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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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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".