Discussion Qualcomm Snapdragon Thread

[adroc_thurston]

Lots of older games

Tens. Out of thousands.

Nintendo becoming open to more hardcore type 3rd party games for Switch may pay dividends in the future for native games on WoA.

That's always a very separate codebase running either Vulkan or that low-level NV API (NVN?).

 

[Joe NYC]

For now at least, but I certainly don't see MS being in a rush to tether themselves to Qualcomm the same way they have been to Intel all these years.

More likely they would wait until QC and software partners did the heavy lifting of making WoA viable in the long term, and then switch to ARM permanently with their own custom SoCs to further follow Apple's business model.

I don't see it is the lack of Microsoft's of SoC that is standing between them and world domination. I think it is the management of the Surface division, and broadly the entire client part of Microsoft.

They can't sell Surface even while having the Microsoft license for free and wile having the Microsoft name on the sticker...

 

[adroc_thurston]

I don't see it is the lack of Microsoft's of SoC that is standing between them and world domination. I think it is the management of the Surface division, and broadly the entire client part of Microsoft.

They can't sell Surface even while having the Microsoft license for free and wile having the Microsoft name on the sticker...

Surfaces are an odd job, they're not available in many markets are generally are overpriced for what they offer.

 

[soresu]

I don't see it is the lack of Microsoft's of SoC that is standing between them and world domination. I think it is the management of the Surface division, and broadly the entire client part of Microsoft.

They can't sell Surface even while having the Microsoft license for free and wile having the Microsoft name on the sticker...

True.

The Nokia disaster showed that they aren't so hot on product control, albeit being Windows mobile rather than Android was probably a big part of that failure.

 

[adroc_thurston]

The Nokia disaster

WP disaster started before that, with WP7 having initially (I don't remember if it was added postfactum, pre-WP8) native 3rd party apps, only Silverlight garbage.
Then WP8 itself forced existing WP7 phones into legacy mode.
MS basically pressed the reboot button on their mobile efforts twice in span of two years, thus alienating any developer base it could've had.

 

[SarahKerrigan]

WP disaster started before that, with WP7 having initially (I don't remember if it was added postfactum, pre-WP8) native 3rd party apps, only Silverlight garbage.
Then WP8 itself forced existing WP7 phones into legacy mode.
MS basically pressed the reboot button on their mobile efforts twice in span of two years, thus alienating any developer base it could've had.

WP7 never got non-Silverlight APIs. Native APIs came with WP8, along with the switch to NT.

 

[soresu]

WP disaster started before that, with WP7 having initially (I don't remember if it was added postfactum, pre-WP8) native 3rd party apps, only Silverlight garbage.
Then WP8 itself forced existing WP7 phones into legacy mode.
MS basically pressed the reboot button on their mobile efforts twice in span of two years, thus alienating any developer base it could've had.

Mostly just sad that they effectively killed my favourite phone maker 😒

 

[adroc_thurston]

WP7 never got non-Silverlight APIs. Native APIs came with WP8, along with the switch to NT.

Oh yeah, gigabrain move from MS it was.

Mostly just sad that they effectively killed my favourite phone maker 😒

Nokia became suicidal and meandered in the dark way before their commitment to Windows Phone.

 

[poke01]

I don't see it is the lack of Microsoft's of SoC that is standing between them and world domination. I think it is the management of the Surface division, and broadly the entire client part of Microsoft.

They can't sell Surface even while having the Microsoft license for free and wile having the Microsoft name on the sticker...

Microsoft can’t even sell consoles. Forget their computers.

 

[poke01]

Vulkan or that low-level NV API (NVN?).

Yep, NVN and soon to be NVN2 when Switch 2 comes out.

P.S Nintendo had a great direct today, gonna plug that in somehow lol

 

[adroc_thurston]

Nintendo had a great direct today, gonna plug that in somehow lol

Having video games to show really is a boon in this day and age.
But even Xbox showcase was aight relative to how little else everyone else showed.

Microsoft can’t even sell consoles. Forget their computers.

Consoles are a different issue, Spencer is too hands off with studio management.
Letting Todd commit to Starfield when BGS sits on two infinitely more popular IPs is lmao

 

[Joe NYC]

WP disaster started before that, with WP7 having initially (I don't remember if it was added postfactum, pre-WP8) native 3rd party apps, only Silverlight garbage.
Then WP8 itself forced existing WP7 phones into legacy mode.
MS basically pressed the reboot button on their mobile efforts twice in span of two years, thus alienating any developer base it could've had.

Exactly. And even with that legacy, it was a fresh start with WP8, and Nutella dropped it like a hot potato, without giving it a chance to catch on.

Now Nutella says it was one of his biggest mistakes. Which I agree it was. Phone market is a strategic market and can be (could have been) a seamless extension of desktop. So that's gone.

What does WoA / WARM bring to the table? Certainly nothing in the phone arena in any foreseeable future.

But putting all this weight behind WoA not going to undo that mistake of dropping the ball on phone market. It could only help Arm could deliver what x86 can't. But between Lunar Lake and Strix Point, this whole WoA is just redundant.

 

[adroc_thurston]

without giving it a chance to catch on.

It never had any, iOS and Android both were reaching critical mass by early 2013.
Pressuring the reboot button twice in the span of two years was a BAD idea. plain and simple.
All they had to do was to make WP7 NT-based from the get-go with native SDK and continuing the multi-vendor push strategy from the WP7 launch window instead of effectively committing to single source (Nokia).

What does WoA / WARM bring to the table?

Freedom from Wintel. Or at least that was the idea.

But between Lunar Lake and Strix Point, this whole WoA is just redundant.

Yeah, bad timing on QC side of things.
But WoA efforts, persistent as they are, so far always been like that.
It's either mid parts or just stuff sitting in the wrong market segment.

Stuffing pre-8cx g3 parts into Very Expensive Devices instead of $600 !netbooks was the biggest, dumbest market misread one could ever pull off.

 

[Joe NYC]

Microsoft can’t even sell consoles. Forget their computers.

Yup, and one has to ask why put all the effort into incompatible console in the first place if Microsoft already had the Windows gaming market, fractioning that market further.

Steam shows a different approach can work just as well.

Microsoft, in general, completely mishandled native Windows environment for application development. And outright sabotaged sales of applications for Windows by the dumb Windows Store, which hardly anyone uses.

Compare that to what Steam managed to do independent of any help from Microsoft and Windows developers. And aside from the monopolistic practices of Apple and Google, their stores help distribute software for their ecosystems.

 

[Joe NYC]

It never had any, iOS and Android both were reaching critical mass by early 2013.
Pressuring the reboot button twice in the span of two years was a BAD idea. plain and simple.
All they had to do was to make WP7 NT-based from the get-go with native SDK and continuing the multi-vendor push strategy from the WP7 launch window instead of effectively committing to single source (Nokia).

It was an uphill battle, that's for sure.

Freedom from Wintel. Or at least that was the idea.

Which Microsoft could have partially achieved if it had given AMD a chance, instead of shooting AMD in the foot.

Yeah, bad timing on QC side of things.
But WoA efforts, persistent as they are, so far always been like that.
It's either mid parts or just stuff sitting in the wrong market segment.

Stuffing pre-8cx g3 parts into Very Expensive Devices instead of $600 !netbooks was the biggest, dumbest market misread one could ever pull off.

It seems MSFT is still playing games, pushing Arm ahead of x86. Giving 0% market share Arm "exclusive features", and apparently Window license discounts / rebates.

I wonder if it is possible to shill WoA into success by throwing money at it. In a way, taxing x86 and subsidizing Arm...

 

[adroc_thurston]

It was an uphill battle, that's for sure.

Wasn't a battle, it was dead before it was ever alive.
Just a chain of boneheaded decisions from MS while comp was reaching critical mass across different segments.

Which Microsoft could have partially achieved if it had given AMD a chance, instead of shooting AMD in the foot.

WoA devices shipped 2017.
in 2017, AMD had RAVEN which is lmao.
remember, AMD had no viable parts before Renoir and in general AMD execution was a big ?.

It seems MSFT is still playing games, pushing Arm ahead of x86. Giving 0% market share Arm "exclusive features", and apparently Window license discounts / rebates.

yes they want to make WoA real for strictly "we hate Intel" reasons.

 

[Joe NYC]

Wasn't a battle, it was dead before it was ever alive.

WoA devices shipped 2017.
in 2017, AMD had RAVEN which is lmao.

By that, I meant recently. Instead of putting so much behind the most recent incarnation of WoA, Microsoft could have achieved more independence from Intel by giving more of a chance to AMD on the client side.

It seems like some sort of extreme marriage dysfunction, where instead of a divorce / break up, one party goes even deeper into bed with the dysfunctional partner, and when things get worse, comes out as gay.

It seems like this is what Microsoft did...

yes they want to make WoA real for strictly "we hate Intel" reasons.

haha, see above.

 

[adroc_thurston]

By that, I meant recently. Instead of putting so much behind the most recent incarnation of WoA, Microsoft could have achieved more independence from Intel by giving more of a chance to AMD on the client side.

sunk cost etc, plus still, freedom from Wintel is worth a lot.

It seems like some sort of extreme marriage dysfunction, where instead of a divorce / break up, one party goes even deeper into bed with the dysfunctional partner, and when things get worse, comes out as gay.

Well, MS is betting on other vendors than Qualcomm now so kinda?

 

[SpudLobby]

Personally I don’t mind AMD and Intel, just dislike X86 as a model. Opening competition up is good. Is Arm ideal either? No, but an order of magnitude less bad. You can license the ISA (many have tried and failed to do much with that ofc) and Cortex. And technically speaking it isn’t a disaster like RV — plus has some desktop backing and momentum by now.

But I don’t think X86 is going anywhere and I don’t need it to die, just for Arm’s ISA to takeoff as viable on Windows (Linux in more ways it already is).

 

[podspi]

My initial impressions:
After a rocky OOBE (multiple crashes, including one hard crash that made me question if the hardware was bad) - which included a lot of updates - everything is up and running! For the most part, everything works fine, and the machine feels very quick despite it being the lowest-end Elite SKU.

The only compatibility issue I've run into so far is Anaconda, and even that installed and somewhat works. I do think there is an issue with SmartScreen or something, a lot of apps can't be downloaded in Edge, complaining about a failed virus scan. No issues downloading these applications with Firefox, so I am guessing this is an Edge/MS issue.

Overall I am pretty satisfied with the performance. The big questions are: How well will sleep work (I hate that this is a thing on Windows laptops), and how long will the battery last.

Haven't been able to play with the NPU much yet, but I am looking forward to seeing what can be done. At the moment it isn't terribly useful without Recall. I cannot imagine what it must have been like at MS for the last few weeks trying to fix up Recall to get it ready for launch. It really is the killer app for the NPU, IMHO. Generating pictures is fun (and I know a lot of people have subscriptions to online AI services so I am sure it is valuable to some people) until it isn't, and I don't do video calls.

Edit: This is on the HP Omnibook X

Edit2: It isn't SmartScreen or Edge, it was Mcafee! After uninstalling Mcafee, including the Webadvisor app, which is separate from the extension and the main scanner, downloads in Edge work fine.

 

[Doug S]

It wasn't a year before but 5 months before M1 launch. But yeah they did release a dev kit at wwdc june 2020 and M1 came out nov 2020.

Some major developers like Adobe had it well before the "official" rollout.

 

[Doug S]

3. Qualcomm made claims it must have known would fall flat on it's face extremely quickly (see: every time they tried to compare their iGPU to Intel/AMD when in reality it's not even close to being competitive)

Given the long timeline between the first announcement and actually getting systems in the hands of reviewers, I expect there were some issues that were believed/hoped would be fixed before launch.

The question is what was the nature of the issues. If they're software related, then maybe some new GPU driver will come out and give a big boost at some point. If they're hardware related, and they thought "the next stepping or two will fix it" and they were wrong, then that's another matter entirely.

It seems like the CPU itself (the part the Nuvia guys designed) is pretty solid. Not quite as good as advertised, but Apple had spent years acquiring technology that helps with doing low power designs - stuff like what they acquired from Intrinsity, for example. Maybe they don't have access to the equivalent quality of tools at Qualcomm and a "similar" design isn't quite as good as a result.

At least if you believe Charlie, or at least believe there are some kernels of truth in what he's saying, it sounds like it is mostly software that's made their launch a flop (by the standards of what was hyped/promised) Not just Qualcomm's software, but also Microsoft's, which they can't control. Software problems can be addressed over time, but you only get one chance to have your M1 moment.

 

[FlameTail]

Geeekerwan is cooking...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1803238313496813816

 

[FlameTail]

X Elite is not even good for AI?

Copilot+ PC launch live blog: Testing the new Snapdragon Laptops

The first group of Copilot+ PCs, powered by Snapdragon X CPUs, are out and we're benchmarking them.

www.tomshardware.com

I'm also trying to use the standard Whisper AI python library, which is not maintained by Qualcomm. But that isn't working on this hardware. It gives a Numpy error because apparently Whisper requries Numpy, a popular Python library, that's less than version 2. But Numpy less than version 2 won't install on Arm64 hardware, at least as far as I can tell.

I'm still working on these problems, but the level of difficulty and awful documentation suggests that it may not be possible to build working AI apps in Python for Snapdragon. Qualcomm's AI hub is full of proofs of concepts of hundreds of models, from those that to image generation to pose estimation to transcription and yet, instead of showing users how to actually use these models in applications, it offers demos with its own pre-chosen audio, images, etc. Intel actually has useful libraries and documentation, however poorly written, for its OpenVINO libraries. Qualcomm, not so much. I'm very frustrated.

 

[adroc_thurston]

X Elite is not even good for AI?

Wait for Nvidia SOC for that.
Well, and Strix-halo, SPIRV support will be mainlined by then.