In 2019, a startup called Nuvia came out of stealth mode. Nuvia was notable because its leadership included several notable chip architects, including one who used to work for Apple. Apple chips like the M1 drew recognition for landing in the same performance neighborhood as AMD and Intel’s offerings while offering better power efficiency. Nuvia had similar goals, aiming to create a power efficient core that could could surpass designs from AMD, Apple, Arm, and Intel. Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in 2021, bringing its staff into Qualcomm’s internal CPU efforts.
Bringing on Nuvia staff rejuvenated Qualcomm’s internal CPU efforts, which led to the Oryon core in Snapdragon X Elite. Oryon arrives nearly five years after Nuvia hit the news, and almost eight years after Qualcomm last released a smartphone SoC with internally designed cores. For people following Nuvia’s developments, it has been a long wait.
↫ Chips and Cheese
Now that the Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips are finally making their way to consumers, we’re also finally starting to see proper deep-dives into the brand new hardware. Considering this will set the standard for ARM laptops for a long time to come – including easy availability of powerful ARM Linux laptops – I really want to know every single quirk or performance statistic we can find.
Thom Holwerda,
Me too. I have my fingers crossed that Qualcomm delivers something worthwhile for us. I’ve been interested in ARM laptops for a long time…but only for linux, not macos or windows. Their announcements about officially supporting linux hit the right chords, now it’s time to see whether the real world products that hit the market manage to deliver.
As a productivity platform I am fairly confident that an ARM laptop would serve me well. An important factor for me if whether we can bring our own OS. I’m not remotely interested in buying a laptop where the OS is tethered to the manufacture, so hopefully these products will be truly generic like x86 laptops are.
I am personally not interested in using ARM hardware to emulate x86 windows software, but I am interested in how well that would perform all the same. Obviously this is relevant for gaming since nearly all mainstream games are all x86.
Me too.
But there are many issues:
– ARM is proprietary.
– ARM booting and drivers are a nightmare by nature.
– x86 emulation will always be subpar. It would be nice for a non x86 platform to have something tech such as Transmeta or Loongson, but A LOT BETTER. Easily change CPU “personality” as in advanced CPU microcode reprogramming or extremely hardware accelerated CPU emulation.
timofonic,
Historically I would agree with you, but more recently there’s been good news from qualcomm and it’s gotten my hopes up.
https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-linux-kernel-support-for-the-snapdragon-x-elite
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-Mainline-Linux-2024
Whether or not it pans out for us long term remains to be seen, but so far I’d like to applaud them for throwing linux a bone. This is sorely needed.
I understand emulation is subpar. But like Thom, I’m still curious about how the performance stacks up.
The best informed put it on par with Apple’s “Avalanche” core which debuted in the 2021 iPhone, not too bad indeed being the first iteration. The strong Linux support will make the difference for me.
Qualcomm hyper-competitiveness at full display: In the smartphone SoC space, where modems are important, they made sure they have the best modems in the market. In the ARM laptop space, where CPU cores are important, they made sure they have the best cores in the market. MediaTek will instead have to make do with whatever they can source from ARM (the company). So, if the ARM64 transition happens in the Windows and Desktop Linux space, we’ll be jumping from a duopoly (Intel vs AMD) to essentially a monopoly (Qualcomm).
I am starting to think the biggest advantage of x86 is the presence of two hyper-competitive companies (Intel and AMD) making cores for it. Well, that and a standardized bootloader and unaccelerated framebuffer mode (VESA mode).
kurkosdr,
I’m a bit perplexed by that. You’re predicting doom and gloom for x86, but the way I see it market pressures forcing them to create more competitive products at better value is actually a good thing for consumers. A competitive threat from ARM may actually help create improvements for x86 product lines too.
Qualcomm is just as hypercompetitive as AMD and Intel if not more. Anyway, I am worried about a move to ARM64 happening because of a Microsoft-driven push for change for change’s sake (“a new way to PC” etc) and marketing pressure to advertise marginal gains over x86, not a pragmatic need to shift to a different ISA. And if that happens, boom!, you are in a Qualcomm monopoly.
I hope this happens and we get to keep x86. Most people don’t realise what they have (for example, standardized bootloader and framebuffer, backwards compatibility without janky emulators, duopoly vs monopoly) until they’ve lost it.
Well sure, there’s no essential need to change ISA, but why is that a problem? If x86 has better specs & valuefor consumers, great. If ARM has better specs & value for consumers, great. I don’t really see why having more choices is a problem especially when the industry has been deprived of viable alternatives for so long.
I think it’s still way too soon for ARM to declare victory, but even if we assume that’s the case it still seems odd to call it a qualcomm monopoly. Unlike x86, many companies are licensing the ARM architecture. Even AMD stands ready to produce ARM chips.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-we-stand-ready-to-make-arm-chips
So I’m not understanding why having more viable competitors to x86 in the CPU market is bad.
I agree with you here. IBM may not have done it intentionally but there’s no doubt that the commoditization of x86 provides us with enormous benefits. We shouldn’t take it for granted and it’s been a major gripe for ARM platforms, as you rightfully suggest. However honestly I am thrilled that Qualcomm are actually committing to UEFI and standard boot loaders. I don’t really have a problem with Qualcomm taking ARM in this direction since I think it’s progress. While I accept that they may not have earned our trust yet, I don’t understand the criticism. Isn’t it a good thing that Qualcomm are going with x86 style standardization to ARM laptops? This has been on my wish list for so many years.
I wrote a detailed review of my Snapdragon X laptop. So far I’m very happy with the hardware but looking forward to jettisoning Windows for Linux. It does run OpenBSD in a somewhat limited fashion already though.
https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2024/yoga-7x-snapdragon-developer-review/