Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

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 ;-)

How's the compatibility? Are there any apps that don't work that are critical?

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.

That’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.

Because Apple controls verything vs Windows/Linux world where hundres (thouthands?) of OEM create things?

I agree with you on the Windows side.

Linux is different. Decades of being tied to x86 made the OS way more coupled with the processor family than one might think.

Decades of bugfixes, optimizations and workarounds were made assuming a standard BIOS and ACPI standards.

Specially on the desktop side.

That, and the fact that SoC vendors are decades behind on driver quality. They remind me of the NDiswrapper era.

Also, a personal theory I have is that have unfair expectations with ARM Linux. Back then, when x86 Linux had similar compatibility problems, there was nothing to be compared with, so people just accepted that Linux was going to be a pain and that was it.

Now the bar is higher. People expect Linux to work the way it does in x86, in 2025.

And manpower in FOSS is always limited.