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Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 850 Platform Targeted For Windows 10 PCs (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Qualcomm's Always-Connected Windows 10 PC initiative with Microsoft kicks into another gear this morning with the announcement of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 Mobile Platform for Windows 10 PCs. Based on what looks to be an optimized version of the Snapdragon 845 specifically tuned for laptops and 2-in-1 convertibles, the Snapdragon 850 promises a 30 percent boost in system-wide performance versus the previous generation Snapdragon 835 platform, while its integrated Snapdragon X20 LTE modem promises peak speeds of 1.2Gbps. When it comes to battery life, Qualcomm says that PCs running the Snapdragon 850 will be able to top 25 hours of runtime. Qualcomm also notes it will have many more OEM partners and a lot more device options to choose from (hopefully at lower price points) this time around. Couple that with Microsoft's new support for the ARM64 SDK in Windows 10, and things could get interesting for this new class of machine. No word on availability just yet, beyond the note that devices will be available in market later this year.
As a matter of fact, they currently do.
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Unless they are going to emulate x86 on arm64, this thing is DOA
You just woke up from a one year sleep or something?
It may not interest you, and if all they run is Windows, it doesn't interest me, but I would LOVE to have an SD845 (something that is available now) laptop that runs Linux. An SD850 would just be a bonus...
I don't do graphics editing on my laptop, or compiling, or (insert computationally intensive task here). I want a laptop that can run for 20 hours.
Hopefully someone like System76 will make a laptop out of one of these.
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10 to 1 that those "native" apps are windows store crap which absolutely nobody cares about.
You beat me to it. The fact that it is Windows 10 only is an automatic deal-breaker for me.
While I certainly understand some corp dudes/dudettes are stuck, but I will NEVER run any Windows later than 7, and that only for a specific DAW software solution.
I want an OS, not a continually soul-sucking, ever-shifting, "cloud-based" system for my personal use. Apps like gmail, sure. Base OS? Nah.
This has so many interesting possibilities. But when they say Windows 10 they kill all of them.
Two questions. What makes this device Windows 10 only, and are you aware that Microsoft backported a significant amount of the evil into Windows 7?
There are already some Windows 10 ARM laptops out there. x86 software is run via emulation. From the tests I've seen, it's rather slow though, so you can't realistically run heavy tasks on them. Unfortunately, these ARM laptops are rather expensive. They do have good battery life, though.
so are they doing x86 emulation? If so what's the performance going to be like? I run VMs on an i5 7400 and it's a bit laggy.
Also instant on isn't a big deal to me. I've got a decent SSD and I'm at a desk top in 5 seconds. That leaves battery life. I'll confess I run a desktop. Battery life isn't an issue for me. OTOH this article says no x64 apps and weak performance in x86 apps. And the laptops aren't cheap. They're $500-$700 a pop
I'm just questioning who these are for. OTOH this might be the OEMs & Microsoft sending Intel a message.
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It looks like somebody modded you down and I don't know why. The linked article didn't exactly make it clear emulation was used to run x86 code. I had to track down an article from PCworld to find that out. I kind of figured on the performance.
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Unless they are going to emulate x86 on arm64, this thing is DOA
You just woke up from a one year sleep or something?
Make that a 31 year sleep, x86 emulators have been available for ARM since 1987.
1988 review
Manual for v. 1.7 (1991)
DOS era ARJ is still my most favourite archive program - though it is not the most versatile in today's win7/10 environment.
Prior to Coffee Lake, the mobile i5 was just a mobile i3 with turbo boost. i.e. A faster clocked i3. That's it. In no way was the obscene markups for an i5 laptop over an i3 laptop justified. The fact that Macbooks were available with an i5 but not an i3 should've been a huge tip-off that there was an obscene profit margin for little performance gain there. Intel really milked that cash cow for roughly a decade. (It was probably driven by people wrongly assuming that what they knew about desktop processors also held for mobile processors. The desktop i5 was a quad core vs. the desktop i3 being a dual core, so was a worthy upgrade. But both the mobile i3 and i5 were dual cores.)
With Coffee Lake and the Kaby Lake refresh (i5-8xxx), most of the mobile i5s are now quad cores. So they're now a worthwhile upgrade over a mobile i3.
Smart enough to take MS payola for going along?
Microsoft realizes they're not beholden to Intel. Intel needs Microsoft more than Microsoft needs Intel. While it's been a profitable relationship for nearly 40 years, Intel is facing serious competition at the lower end from ARM ever since computers became "fast enough" that most people can get most of their computing needs done with a low-end computer. Microsoft is making sure they have a finger in every pie. If the Intel ship sinks, they don't want it to take Windows down with it. So they're doing what they can to make sure Windows and its API is hardware-agnostic and can run on both Intel/AMD and ARM.
Whether Windows 10 for the Snapdragon 850 sells well or not is immaterial to Microsoft. They are simply hedging their bets to insure their Windows cash cow survives regardless of whether the winner of the processor war ends up being Intel, AMD, or ARM.
And partial x64 support is coming soon, .
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Comparing the Kryo 385 (Cortext A75 derived) at 2.95GHz to a Kryo 280 (Cortex A73 derived) at 2.9GHz
Not compared to any competitors products.
Windows 10 is a huge resource hog. On a new (supposedly fast) HP laptop, I see CPU usage spike to 25% with no user applications running. It also needs 3 GB of RAM for the OS alone (while offering no advantage that I can see over Windows 7).
W10 on a machine that has to emulate x86 is going to stink.
So... when you perform the initial OS settings configuration, you choose what you want to sent to Microsoft. You can choose "Send nothing" or you can choose to give them enough information to allow Cortana to adapt to your behavior like Google does. Will Microsoft sell your data? I suppose there's a chance. I think it's far more likely that the revenue it would generate would be nothing in comparison to the issues it would stir up with their cloud business which is their real money maker these days.
Also, if you understand the concept of Microsoft Graph, you understand why the data is being send to the cloud. It actually makes perfect sense technically. The issue is that it's Microsoft getting the data. Linux will never have something as cool and useful as Graph because it would require collecting the data somewhere to make it work.
Windows 10 as a platform is actually very nice. I have to admit it's had some ups and downs, but overall it's still nowhere near as bad as MacOS with regards to usability. Also it has Linux built into it as a first class citizen. It's actually absolutely lovely. As soon as Microsoft sorts out compatibility between Linux and Windows graphics, it will be a thing of beauty. I'm hoping Microsoft cuts a deal with Ubuntu or someone else to run Windows on Linux as nicely as Linux runs on Windows.
If you're not a power user and have no need for wide-spread cloud integration of your stuff... that's fine. Do what you need to do. I see you use gmail, I might recommend Pine as a good alternative. There are some of us who use a computer for more than just surfing the web and watching Naruto.
I'm using the latest Surface Book with an i7, GTX 1060, 16GB, etc... I can highly recommend this machine as being well suited for performance and battery life. As a matter of fact, the battery life and performance often improves as Windows update brings in the BIOS/firmware updates as well.
.NET Core work REALLY well on these laptops.
I'm also considering one of these laptops for a hobby project. I do a lot of ARM development for Raspberry Pi. And I mean a lot. I had planned on building a 2000-3000 device cloud using Raspberry Pi clusters with a Cisco 3560 switch to tie them together in groups of 3-4 units. Yesterday, I managed to replace the Cisco switch with a Banana Pi router platform running fd.io, frr. That was a massive cost savings and it got me Cisco DMVPN support from the Banana Pi as well.
Another major change we made is to add another 20-50,000 Orange Pi Zeros to the cloud we're building. I suspect by the time we're done, I'll have a 500,000 device cloud. These will all be running on Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi and Orange Pi. Though at this quantity we may just work with the guys at Banana Pi to build what we want specifically.
So that said, it would be really nice to have a laptop which I can use to develop code on and test performance. Visual Studio Code and
I have to agree with you though... every time I touch the long battery life laptops that sacrifice performance for battery life it's like being on an old Nokia telephone. Sure the battery last 4 days, but if you're surfing the web, you'll need that long to get the page to download because Nokia swore that unlike Windows Phone, they don't need a real processor, enough RAM or an MMU on the phone... oh... and I was one of the idiots writing the web browser for the Nokia phones. Every other one of our customers were like "We want to build the ultimate mobile experience. We'll give you the RAM you need and the performance you need to make the web work" and Nokia's like "If you use ARM and Symbian you don't need RAM or CPU performance because everyone in the whole world will make an entirely separate web page just for our phones".
Qualcomm processor unquestionably gives more processing power at very less power consumption compared to Intel and the result is more control on the app and file execution, good multitasking ability and most important low power consumption great battery backup with less amount of heat.
I would be surprised if it didn't support Linux, because they will surely want to support Android.
Of course, the drivers will probably be binary blobs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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It will suffer from the same "range anxiety" that electric cars do.
Objectively, range anxiety is kind of bogus for 85% of the driving people do but because some small number of trips don't factor into the car's range, people say electric cars aren't good enough.
Substitute "performance" for "range" and you have the ARM laptop problem. For a lot of people it would be fine but because some people will need to run x86 apps and they will run slow, many people will assume its not as useful and stick with x86 laptops.
In the main, developers seem unable/unwilling to provide parallel support for cross-architecture applications and unless the market decides to shift to ARM you wind up with this fallback to x86.
It's win10-only because Qualcomm won't release open drivers/specs, that probably won't change because of the embedded LTE modem. And I'm guessing there's no BIOS/UEFI on the thing, which I expect does not make installing something else impossible, but it certainly does not make it easy.
In win7 you can still choose not to install any given update, all the spyware updates and win10-forced-upgrade updates are in my WSUS blacklist, for example.
Of course, the drivers will probably be binary blobs.
Are there any ARM vendors actually providing full driver sources? nVidia made noises about Tegra GPU sources (outright stating that Tegra was not encumbered like GeForce was, and they were capable of such a release) but... ah yes, thank you google. Wow, nVidia released Tegra driver sources in February. Alas, all Tegra SoCs are allegedly vulnerable to both MELTDOWN and SPECTRE... all three variants, too. Whee! nVidia has put out a bulletin about these vulnerabilities, but note that there is not a whisper about Tegra anywhere in that document.
Is it presumptive to assume that their attempt to pretend Tegra doesn't exist effectively means that Tegra no longer exists? RIP my TF201.
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The Raspberry Pi is probably as close as you can get to a fully open source device. The boot ROM is still proprietary but I think pretty much everything else can be used with open source drivers now.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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So buy a ChromeBook then and install Linux.
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Great! Just another chip / os combo to process all these adverts, hopefully faster?
Disons que si les applications ou les logiciels sont correctement codés sous ARM, ils prendront beaucoup moins d'espace dans le RAM et le stockage tout en permettant les mêmes fonctionnalités à une fréquence plus basse par rapport à x86 ... ^^
Mais à condition de ne pas s'appuyer sur Windows ou Microsoft en général ...
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Let's say that if the apps or software are correctly coded under ARM they will take much less space in ram and storage while allowing the same features at lower frequency compared to x86 ... ^^
But that is on the condition that it is not based on Windows or Microsoft in general ...