ARM-based laptops

[Aaron44126]

After seeing it hyped up for a few months now, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SOC is starting to show up in laptops.  There were many announcements today, and these systems will start shipping next month.

 

Microsoft Surface Laptop and Surface Pro

https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2024/05/20/introducing-the-ultimate-copilot-pcs-the-all-new-surface-pro-and-surface-laptop/

 

Dell XPS 13 and Inspiron 14 / 14 Plus, and some Latitude systems

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160859/dell-qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-plus-xps-laptops

 

More coming, from Acer, HP, Lenovo

https://www.pcmag.com/news/meet-the-snapdragon-x-elite-starting-lineup-from-acer-dell-hp-and-lenovo

 

Interested to see some real-world performance tests.  These are obviously mid-range systems and not trying (yet?) to replace high-performance systems like mobile workstations, high-end gaming systems, or what passes for DTRs these days.  Still, they show competitive single-threaded performance against Intel Core 7 Ultra and Apple M3, while boasting efficiency and battery life closer to what one would expect from the MacBook Air.

 

There's a lot on the technical side that I'm interested to see how it unfolds:

• These systems will all be running Windows on ARM, which has until now been pretty uncommon to see "in the wild".
• Will Microsoft relax their failed attempt to control the Windows ARM ecosystem and start allowing, say, ISO downloads so users can do a self-install?
• Emulation of x86/x64 apps on ARM Windows is not in terrible state, but how many software makers will start offering native ARM builds of their software for best performance?
  • Both Chrome and Opera shipped ARM-based versions of their browsers for the first time in the past few weeks.  ...I've been running the ARM Windows Firefox build in a VM for almost a year.
• Qualcomm says these things are decent at gaming.  Well, eh, that's a stretch.  They have a demo of Control being played at 1080p/30FPS.  (You can play it on a high-spec MacBook Pro — that is, also an ARM system — through CrossOver, at 1440p/60.)  But, more and more games are leveraging AVX instructions and requiring CPUs that support them.  Microsoft doesn't support AVX in their emulation layer (yet?), so such games have no hope at all of running on ARM systems.
  • Will game devs relax this requirement and offer builds that work without AVX, or ARM-specific builds?  Or will Microsoft add AVX support to their emulation layer?  Or will gamers who want to play on the go just have to navigate a confusing compatibility landscape?
• Similarly, low-level software that integrates with the kernel (anti-cheat, security software, backup software, etc.) won't work through the emulation layer and needs an actual ARM build.  Haven't seen much traction in this area yet, but that seems likely to change as ARM laptops start being dumped out onto the market over the next few months, including in business settings.
• Will anyone besides Qualcomm make ARM SOCs to try to compete in this space?  There have been rumors that both NVIDIA and AMD are interested in launching SOCs to run ARM-based Windows in the next year or two.  NVIDIA has had some success with their ARM-based Tegra SOC (see: Nintendo Switch).
  • Will anyone target the high-performance space?  (Qualcomm's marketing material shows how well their SOC holds up against Apple M3, but doesn't mention M3 Pro or M3 Max.)
  • If there's real competition here, will Intel even be able to keep up, if it becomes clear that you get a "better laptop experience" on a non-Intel system?  (Thinking about things like the noise, heat, and battery life that you experience for the same level of performance.)  We may well have a situation where it is rare to see Intel-based laptops by like 2030 (at least for low & mid-range systems).

[saturnotaku]

The first company that engineers the following laptop can shut up and take my money: An SoC that provides 1080p/60 fps gameplay for ~4 hours on battery while being the size/weight of a MacBook Air. Silent like a MacBook Air would be amazing but not absolutely mandatory.

[Sandy Bridge]

The "how good is the emulation/can I game on it" are key for me.  A more efficient processor with better battery life?  I'll pay a little bit.  Less noise?  Useful in a laptop.  But perfect compatibility with my existing library of software and games?  Priceless.  And x86 is perfectly good enough when it comes to battery life and (with a halfway decent laptop design) fan noise these days.  We aren't in the days of the Transmeta Crusoe where the status quo in the x86 space left a lot to be desired across the board - you can buy x86 systems with quite good battery life and acoustics.

 

That said, if the emulation is good enough that the average person can't tell the difference, and can just install the programs they need without realizing it isn't an x86 CPU, Qualcomm has a chance to build market share.  That being the "if".  It needs to be good enough that retailers aren't getting a lot of returned ARM-based laptops because people tried to install the two pieces of native software they need (browser + varies by person) and couldn't get it to work.  If they can manage that, they might succeed at least among the non-gaming crowd (the latter likely being more skeptical than the public at large due to running lots of performance-sensitive native software).

 

I'm still skeptical on the whole.  The safe, conservative option is to buy an Intel or AMD laptop, and most buyers will want a low-risk option.  Most salespeople will recommend a low-risk option that they think will make a sale, unless their commission is higher on the higher-risk option.  Windows dropped the DEC Alpha and MIPS in the '90s, Transmeta and Via never became more than niche players (despite being x86-compatible and x86, respectively), and Windows 8 on ARM flopped.  ARM in the datacenter, if you just need to run NGINX and want to save on your power bill, can make sense.  But there's a long history in the consumer space of the consumer preferring the safe option that will run everything they run today without any concerns on their part.

[Aaron44126]

12 hours ago, Sandy Bridge said:

The "how good is the emulation/can I game on it" are key for me.

 

Having been using Windows 11 ARM for almost a year now (in a VM, but with regularity) I can say that the emulation of x86/x64 software is "fine".  You don't really have to even know what's going on, it "just works".  Everything these days is done with dynamic recompilation — it will take a chunk of x86/x64 code and convert it to ARM code for execution, and keep that cached for future runs through the same code — so performance is pretty decent.  I'm sure it could be made better.  (Microsoft is touting that with Windows 11 24H2 you can get an up to 20% boost in performance for emulated apps for example, probably done by making their recompiler smarter.)

 

There are some gotchas.

• Software that installs a driver (.sys file) will not work unless said driver is compiled for ARM.  That could be device drivers, obviously, but it could also be other low-level software like antivirus/firewall apps, disk/backup utilities, or even multiplayer games that use kernel-mode anti-cheat protection.
• Software that uses AVX instructions will not run on ARM systems.  That includes a number of newer "AAA" games, it's becoming pretty common to see there.  AVX has been supported in Intel CPUs since 4th gen (2013) but Microsoft is not supporting translation of these instructions in their Prism recompiler.  It could have been excluded for performance reasons — ARM didn't even support vector instructions until ARMv9, which is pretty new and would be limited to newer Snapdragon chips from 2022 and up or the Apple M4 lineup.  But I think that more likely, it is excluded for IP/patent reasons.

Since I wrote this, a couple of other interesting things have happened.

• NVIDIA gave a tease about offering their own ARM platform next year.  It probably won't be just Qualcomm offering these soon.
• Windows 11 LTSC has dropped and there is an ARM64 build... which I have already switched my VM over to.  (But, there was an ARM64 build of Windows 10 LTSC 2021 as well, that I just somehow didn't know about.)

Anyway, I think there's a real chance that there will be a surge in Windows ARM systems within the next few years and that market segment will become impossible to ignore for software developers.  They will have to start offering ARM support for things like anti-virus and backup tools, and make sure that there are AVX-free code paths in games even if the performance is a bit lower (if they don't want to offer a full ARM build).

 

On the subject of games, that's one area where I think Qualcomm still needs to do major work.  They are touting their system as gaming-capable, but performance is middling as I mentioned above (Control running at 1080p/30FPS/low settings should not be touted as a massive success).  But it is not like an ARM system can't game — Qualcomm just doesn't have the GPU up to snuff yet or hasn't bothered to build a truly high-performance chip there.

 

Apple’s (admittedly expensive) "Max" chips smoke Qualcomm’s in terms of GPU performance.  You can see on YouTube that Mac users have shown Control running at 1440p/60FPS — effectively quadruple the performance that Qualcomm is touting.  On my end personally, I just started Horizon Zero Dawn on my MacBook Pro a few days ago.  And it's not just "sort of working"; it is actually a really good experience.  I'm running at 1510p resolution at "original" (medium) graphics settings, it looks great and is running at completely smooth 60 FPS.  And it’s not even a native port.  That's a Windows (x64) build of the game running on CrossOver and being translated to ARM through Rosetta 2, and using Apple's D3DMetal to handle graphics conversion.  (I can also get 60 FPS with "high" graphics settings at 1080p, but I prefer the higher resolution…)  This is running on the same system that I left unplugged and powered on for 13 hours yesterday and the battery level was still at 70%!  (It was not being actively used a lot, but never actually "sleeping", I have disabled the sleep function so that I can access it remotely whenever I need to.)

 

The Dell Precision systems that I have can't make it more than 3 or 4 hours away from the charger even if they are running idle.  I know there are better battery laptops out there but I'm not aware of any that can also do hard-core gaming.  I don't know if Qualcomm has plans to roll out higher-end chips, but I hope that Qualcomm or NVIDIA or someone makes a decent high-performing but otherwise high-battery low-heat/noise non-Mac laptop finally possible.

[Bullit]

First reviews arriving

 

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/asus-vivobook-s-15-snapdragon-x-elite-review

 

German, use your browser translation.

https://www.computerbase.de/2024-06/windows-11-arm-snapdragon-x-elite-test/4/#abschnitt_fazit

 

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/asus-vivobook-s-15-copilot-pc-review

[Bullit]

Single core performance seems to not be on par with Apple M3

[Aaron44126]

I saw something similar on another model a couple of days ago. Seems like Microsoft and Qualcomm maybe over-promised a bit…

 

(Never mind M4, currently only available in iPads until the fall, but which seems to kick single-thread performance up another notch yet, beating Intel’s flagship *desktop* chip? https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apple-m4-scores-suggest-it-is-the-new-single-core-performance-champ-beating-intels-core-i9-14900ks-incredible-results-of-3800-posted)

[Bullit]

For now the review are positive, but there is a hole in apps and GPU is inferior to gaming.  It is curious how the reviewers are not very good. One of the things i would do right a way is to test with Da Vinci Resolve video editor which has native support, but not one i have seen touch it, they spend time with non native Premiere...

[Bullit]

German https://www.notebookcheck.com/Asus-Vivobook-S-15-OLED-im-Test-Mit-dem-Snapdragon-X-Elite-in-ein-neues-Notebook-Zeitalter.847338.0.html

 

I would say in this more in depth review is a disappointment instead including the Vivobook itself with a 240hz PMW OLED with high reflections .  Noise on par with Windows, battery not better than an LG Gram and others laptops that push for lasting battery.

[Aaron44126]

Eh.  I knew about the GPU being meh (complained about it in a post above).  You might be able to play current-ish games ... if you are OK with 1080p / 30 FPS / low settings.  But the main disappointment is that it doesn't seem to hold up in terms of power efficiency / battery life / low noise.  They really touted how favorably these systems compare against M3 MacBook Air in the press bonanza last month, but it is not looking like those claims really hold up.  And if you can't even beat x86 systems in these areas, then why would someone buy one of these — with potential compatibility issues, but no "upside" to balance that out?

 

There's also the stink in the air regarding Microsoft's attempted rollout of the "Recall" feature.  I can't understand... how they were not able to foresee what the reaction to that would be like?  And why do they have this tiered system for testing new features (canary/dev/release preview Insider builds) and then just push something like this through with an announcement just a few weeks away from launch, without going through the process?

 

Anyway, I'm interested to see some reviews of the business models (from Dell, HP, Lenovo).  If I run into any of these systems, it will be one of those.  I will try to poke around and see if there is anything out yet sometime today.

Wonder if anyone else can do better.

In addition to NVIDIA, it looks like MediaTek is going to get into the game next year, plus there have been rumors in the past about AMD being interested in launching ARM systems.

 

(Qualcomm has also made comments about wanting to push into the desktop space.)

[Papusan]

 

 

[Bullit]

https://www.ultrabookreview.com/68896-asus-vivobook-s-15-review/comment-page-1/

[Bullit]

A positive review for Surface 7 ARM from perspective of office job.

 

https://www.thurrott.com/forums/microsoft/windows/thread/surface-laptop-7-first-day-of-work-impression

 

A positive Surface Pro X Elite OLED

https://www.thurrott.com/forums/microsoft/windows/thread/surface-pro-x-elite-oled

 

This also lead me to think there is a strategy going on of putting nice OLED screens in ARM laptops to help adoption.

[saturnotaku]

I'm intrigued by the Surface Pro 11, but it would have to be a few hundred bucks cheaper for me to consider it.

[Bullit]

Yeah, too expensive.

[jeamn]

6 hours ago, Bullit said:

Yeah, too expensive.

 

Don't forget to purchase the $400 keyboard.  lol

 

I'm still intrigued with Snapdragon as a platform option.  They certainly dropped their chip right into the middle of it.  It's not the best at everything, but it did deliver for multi-core CPU performance.  And honestly, the M1 launch was similar too.  Apple cherry picked a bunch of benchmarks that skewed their way and ran with it, just like Qualcomm did.  

 

Like @Aaron44126, i'm waiting to see what Lenovo and Dell come up with for business laptops, maybe even paired with an Nvidia chip for the GPU.    And Linux compatibility. 😀    Although I'm actually a bit surprised that Lenovo and Dell got on board so quickly.  It seemed that it took quite some time for them to get on board with AMD CPUs.

[Aaron44126]

12 minutes ago, jeamn said:

Although I'm actually a bit surprised that Lenovo and Dell got on board so quickly.  It seemed that it took quite some time for them to get on board with AMD CPUs

 

I think there is recognition that, if Qualcomm is able to offer a platform that offers a MacBook Air-like laptop experience (respectable performance + great battery life + low heat/noise), then that's not something you want to let your competitors be ahead on.  I wonder if Qualcomm had an "internal marketing blitz" to try and get OEMs onboard, similar to what we have seen from them and Microsoft when these were publicly announced in May.

 

For the moment, I haven't heard about one of these being offered with a discrete GPU.  However, I already mentioned that NVIDIA is strongly hinting about launching their own ARM SOCs for Windows laptops in 2025, and they also appear to be partnered with Dell in that effort.

[jeamn]

8 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

For the moment, I haven't heard about one of these being offered with a discrete GPU.  However, I already mentioned that NVIDIA is strongly hinting about launching their own ARM SOCs for Windows laptops in 2025, and they also appear to be partnered with Dell in that effort.

 

This is something I *am* excited about.  I think NVIDIA has really rested on its laurels for low power/efficiency with its GPUs.   It's hard to believe that NVIDIA couldn't have implemented sleep states or C states or similar in any of its laptop GPUs, allowing them to remain active while in lower power mode and eliminating the need for Optimus altogether. It managed that just fine with the Nintendo Switch.

 

Optimus style switching isn't going to be a viable option for NPUs.  Nobody is going to want to manage Optimus or other GPU switching tech to spin up their discrete GPU in order for Copilot to answer a question.   It's going to have to be always on, quickly accessible and extremely low power to manage battery.  Especially if Recall is snapping a picture every few seconds.

 

It's crazy, but MS launched a whole AI platform and didn't invite NVIDIA to the premiere.  

[Aaron44126]

Read impressions on the Surface Laptop 7 which seems to fare better than the Asus Vivobook.

• Benchmark results are mixed.  Surface Laptop 7 beats MacBook Air M3 in multi-core Geekbench and Cinebench.  (You could argue the comparison isn't quite fair since MacBook Air does not have active cooling but Surface Laptop does.  I didn't see any comparison against the MacBook Pro 14" with M3, which does have active cooling.)  MacBook Air M3 wins in single-core Geekbench and Cinebench, though.
  • ...Sounds like The Verge is going to do another piece specifically focused on benchmark comparisons, so more to come soon.
• Battery life seems quite good, actually, easily meeting the "all day" claim if you aren't running an intense load.
• The "translation layer" in Windows 11 to run x86/x64 software seems to be hit-or-miss.  Lightweight apps seem to work fine (which has also been my experience with Windows 11 ARM), but the article mentions Adobe Premiere really struggling to run.  The system also struggled with a number of games, and by that I'm not just referring to performance, but the fact that they just don't quite work right running under Prism (crashing, limited options for resolution, ...).  I don't think they've caught up to Apple here yet.  Also, some apps like Google Drive refuse to run at all.  Blender can't "see" the Qualcomm GPU so it falls back to CPU rendering.  Anything that needs a "driver" (VPN apps, security apps, backup apps, ...) will definitely not work unless there is an ARM version available, and that kind of support is still quite spotty.
• Still, there are now ARM64 builds of all major browsers, and many productivity apps like MS Office and Photoshop.  Some other apps mentioned here (Premiere and Blender) have ARM64 builds in development.  Depending on your use case, you may be able to run an all-ARM software stack, if not now then "soon", which would make this system pretty fine to use.  This situation should only improve over time, if ARM-based laptops are finally here to stay...

[Bullit]

Quote

Loud and hot under load

 

The new Surface Pro 11 with the Qualcomm SoC continues to be equipped with a fan. In idle use, and when running simple, everyday tasks, it generally remains off and there is only quiet noise that we measured to be 25 dB(A). Under load, it depends on whether the GPU or CPU are taxed. In native apps, under pure GPU load, the device also remains at 25 dB(A) but as soon as you stress the processor, it quickly gets loud. Under pure CPU load, we measured 39 dB(A) and this was also the case when gaming. The stress test with combined CPU/GPU load even hit a loud 44.8 dB(A). In both of the other profiles, the device remained a little quieter (Better Performance: max. 40.2 dB(A), Recommended: 37.8 dB(A)). Our review device showed no signs of any other electronic noises. 

All in all, this makes the new ARM model even louder than the Intel variant of the Surface Pro 9 and, of course, disadvantaged compared to the passively-cooled ARM variant of the Surface Pro 9.

 

It is impressive how hardware manufacturers shoot themselves in their feet trying to get performance from a CPU that is only good for Office.

 

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-OLED-Copilot-review-A-high-end-2-in-1-now-with-the-Snapdragon-X-Elite.853756.0.html

[Bullit]

https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-EliteBook-Ultra-G1q-14-laptop-review-High-expectations-for-Windows-on-ARM.850291.0.html

 

Quote

Many of the shortcomings of the EliteBook Ultra G1q 14 could have been forgiven had it launched for a much lower starting price than the competition. Unfortunately, it costs about the same while offering no major advantages when it comes to performance or features.

 

[axiom49]

Here is a review of the ASUS Vivobook S15 with Snapdragon X Elite:

 

 

[Aaron44126]

On 6/25/2024 at 12:18 PM, Aaron44126 said:

...Sounds like The Verge is going to do another piece specifically focused on benchmark comparisons, so more to come soon.

 

https://www.theverge.com/24191671/copilot-plus-pcs-laptops-qualcomm-intel-amd-apple

 

Nothing surprising...

 

Snapdragon X Elite holds its own against most of the competition in both single-core and multi-core Geekbench and Cinebench, beating every Intel Core Ultra 7 system tested here.  It is not able to beat Apple M3 in single-core (as already shown).  This is the first comparison I have seen that includes Apple's higher-end chips, M2 Max and M3 Max, which both win out against the Snapdragon in multi-core tests.  M3 Max gets almost 50% higher performance in Geekbench and almost 75% higher in Cinebench.  Not a fair comparison, sure, since "Max" systems cost a fair bit more than the Snapdragon systems.  I don't see any high-end 55W Intel "HX" CPUs in the performance comparison.

 

GPU performance is totally meh.  I mean, I guess it could be worse, but both AMD and Intel integrated graphics are markedly better than the Qualcomm integrated GPU.  Never mind pitting it against M2/M3 Max or any system with even a low-end discrete GPU.

 

There's also a test comparing Blender running a CPU-heavy job and comparing the performance of it running natively or via x86 emulation.  Looks like emulation via Prism gets you about a 40% performance penalty.  I've seen similar benchmarks of apps running on macOS under Rosetta 2 that show only a ≈25% loss in performance compared to running native, so I think Microsoft still has some work to do here as well.

[saturnotaku]

LTT doing LTT things

 

 

 

[Bullit]

On 7/5/2024 at 2:41 PM, Aaron44126 said:

 

https://www.theverge.com/24191671/copilot-plus-pcs-laptops-qualcomm-intel-amd-apple

 

Nothing surprising...

 

Snapdragon X Elite holds its own against most of the competition in both single-core and multi-core Geekbench and Cinebench, beating every Intel Core Ultra 7 system tested here.  It is not able to beat Apple M3 in single-core (as already shown).  This is the first comparison I have seen that includes Apple's higher-end chips, M2 Max and M3 Max, which both win out against the Snapdragon in multi-core tests.  M3 Max gets almost 50% higher performance in Geekbench and almost 75% higher in Cinebench.  Not a fair comparison, sure, since "Max" systems cost a fair bit more than the Snapdragon systems.  I don't see any high-end 55W Intel "HX" CPUs in the performance comparison.

 

GPU performance is totally meh.  I mean, I guess it could be worse, but both AMD and Intel integrated graphics are markedly better than the Qualcomm integrated GPU.  Never mind pitting it against M2/M3 Max or any system with even a low-end discrete GPU.

 

There's also a test comparing Blender running a CPU-heavy job and comparing the performance of it running natively or via x86 emulation.  Looks like emulation via Prism gets you about a 40% performance penalty.  I've seen similar benchmarks of apps running on macOS under Rosetta 2 that show only a ≈25% loss in performance compared to running native, so I think Microsoft still has some work to do here as well.

 Note that no one makes renders in Blender with CPU. It is highly inefficient and slow.

 

2X AMD EPYC 9754 128-Core Processor   4300 score   360w TDP each

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU

5242.41 score