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Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

(www.qualcomm.com)
163 points wmf | 2 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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brokencode ◴[24 Sep 25 23:12 UTC] No.45367050{3}[source]▶
That’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.
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viraptor ◴[24 Sep 25 23:30 UTC] No.45367222{4}[source]▶
Did it? From that list: SQL server doesn't work on Mac and there's no Apple equivalent, virtualisation is built into the system so that kind of worked but with restrictions, games barely exist Mac so a few that cared did the ports but it's still minimal. There's basically no installation media for Macs in the same way as windows in general.

What I'm trying to say is - the scope is very different / smaller there. There's a tonne of things that didn't work on Macs both before and after and the migration was not that perfect either.

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electroly ◴[24 Sep 25 23:37 UTC] No.45367285{5}[source]▶
Out of the gate, Apple silicon lacked nested virtualization, too. They added it in the M3 chip and macOS 15. Macs have different needs than Windows though; I think it's less of a big deal there. On Windows we need it for running WSL2 inside a VM.
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1. pjmlp ◴[25 Sep 25 05:22 UTC] No.45369549{3}[source]▶
On Windows nested virtualization already existed before WSL, all the kernel and device drivers security features introduced on Windows 10, and made always enabled on Windows 11, require running Hyper-V, which is a type 1 hypervisor.

So it is rather easy having to deal with nested virtualization, even those of us that seldom use WSL.

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2. electroly ◴[25 Sep 25 15:23 UTC] No.45373845[source]▶
Yes, nested virtualization has existed for a long time... on Intel. On Windows, it is not supported on ARM. For a long time it wasn't even supported on AMD! They added AMD nested virtualization support in Windows Server 2022!

Note that when the Windows host is invisibly running under Hyper-V, your other Hyper-V VMs are its "siblings" and not nested children. You're not using nested virtualization in that situation. It's only when running a Hyper-V VM inside another Hyper-V VM. WSL2 is a Hyper-V VM, so if you want to run WSL2 inside a Windows Hyper-V VM which is inside your Windows host, it ends up needing to nest.