Qualcomm

In theory. This up to the manufacturers and they're not doing that, so it's quite different from non-ARM laptops, where this is basically standardized. It's not necessarily any better on Windows. I've worked with Qualcomm based laptops that wouldn't work without a bespoke Windows image from the manufacturer. I also had one where the "generic" ARM Windows image wouldn't work with it even though it should've and the manufacturer never provided a bespoke image.

Hopefully it will make Qualcomm behave more like Arduino and not the opposite. Qualcomm is one of the worse companies I have had the pleasure to work with. Their support model is hellish and they provide very little information and documentation, so usually you’ll end up doing a lot of guessing and reverse engineering. They will tell you to sign a contract with one of their “design partners”, but even they can’t get answers for basic questions. Seriously, if they want more small cap companies working with them they have to treat them better, I worked with them as a small company and as a larger company and in both cases their support was basically non existent even if we were buying chips from them for more than 10m$ a year.

Arguably, any system that uses a Qualcomm SoC is not secure: either they do it on purpose, or they truly are incompetent, or it is a mix of both. No Qualcomm phone I've ever owned I've been truly happy with from the SoC SDK perspective (makes the job of community ROMs a thousand times harder). I do consider the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro secure, however. It doesn't use Qualcomm, and the broadband SoC is an isolated part. Allwinner and Rockchip do not have the security nightmare track record that Qualcomm does. They also ship with Postmarket instead of an Android that isn't security focused, which is nice. The only problem with Allwinner and Rockchip is they are both Chinese companies that may be tampered with by the Chinese government. Qualcomm and Mediatek just have a record, today, of security flaw after security flaw. The new Samsung-made SoCs in the new Pixels are also an interesting choice. They do not use the Samsung TPM, instead opting for Google's newest version of the Titan TPM. Shortly after the Pixel 6 came out, Google Project Zero issued a story about the Samsung TPM having security issues. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

You need more than bootloaders. You need drivers compatible with somewhat maintained kernels too. My phone's bootloader is unlocked and if I fix my broken USB port I could flash any Linux system onto it, but Linux has no drivers for most of the phone's hardware. The WiFi and Bluetooth probably won't work and the GPU probably won't be doing anything useful and the camera or fingerprint scanner will never in a million years perform like they do on Android. You can't really continuously operate a smartphone without disconnecting the battery or it will swell up and die. Doing so with this phone will require careful removal of both the screen and the back plate with heated pads, suction cups, spudgers, and lots of tiny screws. I may one day get around to replacing the battery and bad USB board, but if I do so it'll take at least a day of YouTube-guided work, maybe more. Then I'm still stuck with an outdated version of Android or an unofficial LineageOS fork by Some Guy because projects like postmarketOS have so far given up on my device (one maintainer broke their phone, the other gave up "for their sanity"). Until parties like Qualcom start working with the Linux kernel instead of against it, and Apple opens up their bootloaders, I don't expect these devices to be usable for anyone for the next couple of years. It sounds quite enticing to have an ARM cluster of relatively quick trashed phones, but the work you need to put into each phone separately to get it to work just isn't wo…

Unfortunately my memories of Qualcomm devices and technologies are a bit less fond. At least when I was using Android devices, their CPU and GPU performance was always lagging, sometimes quite heavily, behind competitors. As far as I know, the main selling point was always the baseband part of their SoC designs, not the application processor. (Having both in a single SoC supposedly can save a lot of power and definitely does save money in many low and mid range phone designs.) Their proprietary CDMA standards have been a source of frustration as a GSM phone user when traveling to some countries (although CDMA at the time seemed very innovative and was available before UMTS) as well.

Does it matter if the main difference is the OS? Chromebooks are way worse spec wise, and they’re still “phones with big screens” and a different OS. If someone made a windows laptop that was actually good without compromises in an ARM SoC, I’m sure it’d sell well too. The Qualcomm ones seem to have too many compromises today with the OS/driver layer unfortunately.

Hardware has already been out for a year. Outside a custom spin by the ubuntu folks, even last years notebooks arent well supported out of the box on linux. I have a Yoga Slim 7x and I tried the Ubuntu spin out at some point - it required me to first extract the firmware from the Windows partition because Qualcomm had not upstreamed it into linux-firmware. Hard to take Qualcomm seriously when the situation is like this.

Previous Qualcomm laptops have been very expensive unfortunately.

>with the latest Ryzen is faster and gets similar battery life than the M1 or M2, so I wouldn't call x86 dead yet. Mind you, even "as fast as M1" would look amazing compared to Qualcomm's mediocre chips. Those who talk of ARM superiority forgot that if you don't buy an Apple device, what you get is mediocrity. And that's just talking of CPU performance. If you need a real GPU, those qualcomm SOC drop from "bearable" to "absolute garbage". While the M1 and M2 have GPUs that are comparable to some of NVIDIA's mid range offerings. ARM based windows PCs aren't really going to supplant x86 as long as Qualcomm doesn't put a real effort. Qualcomm is also one of the manufacturers that makes it impossible for Android to be supported for as long as iOS. Closed drivers + no will to do long term support because they're happy to sell more e-waste = drivers won't work on newer linux kernels and what remains is a brick.

> Why would you out that? Why? There is not a single human being that could be trusted with that Wait till you hear about how modern Qualcomm chips (your phone runs one unless it is cheap or an iphone) will boot anything signed with a special Qualcomm key

Your critics are more applicable to the similar robotics kits of NVIDIA and Qualcomm, which range from a little overpriced to extremely overpriced, in comparison with their alternatives like single-board computers with ARM chips from Rockchip or the like, small computers with Jasper Lake or even with cheaper Tiger Lake models, NUC-like computers with Intel or AMD CPUs, or bargain laptops (all these are under $500, while the ARM or Jasper Lake/Elkhart Lake systems are under $300, with many slower ARM SBCs under $100; the NVIDIA and Qualcomm kits range from $400 to $2000). These kits from AMD Xilinx, i.e. Kria KV260 and Kria KR260, are very cheap in comparison with the other development systems that include an FPGA so powerful. Their main defect is that Xilinx makes extremely few of them, so if you want to buy one you might have to wait many months or even years. For projects that would not benefit much from a FPGA, a cheaper SBC or even just a microcontroller board of $10 or $20 would be a better choice. However, if you have a clever idea that could be implemented with an FPGA, these new development kits are better than most FPGA boards that have been available previously. Their main alternative are various boards with Xilinx Artix-7 FPGAs. There are boards in the same price range of a few hundred $, with FPGAs of similar size to those of the Kria kits. However the older Artix-7 FPGAs are significantly slower than the UltraScale+ used in the Kria kits, and they also do not hav…

It's a nice theory but I think it's the integrated Qualcomm modem that lets them peddle their rather mediocre ARM processors and GPU.