Qualcomm to Take on Apple Silicon Chips With Snapdragon X Series for PCs

[Beautyspin]

Competition is good but without the vertical integration of hardware and software will this ever match Apple silicon power/efficiency?

If the PC industry is any proof, they will beat Apple handsomely. They do not need to beat Apple Silcon on performance. They just need to follow the PC industry and have better repairability and have more configurations. May be enable DIY PCs.
If they follow Apple model, Apple will win hands down.

 

[deconstruct60]

Does Microsoft provide support for “universal” binaries that run x86/ARM similar to Apple?

No. But Windows doesn't particuarly have "drag and drop" application installs either. If running an installer app to put the application on your system anyway then universal binaries don't really make a lot of sense. The installer can just put the right one on the right system. ( very similar to what Apple app store downloads do.. The modern version of that does have to haul down program components that don't run on that system. )

 

[deconstruct60]

Except that the next generation of Chromebooks uses x86, because Google wasn't happy with ARM. And MacOS has a market share of less than 10%, so that will hardly force anything.

That isn't the next generation of Chromebooks. That is a new Chromebook tier that Google is introducing. There are going to be more than several x86 models that do not make "Plus" labeling .

There are already existing Chromebooks that shipped earlier in the year that qualify for "Plus" updates.

Chromebook Plus is rolling out to certified devices right now: how to try it

We had official word arrive from Google this morning and are already hearing murmors of Chromebook Plus showing up for certified devices that happen to be in the Beta Channel of ChromeOS 118. As we highlighted previously, there are quite a few devices on the market already that qualify as...

chromeunboxed.com

x86 really isn't a metric over whether in/out of "Plus".

The floor for "Plus" isn't that 'high'.

" ... Chromebook Plus models are designed to offer superior performance and therefore are powered by at least a 12th Gen Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 7000 CPUs, ... "

Google's Chromebook Plus Program Targets Premium Laptop Space

Better specs, plus more AI integration, starting at $399

www.tomshardware.com

It is hard if trying to stuff a phone chip into service to cover those i3 / Ryzen 3 but shouldn't be a problem for Snapdragon X .

Pretty good chance some of the better Arm Chromebook offerings would get wiped out just as much due to the webcam and/or screen not making the cut as much as the SoC. Neither one of those is a SoC instruction set 'thing'.

 

[deconstruct60]

I'd love for this to succeed because I would love the ability to dual boot a macbook.

Apple is not supporting the boot environment nor 'bring up support services' to bring anything else but macOS

What Apple has is some hooks to let folks hack around for giggles with largely undocumented hardware. There is nothing that would qualify as commerical support there at all. Microsoft is highly unlikely to engage in a commercial enterprise where Apple is effectively saying no commercial enterprise zone there.

Windows on Arm running in a virual machine wll get better. But 'raw iron' native boot ... you shouldn't hold your breath. That is very likely not coming at all.

Qualcomm is taking a very different path in the boot context. They are following what Microsoft actually wants. [ not phones first. ]

 

[deconstruct60]

Yeah, but it doesn’t work well.
You won’t never be able to run Applications like CATIA, Nuke, Houdini, 3DSMax or Solidworks, nor AAA Games with full details and shading features.

That is an unjustified wide sweeping generatlization. There is nothing about Arm that stops that. Reportedly Qualcomm is putting in substantive work to provision interfaces to work with AMD/Nvidia CPUs. "never' is a really long time.

Nvidia has obviously got several of their GPUs working with their Arm chips.

 

[Reason077]

5G laptops have been already been on the market for a while and haven't exactly set the world on fire. Also, laptops don't have the same space and power constraints as phones, which means that using a separate 5G modem is not a significant issue, so there is not much benefit to integrating it in the CPU package.

Besides, most places you're going to use your laptop have WiFi, and if not, you can just hotspot off your phone. Who takes their laptop somewhere without their phone?

It's a very limited use-case, and having 5G in your laptop just means you're paying more money for another SIM!

 

[Reason077]

This time Apple chose better performance for its HW ray tracing among other things and to make A17 Pro a gaming chip to bring AAA games to iPhone with PC/console quality.

It will be exciting to see this new GPU arrive on Macs in the M3 series! I can't wait!

 

[Wildkraut]

That is an unjustified wide sweeping generatlization. There is nothing about Arm that stops that. Reportedly Qualcomm is putting in substantive work to provision interfaces to work with AMD/Nvidia CPUs. "never' is a really long time.

Nvidia has obviously got several of their GPUs working with their Arm chips.

Chicken and Egg problem here…

As long there is no widely available (sold en masse) hardware, no developer will start porting native software to it, and as long there is no software it won’t be sold en masse. Just like with Windows on ARM(Surface).

Apple was in a position to simply completely cancel the whole macOS future support for x86, and developers were forced to move on with Apple Silicon and start porting their software. Microsoft and Qualcomm aren’t in a such position like Apple, simply because they are two different companies with different goals and dependancies. It also won’t work out, because performant x86 arch from other companies will continue to exist and serve as an ARM(for PC) workaround.

Perhaps it could work out for the PC market in a very very long breathing transition, but since companies are mainly after quick profits and shareholder satisfaction, they won’t have the patience and resource's to wait that long.

NVIDIA‘s and AMD’s ARM efforts are server side ambition's, B2B works totally different than B2C.
Mobile Phones, Tablets or new product categories are also another story, here Qualcomm will continue to exist and serve well.

 

[Deep_learned_mistake]

This could be a precursor for the linux desktop. Perhaps a qualcom X chip and Elementary OS?

 

[Mother Nature]

Qualcomm already too close to Apple Silicon in terms of CPU and they already outperformed GPU with Gen 2 compared to A17 Pro. Gen 3 will be way better.

What happened to Apple in terms of chip development?

Laugh all you want cause that's the truth and fact: Qualcomm is now almost better than Apple Silicon on a same lithography and GPU already outperform Apple. Facts hurt you, huh?

Apple doesn't play by the numbers game. Optimization lets them achieve better results than the competition with higher numbers. It's true that Apple Sillicon seems to be slowing down with A17 Pro, but I think they'll make a comeback with the A18, in part because the competition is now reaching them in terms of performance and especially, efficiency.

 

[genzai]

Not gonna work out, simply because there is no Windows Software for it, no games, no x686 support for all kind of software. Also no NVIDIA or AMD Graphics, etc.

This is a very narrow and misinformed view. It may not work out in the end, but not for those reasons. Windows has, and has had an ARM build for a long time now- and much like Apple did, Microsoft could build a "Rosetta" like translation layer for early systems. The fact that Apple's ecosystem is already on ARM, and that many other popular platforms are ARM based (like the entire mobile app industry), making the transition to native ARM for windows develops is a possibility more in reach than ever. That may be the harder/slower part in the end, but getting native GPU drivers that support Windows on ARM for Nvidia and AMD could be relatively very fast/easy.

g\

 

[jdb8167]

Apple demonstrated you can run x86 code quite well on Arm with a little preprocessing. I'm sure Microsoft is capable of doing the same.

Right now the performance issue with Windows 11 on ARM x86 translation is that Microsoft can't take advantage of a hardware fix that Apple put in place for memory ordering on ARM to match what Intel/AMD use on their x86 processors. Apple added what they call Total Store Ordering or TSO mode to their CPUs. ARM CPUs normally have a more relaxed requirement for keeping memory consistent across read and writes. On the other hand, x86 has a more rigid ordering requirements that on an ARM CPU without TSO mode running x86 code, it has to use memory barriers to force the memory access to occur in the order that the program establishes when running on an out-of-order CPU (which is all modern CPUs). This is much slower than Apple's hardware solution.

I'd imagine that the new Qualcomm CPUs will include a TSO mode for running x86 emulated (translated) software.

 

[bobcomer]

What Windows PC user not want a ARM PC with 6G in the 2030s?

There would be no advantage to do that unless Windows on ARM gets a LOT more compatible. There's just no incentive to get there either.

 

[brio]

Is your pfp an nft?

How much?

No, I did it a few years back. Use it freely

 

[haunebu]

yea, i already saw it with my second gen arm Surface device..Please...no more. The only one who could do it its Microsoft itself but they are not into SoC game

That's using a standard ARM CPU core. It's not the custom core being designed by Gerard Williams and his team, i.e. the former Apple talent which is currently at Qualcomm. The forthcoming (first) product from Gerard's team is what this article is discussing.

 

[R2DHue]

No, I did it a few years back. Use it freely

btw, did you make any money? 💰

 

[KevinN206]

Microsoft themselves seemed to want it. It’s convenient to the other technological breaks they’re trying to make, like centralized control of drivers and moving away from Win32.

I think it’s more the classic issue of Microsoft misunderstanding what the market wants and needs. The market wants Arm and all the benefits. Microsoft’s business customers need all the terrible old software that big companies made in the 90s and will never update. Those two things are fundamentally opposed.

At my place, we still use modern engineering software that are not available on macOS.

 

[deconstruct60]

Chicken and Egg problem here…

As long there is no widely available (sold en masse) hardware, no developer will start porting native software to it, and as long there is no software it won’t be sold en masse. Just like with Windows on ARM(Surface).

Except that Windows on Arm has been around since before Apple released macOS on Arm. It is a slow rollout , but deep mischaracterization the has substantively started.

Firefox was on Windows on Arm back in 2019

Mozilla Releases Native ARM64 Firefox Browser For Snapdragon Windows 10 PCs, Get It Here

Mozilla announced today that it has released a beta of the native ARM64 version of its popular Firefox browser.

hothardware.com

Google is/was a stumbling block in part for reasons that have little to do with "not big enough market". Their dragging their feet hiccups into other browsers.

"... pretty much every other Chromium browser, except for Edge, uses Widevine, Google's DRM solution that's needed to run web apps like Netflix and other streaming services. Google isn't offering Widevine for Windows on Arm, so that's the roadblock. The browser would work, but those services wouldn't. ..."

Google is still the one holding back native browsers for Windows on Arm

We all know Google Chrome doesn't run natively on Windows on Arm, but it's another Google product that keeps other browsers from running.

www.xda-developers.com

Another part of the catch-22 was native VisualStudio , but Microsoft uncorked that also.

But there is a decent variety of apps ( including NetFlix , Adobe , etc. ) now.

Best native apps for Windows on Arm in 2023

Windows 11 devices running on Arm processors are becoming more common, and if you want to make the most of them, these are the apps to try.

www.xda-developers.com

Note also in that last link

" ... Thankfully, Microsoft introduced Arm64EC (emulation compatible), which allows developers to gradually transition portions of an app to Arm64 while keeping others using x64, without breaking compatibility. ..."

Again that is something that Apple threw out ( for better or worse). Either all x86 or all Arm Mac apps. Apple has more of a 'rip the bandages off quickly" approach. Microsoft it trying to keep hesistant folks happen to gradually ease their way into the pool.


This all has little to do with the context of the article I was responding to :

" Applications like CATIA, Nuke, Houdini, 3DSMax or Solidworks, ..."

Those are not mass market apps. ( And a couple of those are ported to Linux so more a matter of matching the underlying hardware focus than whether "mass market" or not. )

Apple was in a position to simply completely cancel the whole macOS future support for x86, and developers were forced to move on with Apple Silicon and start porting their software. Microsoft and Qualcomm aren’t in a such position like Apple, simply because they are two different companies with different goals and dependancies.

Not really. Some of it is Apple has less baggage. Microsoft had 100% control of moving the stack up to Visual Studio over and didn't. In part, it is keeping lots of legacy stuff around from VS that held them back. Similar to Microsoft devoting the bulk of their x86 emulation efforts solely into 32-bit Windows apps. Versus Apple just killing off all macOS 32-bit apps prior to the move to make it simpler. That isn't control of the Apple stack... that is tossing 3rd party apps into the trashcan to make their lives simpler.

It also won’t work out, because performant x86 arch from other companies will continue to exist and serve as an ARM(for PC) workaround.

Microsoft has around 85-90 of the PC market. If Windows on Arm peels off 15% the x86 part would still be 4-5x bigger than Apple Mac market. Vastly different market inerita problems. Apple has to move quicker. If the mac on Arm market is too small then it would have an even bigger problem than Windows on Arm. Window's slice of the pie is so much larger they could 'share' portions of it over two architectures with much less problems.

Perhaps it could work out for the PC market in a very very long breathing transition, but since companies are mainly after quick profits and shareholder satisfaction, they won’t have the patience and resource's to wait that long.

Again the list above of several apps show it isn't the big hurdle you are making it out to be. Folks have waited until the opportune time , but now the momentum has picked up over the last 2 years. VS port and a far more decent dev kit

Windows Dev Kit 2023

Powered by Arm64 and running Windows 11, this desktop device enables you to develop Windows apps for Arm, on Arm. Find device specifications, set up instructions, Arm-native developer tools, Support, and FAQs.

learn.microsoft.com

Imagine the macOS Arm migration if Apple tossed an AppleTV HD ( A8 Soc) to devs and said make some Mac software. It wouldn't have worked as well as the DevKit that Apple did ship.

 

[Homy]

Microsoft has around 85-90 of the PC market. If Windows on Arm peels off 15% the x86 part would still be 4-5x bigger than Apple Mac market. Vastly different market inerita problems. Apple has to move quicker. If the mac on Arm market is too small then it would have an even bigger problem than Windows on Arm. Window's slice of the pie is so much larger they could 'share' portions of it over two architectures with much less problems.

Windows has less than 70% global market share. In May it was as low as 62%. macOS has over 20%. Windows on ARM will still be smaller.

 

[deconstruct60]

Windows has less than 70% global market share. In May it was as low as 62%. macOS has over 20%. Windows on ARM will still be smaller.

from referenced link.

" ... A older version of macOS, Catalina, is currently the most popular macOS, now run on 87.4 percent of Apple computers as of January 2023. macOS runs on Apple’s Mac computers, including the MacBook, which is Apple’s laptop PC product including the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, and the iMac – Apple’s desktop computer. ..."

Catalina is x86 only.

These are stats for "desktop" PCs. If that is literally true then this isn't saying what you think it is.

 

[Homy]

from referenced link.

" ... A older version of macOS, Catalina, is currently the most popular macOS, now run on 87.4 percent of Apple computers as of January 2023. macOS runs on Apple’s Mac computers, including the MacBook, which is Apple’s laptop PC product including the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, and the iMac – Apple’s desktop computer. ..."

Catalina is x86 only.

These are stats for "desktop" PCs. If that is literally true then this isn't saying what you think it is.

You're right about my graphs not showing the macOS version but it appears the statistics about the versions are wrong. There is a disclaimer below the graph. There seems to be a bug that reports everything above Catalina as Catalina. After further research it seems that it's due to Apple's security measures to not report the macOS version in web browsers after Catalina. According to that graph only about 1.5% use Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura and Sonoma combined which is wrong. I'm on Monterey and tested this link but it says... surprise surprise Catalina!

 

[sack_peak]

You're right about my graphs not showing the macOS version but it appears the statistics about the version are wrong. There is a disclaimer below the graph. There seems to be a bug that reports everything above Catalina as Catalina. After further research it seems that it's due to Apple's security measures to not report the macOS version in web browsers after Catalina. According to that graph only about 1.5% use Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura and Sonoma combined which is wrong. I'm on Monterey and tested this link but it says... surprise surprise Catalina!

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Typical replacement cycle for computers

- 4 years: Apple
- 5-6 years: Intel
- 8 years: macOS EOL for 2017-2020 Intel Macs
- 9+ years: macOS EOL for pre-2017 Intel Macs
- 122 months: Windows EOL
- 11+ years: <8% 🇺🇳; <9% 🇺🇸; <5% 🇬🇧; <13% 🇮🇳; <8% 🇨🇦; <2% 🇦🇫; <0% 🇰🇵; <5% 🇨🇺

Most consumers, not Mac or PC nerds, rather replace the whole device than replace parts after a few years.

2019 macOS Catalina does not officially support hardware older than

- 2012 iMac
- 2012 MBP
- 2012 MBA
- 2013 MP
- 2015 MB

Final macOS Catalina Security Update was on Jul 2022.

 

[CarAnalogy]

At my place, we still use modern engineering software that are not available on macOS.

MacOS still seems to fall into exactly two categories at work. Either the entire workflow is built around it for audio/video production for software that requires it (this is becoming less common) or the IT staff / executives that can get away with it because really all they need is a web browser or other basic universal software. They also generally have access to a secondary windows machine and / or someone to use it for them.

Everyone else is still stuck with Windows due to decades of inertia Apple gave trying to seriously disrupt decades ago.

 

[smulji]

MacOS still seems to fall into exactly two categories at work. Either the entire workflow is built around it for audio/video production for software that requires it (this is becoming less common) or the IT staff / executives that can get away with it because really all they need is a web browser or other basic universal software. They also generally have access to a secondary windows machine and / or someone to use it for them.

Everyone else is still stuck with Windows due to decades of inertia Apple gave trying to seriously disrupt decades ago.

For the workplace this is true. That segment is done and over with and I don't see Apple making a serious dent in that market with the exception of iPhones.

 

[CarAnalogy]

For the workplace this is true. That segment is done and over with and I don't see Apple making a serious dent in that market with the exception of iPhones.

They still seem to make half efforts like the Apple Small Business program but it’s really just about them selling more stuff. The real lock-in is on the software side and they don’t even pretend to be interested in that.