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Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

(www.qualcomm.com)
163 points wmf | 4 comments | 24 Sep 25 22:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jasoneckert ◴[24 Sep 25 22:44 UTC] No.45366812[source]▶
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 ;-)

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typpilol ◴[24 Sep 25 22:50 UTC] No.45366858[source]▶
How's the compatibility? Are there any apps that don't work that are critical?
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electroly ◴[24 Sep 25 23:09 UTC] No.45367015[source]▶
Surface 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.

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1. goosedragons ◴[24 Sep 25 23:23 UTC] No.45367155[source]▶
You ABSOLUTELY do not have to create a recovery drive from a Snapdragon based device. I've done it multiple times from x64 Windows for both a SPX and 11.
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2. electroly ◴[24 Sep 25 23:26 UTC] No.45367191[source]▶
Hmm, thank you, that's good to know. Did you just apply the Snapdragon driver zip over the x64 recovery drive? It didn't work for me when my OS killed itself but I could easily have done something wrong in my panic over the machine not working. Since I only have the one Snapdragon device, I was making the assumption that it would have worked if I had a second one, but I didn't actually know that.
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3. goosedragons ◴[24 Sep 25 23:58 UTC] No.45367484[source]▶
Yes, just copy the zip over like the instructions say.
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4. electroly ◴[25 Sep 25 15:59 UTC] No.45374455{3}[source]▶
Thanks again for this. Honestly, it may sway my choice on returning to x64 vs. sticking with ARM64 next time. The other issues are relatively minor and can be dealt with, but I didn't like thinking that I was one OS failure away from a bricked machine that I couldn't recover.