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'Snapdragon 1000' Chip May Be Designed For PCs From the Ground Up (engadget.com)
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 850 processor may be intended for PCs, but it's still a half step -- it's really a higher-clocked version of the same processor you'd find in your phone. The company may be more adventurous the next time, though. From a report: WinFuture says it has obtained details surrounding SDM1000 (possibly Snapdragon 1000), a previously hinted-at CPU that would be designed from the start for PCs. It would have a relatively huge design compared to most ARM designs (20mm x 15mm) and would consume a laptop-like 12W of power across the entire system-on-a-chip. It would compete directly with Intel's low-power Core processors where the existing 835 isn't really in the ballpark. A reference design found in import databases might give a clue as to what you could expect: it'd have up to 16GB of RAM and two 128GB storage modules.
And unless the Snapdragon 1000 is miraculously clocked at something impossible with present technology, like 8,000MHz, any i7 -- even a dualcore mobile one that's basically *shit* -- will completely roast it at running x86 & AMD64 apps.
x86/AMD64 have literally evolved hand-in-hand with Windows for 30 years. Today, "pure" RISC might reduce costs & allow high performance for apps built to run the "RISC" way, but when it comes to maximum balls-to-the-wall brute-force winning performance, AMD64 wins, hands down. A modern best-of-breed AMD64 chip is basically a RISC chip, augmented by thousands of additional specialized instructions to accelerate things that Windows (and Linux) PCs *do*. AMD64 processors are basically now like self-optimizing JIT compilers for x86 assembly, with plenty of additional tricks to accelerate and optimize nearly every chokepoint known to exist in Windows (and Linux).
My phone has a Snapdragon 850 with 4x1.5GHz + 4x2GHz cores, 3 gigs of RAM, and 128 gigs of eMMC SSD. Frankly, Acrobat Viewer runs faster on an ancient, creaky 15 year old Compaq Armada m700 with 500mhz Pentium III, 512mb, and a noname PATA SSD from China (that probabiy has microSD cards hand-soldered to an ASIC inside) than it does on my phone.
When comparing ARM to AMD64, specs alone don't come anywhere CLOSE to telling the real story.
What's that? It's for people who "just" use it for running browser-based apps? Ok, go to walmart.com, amazon.com, or sears.com with the fastest ARM-based phone or tablet you can find, and compare the experience to even a *shit* AMD64-based PC or laptop. The PC or laptop will win, hands-down, because Javascript performance in particular suffers *horribly* on ARM compared to AMD64. Sites like the aforementioned that build pages from the inside-out using Javascript, DOM, and AJAX work just fine on a real computer, but turn into a minefield of delayed clicks and pages that keep reflowing and recomposing more slowly than you can see, but faster than your finger can react once you go to touch something.
ARM is why we can't have nice things like Aero Glass anymore (MS took it away & forced Metro on us because otherwise, Windows would have been unusably slow on crap ARM-based tablets). Dammit, it's almost 2020... we should have UIs with butter-smooth realtime-raytraced refraction & translucency effects by now, not something that looks like a fsck'ing mess of Post-It notes.
That would be NVIDIA's latest ARM SoC at 350 mm2.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The windows emulation might not be any good, but native arm64 benchmarks on my android phone were mostly between half and two thirds the speed of the same benchmarks running on an Intel Core i7-3770.
That's fast enough that speed is no longer the reason my phone isn't my primary computing device. Windows software could be compiled to native ARM code if there was demand for it. Lack of an HDMI output could be fixed (I think a few android phones still support it). Storage space is more difficult, because it should really be modular and SD cards probably aren't quite right (if the hardware even supports them). The battery should really be more modular too.
Linux or BSD driver support for Snapdragon is presumably trash, making the particular chip from the article less useful.
PC used to mean Personal Computer. That could be any architecture. Somewhere along the line (possibly before those Mac vs PC commercials) PC came to be assumed Windows on Intel (most Luddites don't even know about AMD, much less VIA and other x86 competitors) A PC could be SuperH architecture running FreeBSD. IIRC, there was a company that tried to trademark "PC LAPTOPS", but PC had become so associated with Windows and Intel that the examiners sited the use of PC as an adjective.
Bear in mind a phone CPU is optimised for a minuscule battery inside a fanless enclosure. This 1000 series will be tuned for 2-in-1 laptop performance.
That said, Google's venture into ARM64 Chromebooks should result in performance gains on V8 as they fine tune the OS.