Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite - looks like the Windows world’s answer to Apple Silicon

[TEUser2K1]

Snapdragon X Plus will bring ARM to 'even more' Windows laptops, still said to beat Apple M3

Qualcomm just announced the Snapdragon X Plus, a second Windows chip that seems to be more affordable, but still powerful.

9to5google.com

 

[altair21]

Although the general perception around here often seems to be that macbook/iphone/ipad whatever are overpriced - catch is that would make pretty much every premium laptop or android overpriced too

I mean you gotta admit those memory/storage upgrades and base model prices are bullshit , like most peeps dont even realize that it costs Apple just about the same if not outright cheaper for memory in those unified chips as they would have for the memory upgrades if they went with the traditional RAM and CPU separate model (this is a good thread for explanation)

Which brings me back to what triggered this originally. What software restriction , if any have you faced on Mac os?
I could in fact counter-argue that windows is more restrictive in comparison

Would love to hear about this honestly, is there any usecase where you felt Linux/MacOS was better aside from the general open source and ease of use when installing packages? but for me, its not about how restrictive Mac is (iPhone def is), its how restrictive their hardware is,

Arent you assuming two things in a bollywood 80s movie Black/White vein viz:

- Customers are idiots

they are not idiots (well, some definitely are), they just dont give a **** until its too late and its a precedent in the market/monopoly .

- Corporations are outright evil

Evil in the comic sense? no, but they definitely are scum, I don't know what's so hard about admitting that, like you do realize that be it HP/Apple or any OEM which locks you behind their bullshit, once anything goes wrong, its just e-waste which would otherwise have been a perfectly usable device?

In the example of proprietary ink that you quoted, there are two facets that you are disregarding:

1) locked inkjets are disproportionately cheap for the customer
Proprietary Ink model was adopted to create units that could be sold at cost or even at loss.
That makes it a positive proposition for households that print infrequently as many such households are ok with a high variable cost per print.. but not OK with a upfront high cost

(Inkjets are oft available for 2.2 -2.5K excl GST. Once you factor in channel costs, shipping & duty , the proceeds for manufacturer would be to the tune of <1000 INR. Inkjets are complex mechanical devices and the only way they sell so cheap is because of proprietary ink)

yeah and this for me is a predatory practice, unfortunately most consumers dont really check out the caveats that comes with it, and its not like the HP is really that cheap, they mostly cost around the same, I can send you as many threads as you want about it (this describes most of my beef with HP),

Barring outright monopolies or oligopolies, I think you will find it hard, if not impossible to find examples of a company being able to get away with what you are assuming to be the norm

I dont know about you but if I cancel a subscription and my ink gets locked or if I update my firmware/software and the printer refuses to work with my ink, I'mma call it bullshit no matter how you package it

No, it is not that simple. Unified memory is not just same memory for CPU and GPU. From I remember, in a Mac

Yeah, agreed they are on the same chip but thats it, there's no advantage as such unless you count the reduced distance between the SOC and the SSD which might have a little bit of difference, Last I checked any decent gen 4 SSD can beat M3's speeds from what I read.

• SSD and memory controllers are on the SoC.
• Memory is on the SoC, right next to the CPU and GPU cores.
• SSD and SoC are connected via high bandwidth channels.
• As SSD can deliver data instantaneously, OS need not keep large amount of data in memory. This is why Apple says that 8GB on Mac is like 16GB on PC (I do hate 8GB Macs that are sold for 1L or more).

Does it help in real world performance? It did work really well when Apple started migration to M1. Application load time, compilation and rendering was so much more faster. Apple Mx chips showed clear difference in speeds 'in real world usage'. It's a win either way for users.

That's more because of the Arm arch and not because SSD was soldered to the board but I think we got it mixed up, I can't really offer you an apples-to-apples comparison for this.

Those who won't need lot of power will get really long battery life and the laptop can be ridiculously thin and lightweight. Those who want lot of power will get that power and it will not be at the cost of battery life. Those who want extraordinary amount of power can still go with Wintels but those laptops need like 300W or more power to operate at that level and battery won't even last an hour.

yeah agreed, my point is not dissing on mac hardware, I'll happily admit that they have the best hardware on the laptop market, my point is their anti-consumer practices and increasing bullshit does not justify the pros they bring but thats just me, I'll take a 8-9 hour battery backup laptop with same weight/size/form factor over a potential glorified paperweight because a company decided to say **** you to its consumers

Coming back to unified memory. Usually, RISC needs more memory to operate as it can only load one instruction per execution. As memory needs to be loaded more number of times, I believe Apple came up with this idea of unified memory architecture and ways to reduce time taken to load data to memory from SSD and then from memory to CPU cores. This is just my thought.

yeah, unified memory has its benefits, now will they be apparent in most day-to-day usage if you are not a video content editor or a gamer? Nah, atleast for now, even conventional hardware can more than keep up with unified memory, its mostly useful, if you want to load/stuff a lot of stuff quickly. it just cuts out the middle man in between, thus leading to faster loading times, essentially what you said but limited to some very few usecases in daily usage.

Also relevant Louis Rossman video where he shows how a simply NAND short can **** up your entire mac.

View attachment 195395
This is going to be the defining factor though:
View attachment 195396 View attachment 195397

essentially, 12-15 hours of backup? really decent ngl, it all depends on the pricing though for me personally

 

[desiibond]

Yeah, agreed they are on the same chip but thats it, there's no advantage as such unless you count the reduced distance between the SOC and the SSD which might have a little bit of difference, Last I checked any decent gen 4 SSD can beat M3's speeds from what I read.

That's more because of the Arm arch and not because SSD was soldered to the board but I think we got it mixed up, I can't really offer you an apples-to-apples comparison for this.

I think you missed what I said. "I said that even without memory on SoC, Dell XPS matches Mac's memory performance or is at least almost as fast as Macs. If PC SIs can make use of bandwidth offered by memory on SoC, they will make Macs look slow." At this time, Neither Apple nor PCs can make the other's memory look slow. Memory bandwidth for DDR5 is about 65Gbps at 5600MHz and memory bandwith in M3 is whopping 150Gbps. This difference is mainly due to placement of memory. The reason why we do not see much difference in performance between premium laptops of both sides is because though there is bandwidth to utilise, memory itself cannot deliver data at that speed to CPU/GPU. DDR5 can hit up to 8400Mbps? Correct me if I am wrong here. If Apple was able to source memory and place modules in a way that it can utilize full bandwidth of 150Gbps, we would have seen them destroy competition in memory benchmarks. The day is not far though when memory on SoC pulls ahead. With memory controllers getting better and better, memory itself getting faster and faster, a memory with multiple modules and lanes will soon hit that bandwidth limits. It is lot harder though for memory on SoC. There is lot of room to improve for memory m and with each generation, memory bandwidth too is expanding. M1 and M2 had 200Mbps bandwidth and M3 has 150Mbps. Is it because Apple saw that there is no point in giving that much of bandwidth when it cannot be used? I don’t know. I think even 100Gbos would be enough. But then, they have to show numbers na.

Edit: M3 Max will have 300Gbps memory bandwidth. M2 Max had 400Mbps. General rule is to increase bandwidth as per the number of CPU and GPU cores. In laptops and desktops with dedicated GPU, GOU has its own VRAM with separate lanes to CPU (PCIe lanes). When you have everything in one SoC and using same memory, bandwidth will play a crucial role. Putting memory on the SoC is the best way to have that much needed total bandwidth that does not get bottlenecked by race conditions from cpu and GPU. This is why Apple seem to be increasing bandwidth as the cores count go up. With that much bandwidth, there is enough room for CPU and GPU cores to utilise memory.

yeah, unified memory has its benefits, now will they be apparent in most day-to-day usage if you are not a video content editor or a gamer? Nah, atleast for now, even conventional hardware can more than keep up with unified memory, its mostly useful, if you want to load/stuff a lot of stuff quickly. it just cuts out the middle man in between, thus leading to faster loading times, essentially what you said but limited to some very few usecases in daily usage.

It actually helps budget and midrange laptops.

Remember the days before UFS? How every phone used to lag and midrange phones used to become so slow and unusable? I had S3 with eMMC, also had Nexus 6. Both lagged to varying extent. eMMC 5.1 has 250 MB/s read speed and 125 MB/s write speed, while the latest UFS 4.0 has 4200 MB/s read speed and 2800 MB/s write speed. (taken from partition wizard.com). Now, in real world, the difference is visible even in a sub-20k phone. The difference was so much that every phone started using UFS storage.

I had a late 2014 Mac mini. It was pretty fast the first year and then started to slow down just like a PC. I upgraded its HDD to SSD and it was a lot faster. Same was with 2018 MBP. It is solid laptop and is fast but when you compare it with MacBook Air or iMac, the speed difference was visible (MBP was lot faster even for normal tasks). Now, if you use M1 Air or M3 pro max ultra whatever MBP, you will not notice difference in normal use, unless you get that shitty 8GB M1 Air. Given that Windows is actually lighter than MacOS (proof: Windows 10 on my Mac mini runs way way way faster than macOS on the same), biggest benefit is to budget and midrange users. They don't have to worry about lag as the laptop ages.

Performance on battery. See the below screenshot. This is massive for productivity. When both are on full power, SB16 was matching and beating the MBP. See what happens when on battery, especially when battery levels are not high. The only way this fails is if Qualcomm and OEMs get greedy and induce visible difference between midrange and premium laptops.

 

[superczar]

@altair21

This thread is going a little all over the place and completely outside the original topic
So i will keep my response restricted


1) On your point on printers - no one likes it if their printer gets locked for proprietary ink and such.
However with the traditional/established pricing model, it would be silly to expect HP or anyone to sell full blown ink printers for a price of 3K (e.g. just the bw+color print heads alone cost close to that and no one will ever argue that a fairly complex piece of tech for 1500/- is overpriced)

Every manuf does this , not just HP. Gillette started this with their razors - its in fact formally called the razor-razorblade business model.
To complain post-facto that cartridges are locked and expensive is disingenuous to say the least.

2) On your point on MacOS being restrictive/ non-restrictive
I'll repeat that MacOS is not restrictive, and in fact windows is a lot more restrictive (not to mention inconsistent) but you dont hear anyone complaining about that

Since you wanted examples, here are three that i faced just within the last days:

1)try disabling the Antimalware service executable chances are you will find you cannot do it even via the group policy editor on win pro- As in of course you can disable it on the screen but windows wont honor its own policy
2) Forced updates : My ally hung while I was on a commute leaving me no option but to force restart - you probably already know what happened next. Lets just say that the battery and time were both drained out while windows did its thing!
3) try accessing any Windows platform App (UWP app from MS store) , hell try accessing even the folder they sit in and tell me what you find


To repeat something i have said earlier, folks who buy a mac do so for their relative merits while being aware of the demerits. Most, if not all, know very well that a 16GB upgrade on a dell /HP will cost half (or less) than that on a mac yet they choose otherwise. Some (like I) make this mistake repeatedly.

More often than not, they also tend to be older buyers who couldn't care less about the so called show-off factor of a Mac.
Most, probably all have also used Windows extensively
Many also tend to be active or at least erstwhile Linux users ! Wonder why that is?