro-stuttering that you get in some other laptops. So, in all, fine for light use. For anything serious, use a desktop.
- jdibs 11mo agoWhat is it about it that makes it unsuited for anything serious? The way you describe it, the only thing it's not suited for is gaming, which is not generally regarded as serious. Many people including myself do serious work on a macbook, which is also ARM. What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?
- znpy 11mo ago> What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate? Everything else around the cpu. apple systems are entirely co-designed (cpu to work with the rest of the components and everything together to work with mac os). While i'd love to see macbook-level quality on other brands (looking at you, lenovo) tight hardware+software co-design (and co-development) yields much better results.
- NaomiLehman 11mo agofor this to happen we would need to see a second company that controls both the hardware and the software and that's not realistic, economically. You can't just jump into that space.
- LeFantome 11mo agoYou could argue that is exactly what Tuxedo is doing. In this case, they could not provide the end-user experience they wanted with this hardware so they moved on. System76 may be an even better example as they now control their software stack more deeply (COSMIC).
- tester756 11mo agoYea, Lunar Lake made hit into ARM, but Panther Lake should be even stronger hit
- seec 11mo agoBetter efficiency of X86 mobiles CPUs does negate much of the advantage of ARM laptops. It's just not worth the trouble of going through a major software transition. One thing that I find suspicious is the large delta in single thread score between ARM and X86 currently. The real world performance does not suggest that big of a difference in actual use. The benchmarks suggest a 25% performance delta but in actual use the delta seems to be less than 10%. Of course Apple Silicon has the efficiency crown very much locked down Since they have become a marketing target the benchmarks have become much less useful.
- RestartKernel 11mo agoI was incredibly excited when they announced the chip alongside all kinds of promises regarding Linux support, so I pre-ordered a laptop with the intention of installing Linux later on. When reports came out that single core performance could not even match an old iPhone, alongside WSL troubles and disappointing battery life, I sent it back on arrival. Instead I paid the premium for a nicely specced Macbook Pro, which is honestly everything I wanted, safe for Linux support. At least it's proper Unix, so I don't notice much difference in my terminal.
- IshKebab 11mo agoDoes anyone know why Linux laptop battery life is so bad? Is it a case of devices needing to be turned off that aren't? Poor CPU scheduling?
- ajvs 11mo agoA big part of it is chipmakers deprecating S3 sleep in favour of Modern Standby.
- WastedCucumber 11mo agoI ran into this problem on a Slimbook some years ago now. I found that my battery drained way too fast in standby, and I remember determining that this was some (relatively common) problem with sleep states, that some linux machines couldn't really enter/stay in a deeper sleep state, so my Slimbook's standby wasn't much of a standby at all. But that's just one problem, I bet.
- exabrial 11mo agoI mean I feel like once one of the ARM chipmakers can lend a hand on the software side it should be a landslide. Google and Samsung managed to make very successful Chromebooks together, but IIRC there was a bunch of back and forth to make the whole thing boot quickly and sip battery power.
- tecoholic 11mo agoWhat’s the primary need for ARM? Is it because Apple silicon showed a big breakthrough in performance to power with reduced instruction set? While it’s amazing on paper I barely notice a difference on my day to day use between an Intel Ultra and a M2 in performance. Battery life is where they are miles apart.
- acomjean 11mo agoI’m guessing for most people it doesn’t much matter. Most people aren’t writing assembly. They do love an all day battery. I think the competition really helps keep these companies honest.
- aidenn0 11mo agoI'm disappointed, but not surprised.
- rr808 11mo agoHow hard can it be to have an Android laptop? Basically most people just use a browser and the choice of applications is already extensive.
- Egor3f 11mo agoThere used to be some laptops like Toshiba ac100, actually an almost unusable device even for simple tasks.
- Almondsetat 11mo agoThat's a Chromebook
- wiseowise 11mo agoThat's Android nowadays: https://chromeunboxed.com/its-official-google-says-the-android-and-chromeos-merger-is-coming-next-year/ https://chromeunboxed.com/its-official-google-says-the-andro...
- sunaookami 11mo agoNo it's not and never will be. Google says every year that ChromeOS and Android are merging but it's not happening. They are just merging some components, e.g. the Bluetooth Stack. ChromeOS got a new design a few months ago so they are still putting work into it.
- sys_64738 11mo agoWhat Android plus phones proves is you can get excellent performance and fantastic battery life from Linux and third party HW. This could and should be applied to Linux running on an ARM64 system but not sure why. Maybe economies of scales WRT investment on the phone driver side.
- pjmlp 11mo agoExcept it isn't the same. First of all the userspace is completely different, secondly Android throughout the years has been aggressively changing the ways background process work (in the context of Android activities, not bare bones UNIX), thus it isn't the same as GNU/Linux where anything goes.
- arjie 11mo agoI fully expected this. I really wanted to get the Snapdragon X Elite Ideacentre just because I wanted an ARM target to run stuff on and if I'm being honest the Mac Minis are way better price/performance with support. Apple Silicon is far faster than any other ARM processor (Ampere, Qualcomm, anything else) that's easily available with good Linux support. I am so grateful to the Asahi Linux guys who made this whole thing work. What a tour de force! One day, we'll get the M4 Mac Mini on Asahi and that will be far superior to this Snapdragon X Elite anyway. I remember working on a Qualcomm dev board over a decade ago and they had just the worst documentation. The hardware wouldn't even respond correctly to what you told it to do. I don't know if that's standard but without the large amount of desire there is to run Linux on Apple Silicon I didn't really anticipate support approaching what Asahi has on M1/M2.
- aallaall 11mo agoApple provide even less documentation than Qualcomm. Let that sink in.
- ronsor 11mo agoWrong documentation is perhaps worse than no documentation. Although Apple provides little, at least it is usually accurate, and what's left you know you must reverse engineer.
- LeFantome 11mo agoA tour de force indeed. Asahi Linux only works as well as it does because of the massive effort put in by that team. For all the flack Qualcomm takes, they do significantly more than Apple to get hardware support into the kernel. They are already working to mainline the X2 Elite. The difference is that Apple only makes a few devices and there is a large community around them. It would be far less work to create a stellar Linux experience on a Lenovo X Elite laptop than on a M2 MacBook. But fewer people are lining up to do it on Lenovo. We expect Lenovo, Linaro, and Qualcomm to do it for us. Fair enough. But we should not be praising Apple.
- adastra22 11mo ago
- kopirgan 11mo agoBios is an issue for most laptop under Linux not just arm.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- arcfour 11mo agoLVFS doesn't exist? UEFI?
- kopirgan 11mo agoI mean updating it. Often the update are just windows only.. For example I've had this dell Elitebook where I've installed Debian wiping out Win. While on windows system prompts Bios update practically every week but been years in Linux on same bios. IIRC updates were win only or jump thru some complex rings of fire. Haven't bothered looking up in a while.. I've also had to disable some protection such as security before I could install Debian though I guess there's a way if I research hard enough.
- lonjil 11mo ago> Often the update are just windows only.. That's a choice the vendor makes, and Tuxedo Computers is the vendor in this case. Since they control the product they're making, they should be able to provide nice firmware updates for Linux users. They just decided not to even try, I guess?
- p_l 11mo agoThe issue is that Qualcomm is critical path in that and they don't cooperate nicely even with Microsoft
- heavyset_go 11mo agoIf it's Dell, they're one of the most prolific, if not the most, on LVFS. All of my Dell hardware gets firmware updates via fwupd. Dell is conservative with marking their BIOS updates, though, and you might have to enable the testing LVFS repository for regularly updated BIOS. If you mean HP EliteBooks, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than 1) extract BIOS archive 2) drag & drop BIOS file 3) reboot. You download the BIOS update .exe, run 7zip on it, and take the BIOS.BIN file and either stick it in the root of your EFI partition and it will install automatically on boot, or just run `fwupdtool install-blob BIOS.BIN` and it will install automatically on reboot.
- PhilippGille 11mo agoRelated from July: "Linux on Snapdragon X Elite: Linaro and Tuxedo Pave the Way for ARM64 Laptops" 291 points, 217 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44699393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44699393
- userbinator 11mo agoThe first comment there is worth reading again, just for this sentence: If you want to change some settings oft[sic] the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
- Incipient 11mo agoThis feels like BAU for PC vendors - you test out a product on a new combination of hardware, and it isn't mature/stable/ready for production, so you kick it down the road to develop later - this is especially true for Linux, where a LOT of the work would be done outside of your organisation.
- DeathArrow 11mo agoHardware companies generally start working on a laptop before a SOC is released, not after. They also need to secure manufacturer support, in this case Qualcomm to be able to deliver in time.
- sys_64738 11mo agoHW companies generally have access to the prototype silicon. It's how they iron out bugs in the bringup HW.
- fragmede 11mo agoWe can nerd it out about Linux this an S3 sleep that. How much money does the community need to raise all in, for that notebook to happen. Where's the GoFundMeAngelList platform that's a cult where I can pledge $10,000 to get this laptop of my dreams? Or are we all too busy shitposting?
- danans 11mo ago> How much money does the community need to raise all in, for that notebook to happen. > Where's the GoFundMeAngelList platform that's a cult where I can pledge $10,000 to get this laptop of my dreams? The hard part isn't the money - it's identifying an addressable market that makes the investment worthwhile and assembling a team that can execute and deliver on it. The market can't be a few hundred enthusiasts who want to spend $10k on a laptop. It has to be at least tens of thousands who would spend $1-2k. Even that probably won't get you to the break-even when you consider the size (and speciality) of team you need to do all this.
- StopDisinfo910 11mo agoI wonder if Mediatek will try its hand as laptop oriented SoC now that their flagship mobile SoC are competitive again and Google is merging Android and Chrome OS. Generally, they are far nicer than Qualcomm when it comes to supporting standard technology.
- Findecanor 11mo agoThey already have, and they are in Chromebooks. Last week, another HN:er posted that he uses a Lenovo Chromebook with a Mediatek SoC as his daily Linux dev machine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938410 BTW. I don't think Qualcomm SoCs running Windows was just about performance but more of a time-limited exclusivity deal with MS.
- snvzz 11mo agoARM was always a distraction, and a monopoly i.e. worse than x86's duopoly. Only RISC-V is worth switching to.
- igravious 11mo agomonopoly? this is from DeepSeek, ymmv Here is a list of major ARM licensees, categorized by the type of license they typically hold. 1. Architectural Licensees (Most Flexible) These companies hold an Architectural License, which allows them to design their own CPU cores (and often GPUs/NPUs) that are compatible with the ARM instruction set. This is the highest level of partnership and requires significant engineering resources. Apple: The most famous example. They design the "A-series" and "M-series" chips (e.g., A17 Pro, M4) for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Their cores are often industry-leading in single-core performance. Qualcomm: Historically used ARM's core designs but has increasingly moved to its own custom "Kryo" CPU cores (which are still ARM-compatible) for its Snapdragon processors. Their recent "Oryon" cores (in the Snapdragon X Elite) are a fully custom design for PCs. NVIDIA: Designs its own "Denver" and "Grace" CPU cores for its superchips focused on AI and data centers. They also hold a license for the full ARM architecture for their future roadmap. Samsung: Uses a mixed strategy. For its Exynos processors, some generations use semi-custom "M" series cores alongside ARM's stock cores. Amazon (Annapurna Labs): Designs the "Graviton" series of processors for its AWS cloud services, offering high performance and cost efficiency for cloud workloads. Google: Has developed its own custom ARM-based CPU cores, expected to power future Pixel devices and Google data centers. Microsoft: Reported to be designing its own ARM-based server and consumer chips, following the trend of major cloud providers. 2. "Cores & IP" Licensees (The Common Path) These companies license pre-designed CPU cores, GPU designs, and other system IP from ARM. They then integrate these components into their own System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. This is the most common licensing model. MediaTek: A massive player in smartphones (especially mid-range and entry-level), smart TVs, and other consumer devices. Broadcom: Uses ARM cores in its networking chips, set-top box SoCs, and data center solutions. Texas Instruments (TI): Uses ARM cores extensively in its popular Sitara line of microprocessors for industrial and embedded applications. NXP Semiconductors: A leader in automotive, industrial, and IoT microcontrollers and processors, almost exclusively using ARM cores. STMicroelectronics (STM): A major force in microcontrollers (STM32 family) and automotive, heavily reliant on ARM Cortex-M and Cortex-A cores. Renesas: A key supplier in the automotive and industrial sectors, using ARM cores in its R-Car and RA microcontroller families. AMD: Uses ARM cores in some of its adaptive SoCs (Xilinx) and for security processors (e.g., the Platform Security Processor or PSP in Ryzen CPUs). Intel: While primarily an x86 company, its foundry business (IFS) is an ARM licensee to enable chip manufacturing for others, and it has used ARM cores in some products like the now-discontinued Intel XScale.
- tester756 11mo ago>usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices—were not achieved under Linux
- blacklion 11mo agoSomewhat tangent: x86-based laptops of this brand (it is new to me, I never meet Tuxedo Computers before) looks attractive, but there is no information about their screens main property: are they glossy or matt? My wife is very sensitive to glossy screens and we have big problems to find new laptop for her, as most good ones are glossy now.
- imglorp 11mo agoThis is infuriating. Everything should be matte unless you live in the dark.
- Otek 11mo agoFYI you can add a matte layer yourself on any screen
- amelius 11mo agoYes, you can even add a privacy protection layer that blocks viewing from larger angles.
- syntaxing 11mo agoOne possible alternative is system76. Most of their laptop is matte https://system76.com/laptops/lemp13/configure https://system76.com/laptops/lemp13/configure
- Sinescape 11mo agoI use their InfinityBook Pro 14. Its 2880x1800 display is matte.
- adastra22 11mo agoIf she's ok with macOS, the new "nano-textured display" options on the MacBook Pros are very nice. I'm typing form one right now. It has the sharp color response of the glossy displays, but absolutely no noticeable glare.
- walterbell 11mo ago> We will continue to monitor developments and evaluate the X2E at the appropriate time for its Linux suitability. If it meets expectations and we can reuse a significant portion of our work on the X1E, we may resume development. How much of our groundwork can be transferred to the X2E can only be assessed after a detailed evaluation of the chip. Apparently the Windows exclusivity period has ended, so Google will support Android and ChromeOS on Qualcomm X2-based devices in 2026, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368167
- greatgib 11mo agoWas to be expected. Qualcomm sucks very much to support open platforms. I was disappointed to see that no more good linux compatible XPS was available anymore because they are now based on the last snapdragon for bullshit windows "ai" reasons.
- danans 11mo agoPerhaps they should pursue building around Mediatek CPUs. Google has already built Chromebooks (which are Linux based) on them, so presumably the necessary drivers exist. Outside of laptops, NVidia sells its Jetson Devkits and DGX workstations which run Linux and are pretty fast and ARM based. And System76 also sells a high powered (and $$$) Linux workstation based on an NVidia ARM chipset So at least for some ARM SOCs, performance issues have largely been solved.
- amelius 11mo agoI hate to say it but it looks like Apple is winning, folks.
- c2h5oh 11mo agoQualcomm doesn't bother to upstream most of their SoCs. They maintain a fork of a specific Linux kernel version for a while and when they stop updating it or new version of Android requires newer kernel then updates for all devices based on that SoC end. They have little experience producing code that is high enough quality it would be accepted into Linux kernel. They have even less experience maintaining it for an extended period of time.
- ConanRus 11mo ago[dead]
- p0w3n3d 11mo agoI wonder what made it so hard? I thought that Snapdragon was already providing the Linux drivers? Anyone knows? Maybe those were not OpenSource? My guess is that it's all the same as in Linux phones that they have large blobs of drivers given by the board producer but not being open, but then... Maybe we should invest time in microkernels? Maybe Linux is a dead end because of the monolithic architecture? Because I doubt big companies will change...