Microsoft is sleeping on Qualcomm with their lousy port of Windows to Arm processors…

hypercube33 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure they are sleeping. I have an older version and it can run games and other things just fine, its just over priced and not properly cooled. The driver/firmware support from Lenovo / Qualcomm is purely garbage. You're lucky to get a driver update to fix anything. For months it just overheated and video would start corrupting but that got fixed finally. You cant just go to Qualcomm's website and download new drivers even though it looks like you can - they really dont get how modern GPU's work on Windows - a driver updates to optimize for games is really something important because of how Windows is but the experience is pulling teeth. If the systems were Neo priced (500-700 USD) and had a cooling fan I'd be all on board with these systems. Right now, AMD with unified memory is just the better deal for the $1200 (2025) systems to run Windows and an average workload.

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criticalfault 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

and is Qualcomm is sleeping on Linux?

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seems like not? Judging based on https://github.com/qualcomm-linux something is happening, although I can't say how much. They definitively seem awake at least.

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jeroenhd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The problem with these chips on Linux is that something has been happening for months but you still end up needing to download special editions of ARM Linux images to get these devices to work properly.

Some distros still need extracting Qualcomm firmware from Windows to get Linux to work properly. Audio remains a challenge, like x86 Linux decades ago. Apparently camera stuff works these days but produces images of subpar quality.

These issues also occur on normal Linux. My experience with my Lenovo+Intel laptop was that it took three months after release for the firmware to work properly (and the Nvidia drivers took much longer, but that's my fault for buying something containing Nvidia hardware). Intel managed to do what Qualcomm did in months rather than years.

I hope Qualcomm finally sorts this shit out, I really do, but with the prices of computers these days, I'm going to need to see quite the discount before I'll consider buying anything with a Snapdragon.

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Elixir6419 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

one of the biggest issue i see is the devicetree nonsense. It makes every single laptop and bios version very unique and requires a lot of housekeeping. There are also big chunks of work (as i understand it) to be done around hibernate and decent suspend support.

My experience (wanted to use x13s as daily sriver) is that there was good progress for about a year, until jhovold was leading the charge, but something expired and qualcom as far as i can tell forgot that some progress should happen on x1 and x8c as well as x2.

	▲	gsnedders 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It feels deeply unfortunate that even with Windows on AArch64 requiring ACPI that it still doesn’t suffice for Linux, unlike on x86. And I know a lot of that lies on the vendors, but it does feel unfortunate (from a standardisation/conformance/certification point of view) that Windows requiring it doesn’t make it easy to boot other OSes!

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justincormack 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They run a hypervisor under the OS, and dont support actually running directly on the hardware, its very odd.

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stefan_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, Ubuntu on the previous gen Snapdragon X is still trash.

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reactordev 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

10000000x this. They have been sleeping on Arm since windows phone. I just don’t see them ever having an original thought again.

They could have had a 128core arm chip by now.

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adabyron 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They have original thoughts! It's just that those employees get squashed by other divisions or having to meet short term quarterly profits it seems.

There's also the whole giant trillion dollar company doesn't want to invest and let small ideas grow. They only focus on things that move the needle, which isn't much at the size.

Had Microsoft executed and invested, they could have made a come back imo in both search, mobile & hardware. Unfortunately major lack of leadership or they just don't want those areas.

	▲	reactordev an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No doubt the individuals have thoughts. It’s just corporate never actually does ANY of them. It’s a MBA mill.

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dylan604 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless the chip was called Copilot, they are not thinking anything about it. If was called Copilot, they'd have already figured out how to shove it down your throat.