Thoughts on the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite laptops compared against Apple's M3 MacBook.
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Thoughts on the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite laptops compared against Apple's M3 MacBook.
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These new laptops look RIPE
Ripe with possible scams " entrepreneurs" want to sell you?
let us see the machines first before deciding whether they look "RIPE" or not. that said....not a fan of baked storage. that's kind of a deal breaker.
You look ripe
I don't get it ... what's the point of it being "so good' if has to emulate most apps anyhow. why would anyone want to create ARM software.. I mean they can't even get developers to create lots of great windows store apps.
@@michaelxz1305 the idea is that it becomes popular enough that people move their shit over. this was an issue for Apple too when M1 came out, but of course there was far less doubt it would work. still though, Qualcomm is massive too and has the major PC manufacturers on board, so we'll see.
Apple got me entirely based on the battery life. I have zero brand loyalty, it’s simply that battery is *mandatory* for my work and leisure. Very excited for competition in the space.
I would just love Apple to figure out their screen brightness issue. They always advertise around 20hrs of battery, but the moment you put the brightness to max, it's about 3 if you're lucky. My Surface easily lasts the entire day at max brightness. Now, the latter has vastly poorer performance, but it shouldn't be this difficult for Apple to not have the battery absolutely fail like this when the vast majority of the on-battery time is just spent with Office & browser tasks.
@@Rocksteady72a seeing ALL reviews on the M series Apple laptops, nobody has ever said their macbook battery drains a lot faster with high screen brightness. They are literally editing videos and doing heavy tasks and the battery lasts 10+ hours. I don't understand where you are getting your info from, or if you are just hating to hate. Or are you taking about intel based macbooks? Either way, you're SO wrong with what you said.
they got me with battery, performance per watt, and the quality of the hardware. If a windows laptop matched apple silicon in battery life, performance per watt, and had gaming usable power, I would upgrade to that next and not look back
@@AndrewPL5they aren't doing that at full brightness no reviewer has ever said they had 20 plus hours editing videos and got 20 hours thats pure bs they've literally said the opposite. That goes for any laptop the higher spec your screen the brighter it is the faster battery burns. Apple purely based their battery like every body else on basic task at 50 percent brightness lol. He isnt' hating you apple fanboys just get so butthurt when people talk about the basic battery life he even admitted the macbook worked better so hows he hating?
@@Rocksteady72a Do you have an m chip or Intel Mac?
"I don't think Microsoft will allow 8GB 256GB devices." Please don't look at the current Surface devices 😬
Pricing mate. It's competitive with that many vendors.
Mine is ARM 4GB for $1k (got it on discount before knowing the difference between ARM and x86) 🤢. The other day I saw one on sale for dcking $1.9k, i7-1255U, 16GB ram, 512 storage. Two gens old $1.9k without even close to flagship specs is broad day light scamming.
😢q kk I l A
He said *Windows devices, not *Microsoft devices.
@@divine6104what currency are you talking about?
Just a developer's POV here, but in my opinion, the part that really gave us devs the push to move our apps to be native on Apple Silicon was the knowledge that all Macs would be moving to this architecture in less than a couple years. It really was one of those 'you snooze you lose' moments, where not releasing an M1-compatible app as-soon-as-possible could actually lead to people leaving your app for a competitor. Contrast that to the Windows market, which is so large, and these new ARM machines are probably going to account for less than a percent of Windows devices deployed. These statistics certainly aren't any positive incentives for devs on Windows, who then have to compile to ARM and maintain support for it (which can be very costly).
Give it 5 years and I think a large portion of windows laptops will be on arm, the advantage of battery life is impactful. Developers will support it once the technology grows mature.
@@sloanphone2323 Its abit of a chicken and the egg problem with that one. Development teams don't want to commit to a platform that doesn't have a large enough user base, and customers don't want to buy devices on which their apps can't run. I'm by no means hating on Windows here. But the Window's market's sheer scale does unfortunately put it at a disadvantage.
@@SeanCassiere apps can run emulated, the thing is will these chips be able to brute forme decent performance with emulation? If the answer is yes, the chicken and egg problem is no longer a big issue
@@sloanphone2323 I'm not sure the ARM tech is the biggest advantage of apple efficiency, the size of the transistors seems way more important, the latest higher tire apple cpu are not that efficient compared to AMD latest.
@@_Digitalguy they will not, windows does not have a Rosetta. And even Rosetta did not work on all programs
Dave, there is something you didn't say and I'm guessing that you didn't know, is that Rosetta is not only a software, it's a hardware as well: the Apple Silicon M series embarks an emulation layer on the CPU cores that Rosetta activates, and when it does then the CPU core that has switched won't multitask with Apple ARM native apps anymore; and that's why Rosetta is so strangely good and barely suffers from any slowing down from native code. PCs won't have that technology so don't expect emulation to perform well there
This is interesting. Does this imply that running any x86 apps reduces resources (and performance) for native apps? If I keep some x86 app running in the background, entire mac is now potentially slower (this might be hard to notice)?
@@CzlowiekImadlo Well, the concern of running x86 is not that it would reduce resources or speed, but that it activates changes on the hardware that would be costly to emulate, like different memory ordering models: "weak" (WO) for ARM and "total store" (TSO) for x86. From Apple documentation about Rosetta: "The system prevents you from mixing arm64 code and x86_64 code in the same process". It's a per core mechanism, not a full CPU one
Wow, I learned a new thing today. Thanks for sharing this.
So basically it's going to be dead on arrival because they know how to do it properly but chose not to include the hardware feature that makes Rosetta run well? The more I look into modern laptops the more I think large companies are purposely aiming for user dissatisfaction because they already know they own the market And the barrier for entry is way too high with how complicated things are to integrate and make software for.
@@stevenswall Oh, it's a lot more complex than that. The ARM specification does contain a certain list of features, but Apple has a special agreement with ARM that allows to implement a variation on the base specification. Apple does it in house with high level specialists. So, the special Rosetta mechanism is Apple property and is not known outside of the company... So, no official ARM chip will ever have that kind of feature, unless something comparable is suddenly invented by ARM. What allows Apple to pull that is a special situation that have the company sit in the middle of the 3: hardware/OS/software, and no other company in the world (except maybe Nvidia in a way) is in this situation
Honestly, the better these Windows devices do, the better it will be for all the end consumers, both Windows and Apple users alike, since this will put at least some more pressure on Apple to step up their baseline configurations or at least charge less.
Sad truth, it won’t force apple to do anything. Apple fans are sooooo into apple as some in love. No matter what apple does, they keep buying. They sell even now in 2024 a 800$ iphone with 60hz screen and macbooks 2023- 2024 with 8Gb of Ram, and apple fans are buying it and even defending apple anti consumer’s strategy. So don’t push your hops up.
they will not charge less for base models or upgrades but they might increase base storage/ram if the competition is fierce..
Hard disagree. Apple has been doing battery better for the last 10 years. They are going to keep doing better weather PC does or not.
Lol, you don't understand apple. Apple will give you world class products with a high price, no upgrades, locked community and that's all.
@@riomendoza1111 Apple wins only this category.
Yo dave with that dope hair style
Can you believe Dave's in his 40s
@@steve3621 I'm 29 and look older
@@steve3621 This is what people in their 40's look like when they take decent care of themselves though (hair also helps, and his is obviously dyed).
Dave4D
Linus inspired
The Mac Studio has removable proprietary SSDs. However, Apple will not sell you an upgrade SSD yet. This is Apple at its worst, where making the Mac Studio upgradable would be really easy but Apple still choose to force you to buy a new Mac Studio if you want more storage.
I used to use Macs, my wife still does. I really want to like Macs but the whole upgrade/repair scheme just turns me off. I mean they’re great well built machines but damn I can’t get over it. I also don’t love the OS, don’t hate it either but prefer windows or Linux. I’ve been eyeing an M3 Pro MacBook Pro but won’t pull the trigger. If Apple would be a little less shitty they’d earn me back as a customer.
@@OShackHennessy I absolutely get on you on the upgradeability. In terms of the OS, though, if you really meant it when you said Linux, keep an eye out for Asahi Linux!
@@OShackHennessyyou can install Linux on a MacBook. It's actually the best way to have a Linux laptop, since the core firmware makes Linux more stable. And the boot manager is a lot easier.
@@thekwoka4707I’ve never done this, that’s interesting
@@OShackHennessywhich is why i still think the last MacBook that was kind of tolerably repairable is around the mid 2010s. I still keep some of them as spare when a laptop becomes broken and they're still plenty great for basic office use. Some of them i repurposed as a backup server for family devices and digital media playback. I use OpenLegacy patcher to use later macos to old mac devices and still maintain around 95% of the functionality.
So great seeing you this past week, man. Always love seeing what you’re working on.
x64 emulation in Windows 11 for almost all games is basically flawless; The problem comes from GPU drivers and kernel level anticheat stuff.
Which games? 2D Indie Titles? Runescape? :')
@@ReavenZeroEstimated about 2.8-5.2 Tflops so about a low end graphics card
There's cyberpunk that runs 30fps+ through emulation on a snapdragon smartphone. So a laptop should be able to handle it.
Windows has had x64 support for almost 20 years.
Qualcomm has already made an announcment that ARM64EC apps will have drivers and OS stuff as native and everything emulated
The biggest test would be the variants they've shown so far - as you said, "23W" and "80W". They may perform much better than a regular M2 and M3, but we don't know yet how efficient they are compared to the sheer efficiency the M-series chips have. And as much as the performance of Apple Silicon was good, I think the most amazing thing about them is just how energy-efficient they are. 5-8W on light tasks! And that's without fans! I'd like to think we've past the point of being concerned about power in a thin and light laptop. The biggest test for these X Elite chips is simply to normalise 15-16 hours laptop battery life. Exciting times! (Also, light a fire under Apple's buttocks and make them realize that laptops starting at 8GB RAM and asking USD200 for a RAM upgrade is rich for a multi-trillion dollar company.)
Great points, especially on the disgraceful base model specs. In my opinion Apple can double their base RAM and storage while adding more customers instead of shaking down their existing customers.
I'm not even sure why they bother with showing 23w tdp numbers. The only way that 23w could be compelling in windows land is if for some reason, the rest of laptop is dramatically more efficient than a regular x86 laptop, which just begs the question as to what's stopping an x86 laptop being equally efficient. This chip has to be able to do the regular windows experience outside of demanding apps under 5w to ever to be compelling enough to buy it. If it still needs 10-15w to do anything useful, than it's hardly better than a ryzen apu, which you sacrifice nothing in using. Qualcomm and Microsoft don't have to the same adapt or die with arm on windows advantage that Apple had, so this chip has got to have amazing efficiency or be good enough and be dirt cheap.
even x86 can do sub 5 watts on light tasks, the old 8th gen intel chip I'm typing this on is using 1-3 watts with 40 browser tabs open. I hope the 23 watts is that particular chip sku's peak consumption, much like how apple silicon can go above twenty watts doing heavier tasks I'm very much ready for a fanless computer
It's wild being able to grab a random USB-c charger at a convenience store and charge your laptop. No bulky bricks.
They definitely should've shown the 12w version which is meant for fanless devices. That they didn't....
Thanks for doing what you do so well Dave ❤
Dave, the TDPs are calculated by Qualcomm as the total device power draw. 23W TDP refers to the entire system draw including a display, speakers, keyboard and more. Same for the 80W, so hoping for a fanless version to replace my MacBook Air!
I really want a fanless touchscreen windows surface laptop ideally with 5g modem integrated.
@@DanSwain It kinda sucks that Microsoft axed the Android app stuff, that would have been awesome with touchscreen laptops had it been continued.
@@SyRose901the Android Subsystem on Windows sucked because the App Store was that of Amazon. I have never seen a more trash looking UI than that thing. If Microsoft adds APKs to their own store and you're able to download them directly, it would've been a hit.
He probably knows that already, dude’s an engineer
@@DanSwain That's the Surface Pro X for me. Just put this great chip into the 2019 thin body and it's a no-brainer for me 😅 I hope this thing is worth the hype.
Build quality, speaker, battery efficiency and marketing
I made the jump with m1 and enjoy not having candy crush preinstalled on my OS
@@piyh3962 lmao
Macbook Trackpad alone is the reason why I'm not going back to Windows laptops.
@@piyh3962 I got a work macbook and its almost embarrassing how bad the window management is on MacOS. We lose some we gain some
macbooks have mediocre build quality, and have a legacy of poor build quality products since around 2013
I can picture the Surface ones having the 8/256gb base configuration for $1,699.
Buy a Samsung laptop then. They usually have crazy launch offers and their trade in values are amazing.
back to 2010s indeed! 🤣
@@user-wl8xn5tf3g Does Samsung offer a Surface Pro look-a-like? I mean like a real tablet and not this 360 degree versions?
My biggest concern 😢
I know the pricing for all system and you are all going to be happy
Cant wait for you to review one dave!!! Wanna see the performance!!
The background lighting in this frame is insanely good 🤩
Saw the X Elite in person last week and I can say it looks VERY promising.
Do show. And tell
Any words on Linux support? 😢
Its ' promising ' ? That the best you got?😂 Cmon man , even things that fail were once 'promising' . Whats your point?
@@SMT_Glaivethe point is, it's promising. It's better than the ones in its "level" that are on x86. Why are you mad a future release is promising?
It's promising, but don't hype it too much, the "out of league" M3 Max benchmarks are also have 78W limitation on CPU side, so it's actually less power limit for the way better result like the 80W X Elite. It's looks good on low frequency, but when the frequency is high, it's looks power hungry (just looks the difference between 23W and 80W benchmark results, to only gain 10% extra performance for 250% extra power consumption is not to nice)
I dont know if i watch Dave for his tech analysis or to see what new hair style hes rocking.
I remember trying to edit on a windows laptop and wondering why on earth the performance went down, then learning that it gets kneecapped without the wall plug. In my mind, that’s hilariously absurd. The M1 Max not only blew everything I’ve tried out of the water, but I got full performance and exceptional battery life. Apple proved you CAN have your cake and eat it too. I’m skeptical that Windows with its fragmentation between x86 and ARM architectures, NVIDIA, AMD and now Intel’s accelerators can offer what a MacBook offers for creative workflows.
Yeah if they have the plugged in limitation still it may be a hard sell.
The drop in performance is due to having to save battery. Fix the processor efficiency and there's no need for it. Some manufacturers decided not to do it anyway even with X86. Let's see how the new ARM Windows devices do it.
@@torpedospursit’s mostly the GPU though
You don't know how to remove the power limitation when not plugged? It's by design.
If you get the newer Zen 4 AMD Phoenix CPU laptops then this isn't an issue. The R7 7840HS and R9 7940HS perform almost the same on battery and while plugged in and give you great battery life for a Windows machine. Of course, in terms of battery life, portability (they come in gaming laptops, which are of course heavier) and speakers and stuff the Mac takes the cake.
Dave2D!!!!! You're the man of the year!! Cant wait for your review when it comes out!
Great video Dave. Happy to see chips competition. But I'm looking for competition in ecosystems, not in chips or OS. Happy with the Apple ecosystem 'till now, but eager to see a new "as good" ecosystem coming to life
You know what's better than "ecosystems"? Cross-platform standards. From a consumer perspective, it's ludicrous that features implemented in software should be limited to working between certain devices made by the same company. I don't want to buy a "family" of devices that work together, I want to be able to pick from a wide variety of competing products in each category (phone, desktop, laptop, watch, etc) for what fits my needs best in each, without being kneecapped by arbitrary incompatibility. Even if I have the same needs as you in a computer, I might need something different in my phone. With ecosystem logic, I have to compromise on either the phone or the computer just to have fast file transfers or high quality messaging.
i care about few things : 1- Pricing, if its as bad as Apple's then there's absolutely no reason to not buy a macbook instead. 2- Good linux support, i definitely need that. Perhaps there will be snapdragon chromebooks which means linux support will be great. Nice video dave, straight to the point.
Windows laptops are not cheaper than comparable MacBooks. You just don’t get the low-end stuff from Apple. XPS, Spectre, etc. cost even more than the Macs.
Linux support is almost a given
@@haakon_bright, I was looking around to get a windows laptop but damn business grade laptops are so expensive but still looks cheap, runs hot, and terrible battery life. I went with an M2 air instead. Won't be coming back to windows until they're on par with the M series
@@haakon_b maybe when it comes to build quality and finish, but you don't really need an XPS in order to get top internals, i.e. a maxed out i9 CPU and beefy graphics.
@@minciNashu but you do need to utilize those internals, if I'm buying a laptop I want a good screen, speakers, build quality, and even the lightness. I travel while working a lot and I can't always carry around a screen and the battery life becomes more important also the thing I can't understand with majority of windows laptop is not letting you use full power of the device if its not plugged in even when i change the power settings so hopefully this changes that with the system not requiring that much power to begin with
For most apps, building for ARM just requires specifying the target as arm and recompiling. Unless an app has a lot of hand written x86 assembly (most don't) it's trivial to do. Distribution might be complicated but it's easily worth it if people are going to download it.
If you're relying on sequentially consistent atomic memory ordering that's another thing you might need to change to get good performance out of Arm.
Hey Dave, it would be fair if you mentioned that the Pro X became a good device after some updates. And imo, it was important to get ARM dev for W going since ppl showed excitement for it. But what do I know, you're the tech guy 😄 Thanks for the content btw 👍
I'm excited to see the Mac mini and studio versions of it. I'll switch back to windows in a heartbeat
You better keep this video title man. A/B testing spicy KZhead titles is wild.
Unrelated, but do you have a video on your high-tech planted tank? I couldn't find one on your channel, but it looks stunning!
Thank you for being vocal about the pricing.
Love the og hair being back!
this is excellent for one main reason. If these chips blow up enough, to the point we start seeing desktop versions that are viable, support will start flooding in, which in the long run will mean bootcamp for M series macbooks. I cannot wait to bootcamp my macbook pro.
I also thought about it !!
Or... you can spend $70 and just run parallels on it right now and get excellent results. Everything you want on the Mac already exists.
@@_sparrowhawk doesn't fix the fact that windows ARM is complete ass, with terrible support. If it starts to get used in genuinely popular devices, support and stability for the software will increase, and as such make it much more viable for real world use. The issue isn't the existence, its the support. edit: also, actually viable parallels with the ability to make use of the power of an M series chip, is £100 a year, the default option is not suitable for any real load bearing uses. Until then i have no choice but to keep my windows laptop about.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing it. ✌️
Dave looking forward to your take on the new HP Omen Transcend 14 - hope you're gonna be covering that soon!
If it all works with emulation and all, even close to 50% of what apple is doing currently with their laptops, it'll be great! and pricing can really make or break this as you said in the video.
Windows emulation also does translation to native arm code. But they haven't (at least not yet) had the hardware support Rosetta has. It's a very small hardware feature, but Apple Silicon can flip a switch that makes the memory ordering (part of the optimization within the chip that lets things execute out of order) behave like x86. Makes the chip a bit slower, but without it you have to insert tons of extra instructions to emulate the same effect. Making the chip slightly slower that way is way better than having to insert all those extra instructions, which is why Rosetta is so much better than Windows' x86 emulation
Nice haircut Dave! Love your content
Also a note on emulation is that hopefully it can improve in the future even near future, I really like the "blink" virtual machine project that is able to get emulate x86 code, and the program is only like 200KB even less, and is a single file, hopefully the future of programming is more efficient
Won't fix Windows terrible sleep performance, you will still find your laptop battery is dead randomly after sitting in your backpack. Linus did a whole video on this and my HP Elitebook still dies randomly 2 years later.
that is 50/50 blame of the pc manufacturer and Windows, I know HP sucks balls with this but Lenovo for example has worked very well for me, I've done 2 weeks vacation coming back to an 80% full laptop still sleeping. HP Doesn't last 48h, it's amazing how bad they are.
It does not, my laptop only drops 3% battery over night. Lol
@@adrianw519 thats when sleep works. the problem is they dont always work
just dont buy hp bro. My mom got an hp elitebook from work and this happens to her aswell. Full charge, and then next day when she gets to work the laptop is dead. It doesn't happen to me with my dell, so maybe hp is to blame in this case (though windows is BS and we're aware of their random bugs)
@@KhanhDinh291 works fine for me, never got any of those bugs :/
Can’t wait for ARM to be the default for software. Until then, I don’t want to deal with compatibility issues and emulation.
It's hard to say this tbh, x86_64 software has been a big deal and just giving up on that platform means a heck ton of legacy software will be deprecated, this means a lot of servers around the world will still run x86 chips just to support these legacy software. So I don't think x86_64 will be replaced. Modern software for the common man will just have ARM versions is all, what MacOS does anyways. And most developers won't spend all that time and money just porting their software to a new instruction set, it's hard, so you'll still have to deal with emulation and compatibility issues; esp. with games where a lot of specific instructions are used(take a look at RDR2, probably the only limitation to porting it to MacOS ARM is just the specific x86 instructions they use to optimise). This means a great loss of userbase, but big devs can manage it, indie devs cannot. So Emulation and Compatibility is gonna be a big problem for ARM laptops, even in the late future.
ARM is the future for the average person. It’ll suck transitioning everything over but it’s for the best
Enjoy your locked down bootloader.
Why?
@@test-ve6wg if you don't use low-level optimization like rdr2, then your software should be easy to port, as soon as the underlying toolchain is ported, then your software can be recompiled.
Keep it up good work nice video topic thanks for the wonderful video 🙏
Would you make a video showing the apps/programs that you have on your computer? It would be great to see what you think is worthwhile and it felt reassuring to see some things that I have on my computer in the quick scroll through that you did when talking about things not designed for arm
I appreciate you not going for that 10 minute mark or whatnot. Bless you. Great content.
Windows RT was a thing way back in 2012. I was really hoping it would have taken off from that point, so that we’d have powerful desktop ARM chips today. Kind of a bummer; but now we may have a new chance with these Qualcomm chips if they do well.
So sad that it took Apples M1 chips to change Microsoft let them take ARM more serious
Hi Dave, hope you're doing great! Could you please make a video with the laptops with best keyboards! ❤
I am still using my Surface Pro X(SQ1, 8GB ram) daily. It works fine for my web dev job. Edge, Zoom, Teams, VS Code all runs great. STILL no Slack and Discord ARM64 version. I use the web version of these and use the "Install this site as an App" feature in Edge.
Same for me. At one point I startet to use it as a Chrome-... I mean Edgebook. Works great to this day. I hope they make a new version, which is thin like the Surface Pro X.
Here’s the thing about the M3 Max, it’s a 60W chip. Qualcomm can’t even beat it at 80W. And the M3 Pro is holding its own at way less power draw than both of them.
Love my M3 pro 16” MBP! Wouldn’t change a single thing about it ❤
Benchmarks don't mean a lot. When the new laptops are released we'll have a better idea how they compare.
The m3 pro is a 27w chip. Honestly I don't think the point was ever to compete with apples max chips, this is a first year product. These act as a windows competitor across the board to apples offerings, something that I would absolutely take over the entirety of macos to have a little less efficiency.
The thing is that I beleive the 80w and 23w measurements are for the entire system not the TDP of the chip
I can guarantee u one thing Thats definitely not the case @@crestofhonor2349
Any progress in Windows Arm development/ports will open up opportunities for Apple 'power users' too. I'm a Mac person, but came from a Windows background and still need certain Windows apps (and, let's be honest, games). Parallels lets me run Win 11 on top of macOS to access that good stuff, but only where Arm ports exist.
I've had the chance to experience the X Elite platform first hand and let me just say I am SO excited. I am all about efficiency!! One correction though is the wattage is not the TDP of the CPU - it's total system power. This means the CPU itself is using much less power (on those reference designs some of them are 23ish watts for total system power)
can you 'loan' the E Elite and perform a typical day's task and publish it for us? Those typical 20 chrome tabs, video calls, office tasks, these real footage along with realistic battery life are what people need to press the buy button coming this June. Those TDP confusion will be immediately vanished when they see a real recording like this.
@@AlexFoo89 believe me I have been trying! Hopefully soon
Wow! These numbers are impressive! Finally some competition in the space!
If the chip is powerfull while being eficient Valve should maybe consider to build a ARM based Steam Deck
Looking forward to these chips! It has to be a seamless experience to the end user though. If there are tons of application incompatiblities, it will be DOA again. Hopefully that emulation works as well as they hope!
curious what video you are using to stream. Beautiful and crisp.
So nearly four years in, and the competition hasn't even half caught up with Apple's architecture
I was too early, dave wasn't even in the frame
the fuck you early to? my god you people just seem like bots. grow up and touch some grass.
There are efficient CPUs on the AMD side like the 7840U, the main issue is that for some reason is hard to find a laptop with that CPU with a large battery and fast ram (good for the iGPU). I don't know why this happens, because that CPU seems to be a good CPU with decent performance at least to compete with base models of Apple M CPUs.
I had a MacBook with the M1, the fans never turned on and it always stayed cold to the touch. It was amazing with that.
Seems like Upgradeability and Energy efficiency are mutually exclusive. I don’t think the new ARM windows laptops will have any slotted RAM.
That would absolutely SUCK!!!
Definitely wont it will most likely go down the apple route soldered RAM and storage
@@buttercrazy30 oh hell naa not soldered storage. I’m ripping apart every nand chips from the motherboard if they go the soldered route.
Fuck that. I want upgradeability AND energy efficiency. If companies are saying they’re mutually exclusive then they’re lazy.
hopefully at least the SSD is removable, but even that is a stretch.
Finally good hair is back
Love the fresh new intro… and the hair… thank god 😂
Much better hair 😅 thanks for your great videos!!!
Love my 14in M1 (first Mac I've owned)
I like mine too. But I wish I never bought it and kept my $3000.
@@user-wl8xn5tf3g I paid around £1600 with 32gb ram upgrade My previous laptop was a refurbished windows laptop - it lasted about 3 years
something i repeat a lot in regard to the reported wattage of the X elite, qualcomm is giving the entire device tdp not just the chip itself, so the 24w one is including the high resolution oled display, ram and ssd, the CPU itself is probably closer to 10w performance on Linux is also stellar, probably due to linux having an older ARM build, like the 15k of the 80w X elite in geekbench becomes 17.3k MT, and 3.3k ST. really exciting stuff and i'm definitely getting one to tinker around with edit to add more thoughts: the ram is most likely going to be soldered down, except if they adopt CAMM2 modules but i doubt it. the X Elite supports up to LPDDR5X 8547, it's just way too fast to ignore, especially with how fast the NPU is as well, tho a wider bus would be good to squeeze even more performance from it
This comment should be pinned
Nop you are wrong , I’ve seen their demo and they didn’t even have a chassis for the 80w chip , it was on a board with a huge cooler. Their 80w X elite is comparable to the M2 pro (27w). The X elite has 12 performance cores (no efficiency cores), so I’m curious to see the first real test
I have a lenovo 10w (snapdragon windows) and other than the performance it's awesome. Very excited to see the performance catch up :)
I hope microsoft didn't sign an exclusivity agreement with quallcomm again. that's the main reason why windows ARM has not taken off, because quallcomm-based windows laptop are all slow, don't have good compatibility, and are expensive compared to the x86 or even apple competition.
only reason Qualcomm agreed to the exclusivity is because unlike apple and its army of operating system engineers. they need software devs to support and make operating systems work on it.
I am waiting for the Yakuza2D era
W I D E D A V E
I also agree I got the MacBook Air M1 due to the speakers the form factor and {the battery}
Glad to see you FINALLY cut that Mad Scientist mullet or whatever the hell you were going for. Good stuff as usual Dave.
Clicked for the style, stayed for the content.
If this makes it into Framework, I'll definitely be swapping my board out.
I can't see Framework managing to put an entirely different architecture into the exact same board design, but I am totally here for it if they do.
Wouldn't a product like this go against what Framework stands for? Not having upgradeable RAM or storage options isn't what Framework is about.
I think users of framework will generally hate it when you can't have removable ram and ssd. don't know if framework will make them swappable for arm-based chips.
@@CyanRooperfixed ram is fine in a phone or laptop as long as a big enough memory option is available for a cheap price. For example, I don't mind soldered ram on my Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro because I got 32GB of DDR5, a 1TB storage SSD and a ryzen 7 7840 for a price tag under 1000 USD. I actually got mine for 800 which is an awesome deal for a programming laptop.
As far as I know, Qualcomm doesn't have the ram and storage in their SoC in their mobile chips, so I doubt they will add them to their laptop ones. That's just something Apple does on their M series chips.
@Dave2D With the coming of ARM-based Windows Computers, and with the Google Play Store getting a fuller release on Windows, are we about to see the start of ARM gaming on Windows?
Steam deck introduced me to Linux and I’ve been loving it and actually wanting to use it for work. The Oled screen helps being able to see more stuff on documents and it runs so much smoother. It is also very power efficient especially when it doesn’t have so many random resources consuming your power without you knowing
Technically Rosetta *is* emulation. A translation layer is a way to do emulation. Rosetta does it very well. It does both ahead-of-time and just-in-time. Microsoft also had ahead-of-time translation for their x86 emulation on ARM, but they did it much worse than Rosetta did it.
Hmm, going by the benchmark charts.. The processor they haven't released yet, seems to only tie last year's M3 Pro but it has to use more than double the power to do that (80W). At the 23W spec, the future Snapdragon is handily defeated by the similar Watt (28W on full load) M3 Pro. The base M3 GPU nearly matching the 80W Snapdragon is a crying shame. Now you can call the M3 Max "a different class of chip", maybe because they only make it available on higher class machines (but in order to make that argument you would first have to see what machines the 80W Snapdragon is on)? But the fact is, the M3 Max runs 54W on full load. So it is a 50W class ARM chip, completely moping the floor with an 80W ARM chips. That Max chip will be a year old by the time Snapdragon brings their offering to market, so by my count Qualcomm is still more than one generation behind on performance. Qualcomm is talking big about how they can bring Apple level power efficiency to Windows devices. I hate to break it to them, but the closest competitor on Apple's end to the 80W Elite, is the 90W Ultra series of Apple silicon. That is 4x the benched performance of the Elite. And yeah that is just the on paper bench. Not counting how Apple hardware and OS are designed in tandem, and how well third party and first party software runs. Compared to Window's horrible record with ARM and their focus on x86. I hope more devs make native ARM stuff for Windows, but only time will show, hardware alone can't fix that. As it sits, all I see is marketing fluff, with Qualcomm still several generations behind on power efficiency, and a total non competitor when it comes to on chip GPU.. Intel, AMD, and Apple all put them to shame.
Is ARM even something that is worth switching to or is Apple just better at making efficient CPUs and they could have easily done it on x86 instead. Or is it a combination of ARM being more efficient and Apple making better CPUs that makes M-series so much better.
@@garbagecollector64 Well, ARM has always been pretty efficient since its inception. There is a funny story of the developers showing off the chip back in the day. It was working but it seemed to be performing very slowly. It was a live demo so it was a little embarrassing. Then someone noticed they forgot to connect the chip's power.. turns out it was running off the residual power flowing through the motherboard the whole time. So in the end it kinda worked in their favor, showing off the incredible power efficiency of the chips. As far as Snapdragons, they are generally more power efficient than an x86 chip that has equal performance, but Qualcomm hasn't figured out how to get to either Apple's power efficiency or their performance level. The Elites seem to be more of the same. They will be good for non power users, in a laptop. But they won't be able to keep up with powerful AMD, Apple, or even Intel APUs on higher end machines. So if these new ARM chips are successful, the consumer will have 3 main options. 1. ARM chips with good battery life and access to much of the deep Windows software library, but unable to run heavy programs 2. x86 Chips with very bad battery life, but the most complete software library on any platform, and the ability to run heavy programs. 3. Apple chips that can run heavy programs and have excellent battery life, but the user is limited to a much smaller software library.
A first-generation chip that is still not on sale, running on a very open, ambiguous and flexible operating system, loses to a third-generation in-house chip, running on an operation system that is carefully tailored for a specific, very narrow set of hardware. What a surprise! I know that end user doesn't care about anything. But that doesn't make the comparison fair in any way.
@@iowawalker I think it is just a hard pill to swallow, since the first generation Apple PC chips blew everyone out of the water, meanwhile Qualcomm has been doing PC ARM chips for like a decade, and now they say they are really gonna bring on the heat with these new chips... only to be years behind as always. The sad part is even if you paired these benchmarks up with Apple's 4 year old 1st generation ARM PC chips, the Elites still lose by a wide margin on both performance and efficiency. 1st gen or not, they had 4 years to at least catch up and make a splash, but they haven't even caught up to 2020 yet. You want power, go x86. You want power efficiency, you go Apple silicon. You want neither, and a buggy software experience, I guess Snapdragon is the way to go. It's really disparaging, because I want my Windows devices to have good ARM options, but it seems it isn't going to happen. These new chips will be great for Chromebooks though, I guess.
@@destructodisk9074 The only way M1 surprised anyone is by not being a total slouch. Its efficiency comes more from optimizing the operating system than from the hardware itself. There are tons of reasons for ARM to not be anything monumental on Windows. First one being that Windows itself is insanely complicated code-wise, and re-writing and optimizing everything for ARM would be neither viable nor achievable. Then there's financial stimuli for developing cutting-edge ARM CPUs, or rather lack thereof. There are people who will not just make peace with imperfections of first gen ARM CPUs, because, unlike Apple consumers, you can always buy a different machine. You wouldn't find yourself in a situation where your only option for a PC platform is an ARM model. Then there are limits of semiconductor waffer production. Apple bought out all orders for 3nm chips from TSMC for 2023. How can you compete, if you aren't able to put fair prices on your ARM chips, because you can't physically meet all the demand? Apple has money and a fanbase. PC market doesn't have that. There's competition and making a wrong choice cost you a lot of money and reputation. Maybe for most people, Apple laptop would be the best choice. But I appreciate the effort of PC manufacturers for keeping up with the industry, considering the circumstances they are working in, and I will pay for an inferior product if it means not paying Tim Cook and pushing his ideals forward.
Hi Dave great video. There's something about the charts tho, I find myself pausing the video to be able to read them (maybe the ordering or the different colors)? I don't know maybe it's just me
Dave my man, Im gonna ask again: Where’s the end credit music!!??? We need it back!
Baking on storage would be a dealbreaker for me. It's not the lack of upgrading that's the issue - it's the fact that all flash goes bad with usage. I don't care if it's a $200 Chromebook, but this doesn't sound like that kind of product.
Unless you’re using it to crunch data continuously an NVMe drive will outlast the rest of the hardware unless it malfunctions for another reason other than usage.
@@ElDiablo-sv2nn depends on the drive, but I have had SSDs fail with normal usage after 10 years - not abusing them.
@@YuJinChia surely you would upgrade in a 10 year time frame?
@@ElDiablo-sv2nn I personally? Yeah because I'm a gamer. But a lot of people don't.
@@YuJinChia your cpu would be way behind by that point. So unless you’re using a custom built ‘laptop’ then you’d have the same problem whichever laptop you go for. GPU isn’t replaceable in laptops either…
Yeah having to pump 80w through the chip to match an M3 pro is the opposite of efficiency
😅
The 23 watt Snapdragon outperforms the regular M3 by 15%.
that's not the chip by itself
That's the entire device power usage, not the processor itself.
yuh because the few Watts used by everything else makes that big of a difference. You are comparing two things without dedicated gpus etc. @@SupremeCodyGaming
I hope that modularity of laptops doesn't end with x86. I wanna see "extensions" on a base chip. If that makes sense? I don't know if it's possible to make ram in an SoC while also having a similar system to DRAM. and having the possibility of extending the storage because even 1 tb is too little for me. I have a 1tb + 4tb stick on my laptop and I wouldn't trade anything for it.
Though it's more likely Apple's other components can go on sleep when necessarily, given everything is deeply integrated into (and controlled by) MacBooks, that the more casual tasks' battery life is where Apple M series MacBooks shine really bright. Geekerwan's M2 video did point out the out-of-core power (aka the laptop manufacturer's tuning) plays a huge part in light load battery drain.
I never like Apple one bit, but their M1 get me into their eco system, long battery life and good performance editing on the go. If WINDOW play nice with Adobe and force dev move to ARM chip then I would still stick to Window device. M14 Pro M2 max a power house editing on the go and single USB C 100w charger, I prefer compact and long lasting battery, even I don't do alot editing it battery can last up to 2 - 3 days web browser useage.
True, I'm not an apple fan but the m series are undeniable. I don't even recommend windows laptops to most people anymore. Only reason I'll recommend windows is gaming.
@@thebeanstalker631 if you want to game you'd be better off buying one of those portable gaming pcs than buying a laptop, they're way too bulky and large
Been a Windows power user for +20years, and I wouldnt change my new 15" Air for NOTHING in the world lol
Dave, your camera looks extra crispy today.
Looking forward to this big shift in Win 11 and gaming - would love to get this class into an enterprise as a premium option! Also interested to see M4 coming soon!
Hope Qualcomm delivers this time
About to Ram & Storage Configuration. I doubt manufacturers would take that risk, there is going to be secondary storage drives 100%. If not, I'd just go Mac/Framework. Especially with the pricing.
RAM will be soldered as they are using LPDDR5X which does not come in a modular form. Also, ARM is basically a smartphone-based chip and they all have soldered storage, so why does that need to change. Many flagship phones will cost as much as these X Elite laptops and no one complains they have soldered storage. So I think that although it is possible to have modular storage, the expense of not having them on-chip, added to a chip already likely to cost $250-$300 would be a bad choice. That is why MS is now using Core Ultra in their business machines as they can use modular SSDs for end-of-life security, and they will use X Elite for only consumers. So you can buy Framework, but that in the UK costs more than most premium laptops so is a poor choice for 99% of potential buyers.
@@andyH_England comparing the storage of a phone to a laptop is a poor comparison. Most storage is used by Photos, which most eventually upload to the cloud anyway. But when it comes to files that are 5, 10, 20 ,50, or even 100GB in size. It adds up and it sucks. Also, Framework is just my choice of Windows laptop. Not a suggestion.
@@andyH_England phones are extremely limited in internal space so soldered storage is simply unavoidable. Most laptops don't have this problem
This guy deserves more than 5M subs! And I got Zenbook OLED 15.6'' and I am super happy with both performance and efficiency.
I've had more than 1 experiences where my macbooks just doesnt last that long (screen issue, charger cable, keyboard). And the (soldered) low RAM configuration also create the impression where we need to upgrade it once the next model comes out. Not to mention the high price, and high repair price :c. Other than that: unpararelled battery life and speaker quality.
Never owned a MacBook until the silicon series CPU’s. Absolute game changer, unrivalled performance to energy ratio’s. A powerful machine that doesn’t need to be constantly plugged in, what’s not to love 😎
As a 2019 razer blade and 2023 Lenovo slim owner, the battery life and fan noise are the major reasons push me away from windows laptops, recently switched to a M1 Max MacBook world finally become quiet 😂 I no longer care about performance benchmarks anymore, they are not an enough standard to represent how good a laptop is
According to some Reddit post: During a Cinebench 2024 test, the M3 Pro on normal power mode used a max of 29w on the CPU & 17w on the GPU. While the 16-core M3 Max used a max of 54w on the CPU and 33w on the GPU. The question: Is this 80W power draw of the high-end SD XE SoC the combined CPU+GPU or CPU only?
keep in mind that the lack of configuration change of RAM size post-purchase has nothing to do with the chip being ARM. All comes down to the manufacturer. There are ARM chips in servers that can take anywhere from 16 GB to 2 TB of RAM tossed in DIMM slots
Anyone else misses the old studio with the lightsaber in the back?
I like ya Dave, but you got it wrong big time here. To be clear: ARM isn't naturally more power-efficient than x86. The singular major difference between these two ISAs in 2024 is that x86 has more instructions. That's basically it at this point. This does require a larger instruction decode block = more silicon spent on it = more power used, but the size of the decode block even in the latest x86-64 CPUs with scads of AVX-512 instructions is still infinitesimally small compared to the GPU, the caches, even the AVX-512 SIMDs themselves-and ARM has its own wide vector units, too. The main reason Apple's chips are so power-efficient is because they are designed with that intention from the ground up. Fully unified, they lack so much of the connective fabric that x86 machines require. They also are designed in such a way that they don't scale up very well with extra power. x86 processors are designed such that their core and fabrics can be configured to handle workloads from 6W to 600W and anywhere in between. Apple has absolutely no answer to something like a Sapphire Rapids or Storm Peak chip, and that's why they are able to make such an efficient processor-it's a client processor, through and through, and exclusively. x86 is much more versatile.
New hair cut is much better. Great vid
I've been waiting for Windows on ARM to get to this point for years! I hope this is it. I hope all the different vendors come out with a mix of baked-in RAM and user replaceable. I know the speeds on Apple are because it's all on one board but it would still be nice to have options.
What about Linux? Can you put any Linux OS on these machines?
You can put Linux on almost anything. Chrome OS and Android and other mobile OS offshoots are Linux based afterall. There are traditional distros for Arm as well, I think I saw Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, and some other distros
There are already plenty of distributions that make an ARM version, just think all the different ones that people put on raspberry-pi. They do have the problem of having way less software options out of the box, many can be just compiled with a different target and should work, but that still will leave a good number of packages that will need modifications to run. For the most part day to day things should work, plenty of user friendly distributions like Ubuntu should work and cover many, many cases but probably not all of them.
the distros with ARM versions are like puppy dog linux no one is going to use thaton these.@@CesarClaveria
You can even put Linux on a toaster
Soldered RAM and SSD is a dealbreaker. Let's hope there will be options, or it's a hard pass for me.
Nobody cares what is hard pass for you
I still have my intel macbook pro 16" and fully specd at that time still works really well for my needs. I dont see myself leaving the x86 for at least anoyher 3 years.
The modern surface ARM CPU laptops have a NVMe slot that’s upgradable.
Windows has a very slight Bluetooth delay with AirPods that isn’t present on Mac OS. It drove me nuts when trying to switch from mac
This sucks. I tried to use my AirPods for a Teams meeting when my headset ran out of juice and felt like my brain was a second behind 😂😂
Yeah it’s atrocious. I thought it was just me
Its maybe because of Apple? Because I used at least 7 different bluetooth headsets, never had that problem. Apple is known to make their devices not working well with other devices.
I haven’t had an issue with Bluetooth delay before using mine with non-Apple devices, but I’ve definitely noticed the microphone sounds absolutely horrendous when using them on windows discord. Fortunately I have an actual headset in my pc most of the time but it’s a bit annoying when I’m not at home.
When I say delay I mean 180ms. I’m really sensitive I know… It was very slight, but apparently it’s as good as it gets with Bluetooth. Apple has delay but they compensate with media by delaying the video to match audio. It’s literally 0ms on KZhead. It’s why zoom still has delay on my Mac because the video is live and cannot be delayed. There is no way to sync video and audio on windows like Mac.