Qualcomm Snapdragon

Can't wait for it to be complete trash in Windows and continue to suffer the same issues I've had with every snap dragon powered windows machine including the devbox 2023. GPU driver will crash under heavy web rendering loads (twitter gif heavy threads), It will probably be undercooled causing P cores to be kneecapped push applications to the E cores as soon as it warms up, and never let them go back. Although I will note the MS ARM devbox at least was adequately cooled, if poorly vented so this was a rare occasion. On top of that linux support will be non-existent leaving you to struggle as microsoft's most underserved user population. Good luck anyone who makes the dive, even as an ARM enthusiast I gave up on qualcomm products as a whole.

Qualcomm has been "on track" with desktop level chips based on their mobile platforms for at least four years. I've tested the first Windows on Arm laptop with a series 8 "desktop" Snapdragon in 2018. Yet, they still have to ship anything meaningful. They lake the vertical integration Apple has, and they will never have it. Hard for me to see how competitors (Qualcomm + Microsoft + OEMs) are supposed to go after Apple in this area, considering how incapable they are at working together in a productive way.

It's horrifying that anyone takes Qualcomm seriously after their long history of broken promises. Remember the Snapdragon Insider phone that was almost instantly abandoned? I think it never even got a single major release update. They took everything that was open about Atheros WiFi and closed-sourced it by putting everything into binary blobs. Most of the laptops from the last year or two are still not usable. Audio and webcams will almost certainly never be fully supported, or even supported well enough to be usable.

You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now. I sure as hell hope that if Qualcomm even comes close to parity with other platforms they change their name because I'm going to have a hard time associated Snapdragon and their other products with anything that is quality. So far these are for desktop CPUs what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant is for cars. On the other hand, Intel is doing everything it can to keep the x86 platform from advancing which will let even the laggards catch up.

I feel like such initiatives miss one obvious target - the well heeled tech savvy user (who quite often is also privacy minded) and wants the latest. At the price point they are selling a Snapdragon 7 device, I can get a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone from the market quite easily. Now I am happy to pay more because of what they stand for but I don't see them selling a model that features the latest and greatest + the privacy focus. Surely the latest hardware and privacy/environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive. I change my phone every 4-5 years on average so I try to not contribute to the landfills but I do want the latest when I buy.

That table doesn't have the Snapdragon 810 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/smartpho... I worked on it in 2014. The table does have 808 listed. That may have been a lower end version. Qualcomm got caught being late. They were continuing development of custom 32-bit cores and Apple came out with a 64-bit ARM core in the iPhone. The Chief Marketing Officer of Qualcomm called it a gimmick but Apple was a huge customer of Qualcomm's modems. Qualcomm shoved him off to the side for a while. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/qualcomm-gambit-apple-64-bi... Because Q's custom 64-bit CPU was not ready the stop gap plan was to license a 64-bit RTL design from ARM and use that in the 810. It also had overheating problems but that's different issue. There were a lot of internal politics going on at Q over the custom cores and server chips that ended up in layoffs.

For me that list looks not that good compared to Asahi Linux for M1. No GPU, no camera, no suspend/resume.... I won't be spending my money on that platform until that sorted out. And judging from the other ARM platforms that means most likely never. Over-hyped and under-delivered.

"I'm hopeful for Microsoft's future on ARM, but either Qualcomm needs to get their act together, or Microsoft needs to pour money into some other chipmaker to optimize for Windows. Otherwise, the vast gulf between ARM SBCs on the low end and Apple's custom Silicon on the high end will persist." Part of it is... what on earth is Qualcomm thinking with their pricing? Every PC that has had a Windows on ARM processor is priced like a premium machine, while running slower than the competition from Apple, Intel, and AMD (though Project Volterra is the best value by far, so far). It's like Qualcomm has decided that high-end Snapdragon parts may only appear in $1000+ devices, perhaps to prevent people from asking questions about the cost of their chips in phones. (If a Snapdragon Gen 8 appeared in a $500 laptop, why couldn't it be in a $500 smartphone? Especially important, because of legal filings, Qualcomm uses the total sale price of the device for some royalty calculations IIRC.)

Comparing this to a M1 is weird I'd compare it more to a Raspberry PI, a toy, not powerful enough to to meaningful things With a mac mini you can edit raw photos, 8k videos and master some audio What can you do with a snapdragon on Windows 11 ARM? nothing I guess it's modern journalism

Im shocked Qualcomm has done basically nothing with their existing "laptop class" chip, like the 7c and 8c, announced end of 2018, based off the a76 announced that spring. I was skeptical & the initial chips landed at my low expecation level, but I at least thought they'd get better. Tacking on another hundred mhz to nearly the same chip every now and then... thay is not what i expected. From thr outside perspective this looks like baffling non-delivery, utter unwillingness to try to compete. Three years latter & the offering is effectively unchanged. By compare, MediaTek started slow, but was cheap, and they've gotten faster & faster. Respectable bottom up disruption.

My current phone is also an S20 FE (SD865). Comparing it to my previous phone, a Oneplus 6 (SD845), both get almost identical amounts of screen-on time while browsing the web at 150 nits, despite the S20 FE having a 4500mAh battery and the OP6 a 3300mAh battery. The SD835/845 era was a high water mark for performance per watt and so far the situation is only getting worse. The 888 and 8 gen 1 are both hot power hogs and the exynos 2200 is a garbage fire.

The oneplus 9 has a SD888 and a 4500mAh battery. Its websurfing test was 14 hours. Seven percent longer surfing than the OP6 with a 36% larger battery. The SD888 is a bad chip. All evidence points to the 8 gen 1 as also being a bad chip. Qualcomm's only saving grace is that the Exynos 2200 isn't a bad chip; it's an atrocious chip.

Not even close. TSMC 10nm wafer $6,000 TSMC N7 wafer $9,000 TSMC N5 wafer $17,000 TSMC N3 wafer $20,000+ (exact pricing not public) Cutting core size and saving just a few mm^2 per chip means a few more chips per wafer which is critical to the bottom line given the radical price increases for each node. The only company this doesn't seem to be particularly true for is Apple. Apple has 2 large, high-performance cores, 4 relatively large efficiency cores (around A78 performance levels), a large GPU, and a whopping 32MB of SLC (system level cache). Meanwhile, Qualcomm's just released Snapdragon has ONE high-performance core (that is still smaller than Apple's performance cores) and 3 "medium" cores that are only a bit better than Apple's efficiency cores with a smaller GPU and a tiny 6MB SLC. Qualcomm has been so desperate to lower wafer/chip costs that they even moved to a terrible Samsung process. The only specialized units are HIGHLY specialized. They are fixed function (or near fixed function) video decoders or ML units and none of these actually add very much die area. GPUs have actually moved heavily toward general purpose computing (GP-GPU) specifically so they could reuse the die area for other non-graphics things.

The Pixel 2 era 820s-830s especially seemed fairly throttle heavy. There's better APIs for sustained power modes now, although I'm not sure VM would use them.