Apple is doing this alone. of course if all x86 developers put more effort on it, they must do better than Apple. But the truth is if Apple doesn’t dominate the market, x86 side especially Mircosoft won’t change.
It's already used in handheld devices without the annoying fan noise, those are called "smartphones". Still can't understand the hype of companies wasting funds and silicon on making Windows work with ARM when Windows already worked perfectly without it.
@@padmabharali1306then battery life will not be the strength of these kind of laptop. then why customers don’t buy 100% x86 compatible Intel / Amd laptops?
Here's my take for the Snapdragon X Elite laptops. It's a good proper introduction of ARM into Windows ecosystem. But, the price for these laptops are eyebrows raising.
Yeah these are good for doing spreadsheets, web browsing and 2D applications. They are asking $1,300 for this! I wouldn't pay more than $800 for their top version.
Great video. Keep in mind that only the CPU instructions need to be emulated. When it comes to the GPU, it is using the same API calls to DirectX11/DirectX12 that x86/x64 games already do and that gets translated into the GPU's specific native code anyway.
@@Codyslx a similar priced macbook air can do office + all of those blender things, then why would someone even buy these office laptops? Perhaps only for the os, windows and maybe better display
I'm writing this post on this very laptop. It forced me to restart the setup once (because it refused to recognize mouse clicks on the permissions section near the end) but has worked fine after that. I was happy to find that there are native ARM versions of the major web browsers (though you might have to look around their respective download pages to find them), and even some games (World of Warcraft, not sure of BG3, though there is an ARM version for Mac.) And the screen is beautiful.
Of course it will, these laptops are not gaming devices. I bought a Pro 11 and it's super snappy, but it's not good for gaming. For gaming on the go I have a Rog Ally.
Once a few driver updates go through and we see ARM native games with optimization for Adreno, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing literally doubles its performance.
@@MadafakinRio Microsoft should use their power as a major games developer and publisher to actually port some of their own games to ARM. If not they are not serious about ARM.
The prices for these are terrible for how much stuff just doesn't work or when it does work it works poorly. Idk what Qualcomm and Microsoft are smoking.
Eh, give it time. As long as they don't abandon it, they might end up being pretty good. The m1 wasn't perfect on release and a ton of stuff wasn't supported on it early on.
I feel like Chromebooks are what Windows are targeting, at least in the short-term as they can get reasonably good performance from a cheap Mediatek tablet SOC, and as the software matures they can aim for the more casual gaming laptop market that also has excellent battery life.
@@ROcheaterwe sure give them time, but we must not spending money on such a beta product, we are not content creators, if we buy a laptop we should consider it can fully fulfill our needs. If it will become perfect in the future, then we will buy it in the future.
It's about as good as first-gen products get. Apple's first ARM-based Macbooks at launch were pretty slow and janky, too. Eventually costs will come down and performance will get better. It's a first step away from Microsoft's over-reliance on Intel CPUs, but power users and gamers are probably going to want to look elsewhere while the Prism Emulator improves and more developers get onboard with native ARM apps.
They might improve performance via Microsoft optimising Prism emulation layer, otherwise any drivers that come from Qualcomm will most likely not be targetted at gaming in any way as this chip is not intended for that purpose.
@@SOF006 Qualcomm said they would have an application similar to GeForce Experience to optimize games settings, and users would get GPU driver updates from there every month. I don't know if Qualcomm is able to deliver trully optimized drivers, but I'd like to see them try, like Intel is doing with their Arc GPUs.
I wish ETA would came back couple months later to test out Snapdragon X product and see if the driver update they have promised do actually improve the performance of the device down the line
That’s pretty sick performance when you account for the fact that it’s translating from x86 to arm instructions. I’m sure it’s going to get better as software updates come out. Are there any games that have both a native arm variant and a x86 variant you can test to better show the impact?
I have to disagree with you here. I don't want to be to completely trash it, but to my eye, the performance is pretty bad considering the pretty low settings and resolution used. Cyberpunk at 720p with all low settings? Even an older $300 handheld like the Steam Deck can handle that. In fact, I think the Steam Deck can do most of what we've seen here. For now, x86 architecture and a dedicated GPU are definitely the way to go if you want to play games, especially if you have $1,300 or more to spend.
@@Codyslx (Edit: to clarify I am still purely talking about gaming here) Sadly, the battery life of this laptop isn't so amazing when gaming either. It doesn't matter that it has to translate; the end product should just be good, and this is bad. Additionally, high-end and mid-range Nvidia and AMD GPUs vastly outperform the best Qualcomm and Apple ARM chips, even without a translation layer. The whole point of ARM is that it should be efficient and have good battery life with at least decent performance. In my opinion, it does not deliver, with this terrible gaming performance not even outperforming a $300, 2-year-old handheld. Let's hope for some improvements
@Nucleosynthese It's not a gaming laptop so no shit. This chip was meant for office work where you needed a days worth of battery life. The 300 dollar handheld does not need to translate to a whole different architecture. Expecting a first gen arm chip to outperform a steam deck, especially one that isn't even a gaming chip is delusional. These laptops and apple's macbooks are addressed at people who want to be productive. That's the market these are going for, not gamers.
I'm sorry, but I was talking about gaming performance 😅. Sadly that aspect is just terrible. Sure, ARM can't compete with dedicated GPU's, even without translation (look at the relatively bad graphics and performance of native Resident Evil on Apple silicon compared to similarly priced hardware with dedicated Nvidia/AMD GPUs), but this is even far below that level. I'm sorry, but many reviews are rightfully negative about this product. There's a long way to go for this to become viable for consumers who want to do more than just office work and play some games on their laptops.
Here's the hot take 12:38 "We're emulating x86 Application on an ARM Chip" Here's list of Instructions Sets that Computer Video Games in the past 20 years is ACTUALLY using SSE3 SSSE3 SSE4.1 SSE4.2 AVX AVX2 AVX512 . Windows, Linux, MacOS doesn't matter, those are what games actually use under the hood. Reminder: Those instructions set I mentioned is NOT TIED with x86 architecture. Because ARM and RISC-V also have those instructions set in their SoC. How do you think mobile games like Genshin running on Android? That's right, ARM SSE4.2 Vulkan So le'ts get this VERY Clear. 1. Why do they (Qualcomm) even bother to include Those specific instructions set in their Spec-sheet of this particular chip (SoC)? 2. If those Instructions sets exist within the Snapdragon X Elite chip, why do they need "Emulating" ? it's not like the games actually checking for "Chip's architecture" No, when you click on a game to run, the very first thing it checks is "is the necessary instructions set exist?" This is the reason why modern games simply refusing to run on Intel Core2Quad CPU simply because the CPU is lacking newer instructions set, even if you have Windows 10 installed. So if Snapdragon X Elite "really" need emulation to run any kind of Native Windows Games, then it is not even Utilizing those instructions set I wrote above. Perhaps the only instructions set being used in this video is AVX2 or AVX512 because that's what Translation layer utilize at 02:06 But that totally defeat the point of "why Qualcomm even bothered including all those instructions set in their spec sheet"
Terrible misinformation. SSE2-SSE4.2, AVX-AVX512 are all instruction set extensions of the x86_64 architecture and ARE TIED to it. They are ASIMD/Vector extensions, and nearly all major cpu architectures do have similar ASIMD and Vector instruction set extensions in their own respective ISAs. for ARM, SIMD comes in the form NEON and the vector set instructions are SVE128-SVE512. These are similar to x86's SSE and AVX respectively. Mobile games like you mention on android that target the arm64 cpu architecture do not use SSE, they cannot use SSE, because SSE is not part of or even related to the ARM ISA. Some game engines and game releases recently have been built against the AVX requirement, but some of these games may not even end up using the AVX instruction set and can that requirement can be bypassed and some games can still run on a case by case basis.
I've seen similar stutter using Box86 on a raspberry pi. It usually clears up over the course of a play session. I think there's some kind of instruction cache being built in the background rather than a shader cache as the stutter occurs when a new thing happens moreso than when a new shader is drawn. The more CPU bound a game is, the more you're going to see that stutter, I'd wager.
Thanks, this video was very informative. For a first generation product it is impressive, but I game way too much to get one of these right now. Next year when the generation two models come out I hope to see big improvements in the area of gaming.
I'm not disappointed at the overall gaming experience of X Elite. That's like being disappointed at that of a Macbook. The processor was never going to pleasantly surprise us. I'm disappointed that this is probably not the most advanced Adreno GPU ever made. Ray tracing is still trivial for these iGPUs (and most graphics cards LOL) but its absence along with the lack of DX12 Ultimate support suggests other features are missing compared to available flagship smartphones. Plus the ARMv8.7a CPU cores were nerfed by the legal drama with ARM.
Yeah at this point just not worth it, because to be honest a lot of modern x86 architecture can fit in these ultra lightweight form factors, and that was a big selling point when Lenovo started making Snapdragon computers on Windows ARM.
Really informative video. Would be interesting to see how this performance with DXVK as Snapdragon chips have support for Vulkan. If you get the time, try it put and see if there's any improvements! Thanks.
I beg of you, please please PLEASE test Sonic frontiers. Both ARM Mac’s and Android have a lighting bug and I want to see if the bug is on Windows on ARM as well.
eGPU does not work, because there's no Nvidia or AMD drivers for ARM yet. But if they do release drivers it could probably work, as there is proper USB 4 support on these devices. There's also rumors that Nvidia are working on their on CPU/GPU chips for ARM laptops.
for a laptop cpu that isnt meant for gaming, being able to play Spider-Man and Fallout 4 above 30fps is pretty good! Also may I ask what you use for the capture? Thanks and keep up the great work!
Can't say I'm disappointed with performance. It's a laptop running a new processor with new drivers and translation software that "isn't there" yet. Looking forward to the arm future on windows based laptops.
I wonder why though when there are better X86 chips that can get more performance, compatibility and very close battery life at a cheaper price. It seems like a far reaching senseless pitch from Microsoft. I think Qualcomm should have made this better before launching them because they are not worth it yet.
I have been watching every single video you have produced in the past month or so, and tell you the truth what's inspired me to watch your videos is that in every single video you produce yourself there is something new on it man keep up the good work
I'm trying not to be too judgmental yet, because hey, translation optimizations could improve the performance in some games substantially and maybe this does turn out to be a competent, low-spec gaming chip. That being said, I'm not too optimistic here. I was more excited at the prospect of strong performance in a small package, more-so than ARM architecture, and may wait to see how Lunar Lake Xe-2 turns out.
I think a handheld Windows ARM in the size of a Switch Lite would be nice, as the battery life wouldn't be horrendous like it is with the current x86 handhelds.
@@astrahcat1212 I don't disagree with you there; if they can work things out I could see this being a nice option. For my use case though, I'm mostly looking at tablet laptops for drawing / animating that can do gaming on the side. I'm excited for progress on either the ARM or x86 front honestly. I'm not picky and am just waiting for one to improve or the other to release in a device that's my preferred tablet/laptop/convertible form factor haha.
I`m curious to see how the gpu performance is going to improve over time, and especially on next year`s chips, and on the chips mediatek are supposedly also developping for pc, because I can pretty much guarantee that it`s only a matter of time before we start seeing arm gaming handhelds, and if efficiency and battery life is as good as is hyoed about, than I`m vary interested to see them arrive, and to see what they can do once software optimisations become a thing
Presumably it will get better as companies optimize for ARM chips, but I wonder what that means for applications in general. If developers now have to optimize for both ARM and x86, surely that just takes up resources and results in either longer development teams or less optimized versions of both ARM and x86 (unless they prioritize one).
I remember them mentioning "coming to "all PC form factors," including desktops." I really am looking forward to the desktop part :3 Hope they won't mess up
Sadly. No one in the game industry is wanting to port their games to mobile even if it has that power. Most current phones are already stronger than the switch.
During the initial announcement it was mentioned that there would be support for eGPUs unlike Apple silicon. Is this something that you've tested? I'd love to see a video attempting to connect one among other experiments. It would also be cool if you were able to boot another OS on to the laptop via the BIOs. Having something like Linux, Chrome OS, or Android boot on these chips would be really interesting,
NVIDIA AMD and Intel should really consider ARM64 market. All Tensor, Exynos, Kirin, Mediatek, Unisoc, and Snapdragon need to do is increasing their performance which they always do every year.
Great review! Hopefully Qualcomm can get this optimized. We really need another competitor out there. AMD makes great chips. Intel does too, but the pricing has gone off the rails
I can't believe Windows on ARM is finally viable! After the mess they made on the past few attempts, I wondered if they could pull it off. The good things is, everyone is very positive about it and we have to remember this is only Gen1 of the X Elite. Hopefully MediaTek and others will also bring some competition to the game!
I think the Ryzen HX AI 370 is gonna be the laptop chip-of-the-year, it should 2x the GPU on this qualcomm snapdragon in most cases, but will fall short in battery life / video playback.
It would be interesting to test an app or game that has both ARM and x86 versions, run them on the same laptop, and compare the difference to see what is the performance hit from using Prism emulation.
Did you try touching the screen during gaming and benchmark tests? One youtuber encountered a bug with a laptop with SD X chipset that touching the screen increases performance for a while.
@@Chalky. Maybe, but when he was also showing the Apple ARM benchmarks, he was using the ARM version of Cinebench, not x86, so I think he should do the same for WIndows for it to be fair
Any news on when Plus version are coming? I wanna know how those will perform. And more importantly what they will cost. Performance isn't that big of a deal for me because I'm probably still going to keep my gaming PC around in my den. But having a light media station that I can lug around and my wife can do some work on will be great.
Excited for the new generation but let down by the product launch tho. I think the laptops unveiled outside the Surface Laptop 13.8 which hasnt had a proper review yet because microsoft wont let folks talk about it yet. All the laptops so far unveiled have such a lack of IO. I really dont wanna carry more dongles and crap around that I dont need. Something that others have also stated is that sometimes higher wattage actually didnt give better FPS gains, apparently it was more optimized on a lot of applications for lower wattages than higher power. ETA said "if he can get a higher end X Elite chip device" Does this mean Qualcomm confirmed if there will be more models of the x Elite? Was thinking it would be like M1 is to SD X Plus as M1 Plus/Pro is to SD X Elite.
Yeah these are so over hyped but never bad to have more options. Since this is first good attempt maybe 2-3 generations from now it will be worth using all around
The true is that if everyone wants good performance and better battery life at the same time then, everything under x86-64 must be recompiled to be fully native under arm
The best part about ARM laptops is that it’s going to lead to better x86 laptops. If we get eventually x86 with power draw and battery life comparable to ARM, we can have our cake and eat it too.
"But can it run Crysis" used to be the catchphrase. Now it's, "But can it run Cyberpunk?" which is the acid test, and unfortunately, it essentially fails, sub 30fps at 720p with low details.
It will improve as translation improves, saw the same thing with the m series on Mac, though it was stronger at the onset …still a good start at first gen…
There's promise here, even if I'd still take a Ryzen Mini PC over this. But there future on ARM is looking a lot more promising than it did before this.
AMD 9 AI HX 370 is better than X Elite and M3! 9 AI HX 370 (can have lower TDP than X Elite & M3, 15W vs 20W) CPU G6: 17 900 IGPU 5.94 TFLOPS (15W) OpenCL: 42 000. (Near M3 PRO (14 cores , 24W) 43 000) X Elite E84 CPU G6: 15 200 IGPU 4.6 TFLOPS (15W) OpenCL: 23 000. M3 CPU G6: 11 800 IGPU 4.1 TFLOPS (15W) OpenCL: 30 600.
People who think of Windows ARM laptops as anything else but alpha-beta test products for which they pay the price of a real decent laptop are laughable to me. Specifically with future Intel/AMD prospects. Maybe it's the hype of "copying Apple is good" though it's commonly Apple who copies. But anyways thanks to all the enthusiasts/testers who would invest into making some additional competition to Intel/AMD.
@@andreiguzovski7774 Microsoft has been desperately copying anything that Apple/Google comes up with for years now, remember Windows 8 a too little too late attempt to follow the iPad cash cow, Windows phone being a crap and late iOS/Android clone, and now they're playing catchup again with Apple even though Microsoft were dabbling with Windows on ARM a decade ago with the Surface RT. Microsoft are a company who follows, not a company who leads (well aside from making the most privacy invasive piece of shit operating system possible).
People in the comments seems to gloss over the fact that these all are in emulation and able to run smoothly is amazing. Doesn't that let you wonder when the games are Native ARM?
Could you try using a eGPU via thunderbolt or oculink? Would be great to see the performance if compatible with a nice external gpu such as a rtx 4060 or a rx 7700 xt, thanks!
Nope, no Windows on ARM based GPU drivers for AMD or Nvidia. Nvidia has some for ARM on Linux but they don't work for Windows. I'd not be surprised if Nvidia and AMD decided to add support in the future when they eventually make their own ARM processors for Windows.
I think symbiote spiderman IS going to allow a reactivation. I think it will be like Odin. Unlike odin that reactivates everything in that location (and hence its 6 cost value), this will only reactivate one card in the locaton....hence its lower cost stat
Genshin Should be playing at 4K fine. The Android version with GFX tools can run at 4K 30FPS on Snapdragon 8Gen3 with the only downside being the heat since smartphones don't have good thermals.
Snapdragon X Elite is the first great processor for PC's from Qualcomm. They can improve GPU and Microsoft can improve drivers. So, it's just a matter of time
Well the performance is exactly what I expected it to be. Good CPU performance per watt but gpu lags behind AMD. Better driver optimisation will help the Adreno chip but I'm guessing that'll come in 6 months by which time Strix Halo would have launched. Still, I expect these laptops to have better battery life in real work because they can clock lower and I'm looking forward to using AI features.
If pc games only handle up to 720p low at ease. Definitely only use this as a emulator laptop if you actually don't have an Ally X or a Steam Deck OLED. But even if you don't, it's still perfect up to potential PS3 low based on these pc games either way too with upgradable storage, while still only needing external storage for rendering videos/photos when traveling too
reminder for warframe; warframe is an old game but warframe takes a lot of graphical improvments. recently they implemented a new lighting system. so warframe is not a very light title to run while not so much heavy.
In the coming future, this will be getting better and faster and used in handheld devices without the annoying fan noise.
Apple is doing this alone. of course if all x86 developers put more effort on it, they must do better than Apple. But the truth is if Apple doesn’t dominate the market, x86 side especially Mircosoft won’t change.
Copium because the fan helps the SOC perform faster and better than your phone lol
@@acwbit2368 well it still has a fan, it just doesn’t need to use it as much as x86
there are already snapdragon handhelds that can emulate x86 games pretty well. even my android phone can run fallout 4 pretty okay.
It's already used in handheld devices without the annoying fan noise, those are called "smartphones". Still can't understand the hype of companies wasting funds and silicon on making Windows work with ARM when Windows already worked perfectly without it.
I am a bit disappointed on the performance because of all of the hype but I would say seeing more competition is great for gamer. IGPU is the future.
There is a rumour that nvidia will be collaborating with mediatek for their arm windows cpu , future looks good
@@padmabharali1306 that would be incredible for a handheld
It was never hyped up for gaming
It just beginning so software wil not optimize yet
@@padmabharali1306then battery life will not be the strength of these kind of laptop. then why customers don’t buy 100% x86 compatible Intel / Amd laptops?
Here's my take for the Snapdragon X Elite laptops. It's a good proper introduction of ARM into Windows ecosystem. But, the price for these laptops are eyebrows raising.
better pricing than current macbooks
Especially for a first generation.
Yeah these are good for doing spreadsheets, web browsing and 2D applications. They are asking $1,300 for this! I wouldn't pay more than $800 for their top version.
@@niveZz- macbooks are a ripoff too.
@@robertlawrence9000 I use a macbook pro fro development, I'm pretty sure these are also pretty good development machines as well
I am interested to see better drivers and optimizations.
Give it a few years to mature.
no one's gonna support it bro😢
Great video. Keep in mind that only the CPU instructions need to be emulated. When it comes to the GPU, it is using the same API calls to DirectX11/DirectX12 that x86/x64 games already do and that gets translated into the GPU's specific native code anyway.
Does that mean the X elite's GPU is just very weak?
@@themonkeyman2790 well more so that's its not meant for gaming, which we all already knew.
@@Codyslx but even the brute force of the GPU like for 4k video editing, rendering and for blender stuff, is it not sufficient for those stuff either?
@@themonkeyman2790 This is an igpu my guy. This is an office laptop, so now you would not use blender with this, lmao.
@@Codyslx a similar priced macbook air can do office + all of those blender things, then why would someone even buy these office laptops? Perhaps only for the os, windows and maybe better display
I'm writing this post on this very laptop. It forced me to restart the setup once (because it refused to recognize mouse clicks on the permissions section near the end) but has worked fine after that. I was happy to find that there are native ARM versions of the major web browsers (though you might have to look around their respective download pages to find them), and even some games (World of Warcraft, not sure of BG3, though there is an ARM version for Mac.) And the screen is beautiful.
Dang! I hope you didn't pay for that. It's a rip off.
@@robertlawrence9000 No it isn't, meant for office work that actually requires battery life.
890M gonna kill this
Of course it will, these laptops are not gaming devices. I bought a Pro 11 and it's super snappy, but it's not good for gaming. For gaming on the go I have a Rog Ally.
680M is destroying this. Steam Decks GPU is crashing it by a lot.
not a fair comparison between native x86 and emulation on ARM
Once a few driver updates go through and we see ARM native games with optimization for Adreno, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing literally doubles its performance.
@@MadafakinRio Microsoft should use their power as a major games developer and publisher to actually port some of their own games to ARM. If not they are not serious about ARM.
The prices for these are terrible for how much stuff just doesn't work or when it does work it works poorly. Idk what Qualcomm and Microsoft are smoking.
Eh, give it time. As long as they don't abandon it, they might end up being pretty good. The m1 wasn't perfect on release and a ton of stuff wasn't supported on it early on.
@@ROcheater Apple customers don't seem to care about price so they got away with it. Not sure Microsoft will.
I feel like Chromebooks are what Windows are targeting, at least in the short-term as they can get reasonably good performance from a cheap Mediatek tablet SOC, and as the software matures they can aim for the more casual gaming laptop market that also has excellent battery life.
@@ROcheaterwe sure give them time, but we must not spending money on such a beta product, we are not content creators, if we buy a laptop we should consider it can fully fulfill our needs. If it will become perfect in the future, then we will buy it in the future.
It's about as good as first-gen products get. Apple's first ARM-based Macbooks at launch were pretty slow and janky, too. Eventually costs will come down and performance will get better.
It's a first step away from Microsoft's over-reliance on Intel CPUs, but power users and gamers are probably going to want to look elsewhere while the Prism Emulator improves and more developers get onboard with native ARM apps.
Hopefully they can improve the gaming performance with some driver updates.
They might improve performance via Microsoft optimising Prism emulation layer, otherwise any drivers that come from Qualcomm will most likely not be targetted at gaming in any way as this chip is not intended for that purpose.
@@SOF006 Qualcomm said they would have an application similar to GeForce Experience to optimize games settings, and users would get GPU driver updates from there every month. I don't know if Qualcomm is able to deliver trully optimized drivers, but I'd like to see them try, like Intel is doing with their Arc GPUs.
Native Vulkan support would be helpful, might even be able to work around issues with older games by running through DXVK
I wish ETA would came back couple months later to test out Snapdragon X product and see if the driver update they have promised do actually improve the performance of the device down the line
I'm sure he will.
A handheld with the Snapdragon X Elite would be great.
Would love to see some Linux benchmarks with translation layers for comparison.
That’s pretty sick performance when you account for the fact that it’s translating from x86 to arm instructions. I’m sure it’s going to get better as software updates come out. Are there any games that have both a native arm variant and a x86 variant you can test to better show the impact?
I have to disagree with you here. I don't want to be to completely trash it, but to my eye, the performance is pretty bad considering the pretty low settings and resolution used. Cyberpunk at 720p with all low settings? Even an older $300 handheld like the Steam Deck can handle that. In fact, I think the Steam Deck can do most of what we've seen here. For now, x86 architecture and a dedicated GPU are definitely the way to go if you want to play games, especially if you have $1,300 or more to spend.
@@Nucleosynthese the steam deck isn't emulating x86 to arm. Also the steam deck battery life is no where as good.
@@Codyslx (Edit: to clarify I am still purely talking about gaming here) Sadly, the battery life of this laptop isn't so amazing when gaming either. It doesn't matter that it has to translate; the end product should just be good, and this is bad. Additionally, high-end and mid-range Nvidia and AMD GPUs vastly outperform the best Qualcomm and Apple ARM chips, even without a translation layer. The whole point of ARM is that it should be efficient and have good battery life with at least decent performance. In my opinion, it does not deliver, with this terrible gaming performance not even outperforming a $300, 2-year-old handheld. Let's hope for some improvements
@Nucleosynthese It's not a gaming laptop so no shit. This chip was meant for office work where you needed a days worth of battery life.
The 300 dollar handheld does not need to translate to a whole different architecture. Expecting a first gen arm chip to outperform a steam deck, especially one that isn't even a gaming chip is delusional.
These laptops and apple's macbooks are addressed at people who want to be productive. That's the market these are going for, not gamers.
I'm sorry, but I was talking about gaming performance 😅. Sadly that aspect is just terrible. Sure, ARM can't compete with dedicated GPU's, even without translation (look at the relatively bad graphics and performance of native Resident Evil on Apple silicon compared to similarly priced hardware with dedicated Nvidia/AMD GPUs), but this is even far below that level. I'm sorry, but many reviews are rightfully negative about this product. There's a long way to go for this to become viable for consumers who want to do more than just office work and play some games on their laptops.
Definitely need to see emulators performance in this one
Si, quiero ver un snapdragon x elite vs snapdragon 8 gen 2 o snapdragon 8 gen 3.
probably good
If only this laptop would take a screenshot every 5 seconds so I can relive my gaming glory months from now.
Or so hackers can steal your info even if you turn it off they will turn in back on in the background and upload your screenshots. 😨
Here's the hot take 12:38
"We're emulating x86 Application on an ARM Chip"
Here's list of Instructions Sets that Computer Video Games in the past 20 years is ACTUALLY using
SSE3 SSSE3 SSE4.1 SSE4.2 AVX AVX2 AVX512 . Windows, Linux, MacOS doesn't matter, those are what games actually use under the hood.
Reminder: Those instructions set I mentioned is NOT TIED with x86 architecture. Because ARM and RISC-V also have those instructions set in their SoC. How do you think mobile games like Genshin running on Android? That's right, ARM SSE4.2 Vulkan
So le'ts get this VERY Clear.
1. Why do they (Qualcomm) even bother to include Those specific instructions set in their Spec-sheet of this particular chip (SoC)?
2. If those Instructions sets exist within the Snapdragon X Elite chip, why do they need "Emulating" ?
it's not like the games actually checking for "Chip's architecture" No, when you click on a game to run, the very first thing it checks is "is the necessary instructions set exist?"
This is the reason why modern games simply refusing to run on Intel Core2Quad CPU simply because the CPU is lacking newer instructions set, even if you have Windows 10 installed.
So if Snapdragon X Elite "really" need emulation to run any kind of Native Windows Games, then it is not even Utilizing those instructions set I wrote above. Perhaps the only instructions set being used in this video is AVX2 or AVX512 because that's what Translation layer utilize at 02:06
But that totally defeat the point of "why Qualcomm even bothered including all those instructions set in their spec sheet"
Terrible misinformation. SSE2-SSE4.2, AVX-AVX512 are all instruction set extensions of the x86_64 architecture and ARE TIED to it. They are ASIMD/Vector extensions, and nearly all major cpu architectures do have similar ASIMD and Vector instruction set extensions in their own respective ISAs. for ARM, SIMD comes in the form NEON and the vector set instructions are SVE128-SVE512. These are similar to x86's SSE and AVX respectively.
Mobile games like you mention on android that target the arm64 cpu architecture do not use SSE, they cannot use SSE, because SSE is not part of or even related to the ARM ISA. Some game engines and game releases recently have been built against the AVX requirement, but some of these games may not even end up using the AVX instruction set and can that requirement can be bypassed and some games can still run on a case by case basis.
I've seen similar stutter using Box86 on a raspberry pi. It usually clears up over the course of a play session. I think there's some kind of instruction cache being built in the background rather than a shader cache as the stutter occurs when a new thing happens moreso than when a new shader is drawn. The more CPU bound a game is, the more you're going to see that stutter, I'd wager.
Thanks, this video was very informative. For a first generation product it is impressive, but I game way too much to get one of these right now. Next year when the generation two models come out I hope to see big improvements in the area of gaming.
I'm not disappointed at the overall gaming experience of X Elite. That's like being disappointed at that of a Macbook. The processor was never going to pleasantly surprise us.
I'm disappointed that this is probably not the most advanced Adreno GPU ever made. Ray tracing is still trivial for these iGPUs (and most graphics cards LOL) but its absence along with the lack of DX12 Ultimate support suggests other features are missing compared to available flagship smartphones. Plus the ARMv8.7a CPU cores were nerfed by the legal drama with ARM.
Yeah at this point just not worth it, because to be honest a lot of modern x86 architecture can fit in these ultra lightweight form factors, and that was a big selling point when Lenovo started making Snapdragon computers on Windows ARM.
Just impressive to see those x86 gamea running on that arm chip.... They make a good translation work this time
At least we got strix halo to look foreword to. Btw what is the performance with native ARM applications?
Really informative video. Would be interesting to see how this performance with DXVK as Snapdragon chips have support for Vulkan. If you get the time, try it put and see if there's any improvements! Thanks.
I beg of you, please please PLEASE test Sonic frontiers. Both ARM Mac’s and Android have a lighting bug and I want to see if the bug is on Windows on ARM as well.
I'd like to see this tested with an egpu. See if the GPU drivers could be causing some of the issues.
eGPU does not work, because there's no Nvidia or AMD drivers for ARM yet. But if they do release drivers it could probably work, as there is proper USB 4 support on these devices. There's also rumors that Nvidia are working on their on CPU/GPU chips for ARM laptops.
Looking forward to the second generation released in October, hoping to greatly enhance the GPU
for a laptop cpu that isnt meant for gaming, being able to play Spider-Man and Fallout 4 above 30fps is pretty good! Also may I ask what you use for the capture? Thanks and keep up the great work!
Can't say I'm disappointed with performance. It's a laptop running a new processor with new drivers and translation software that "isn't there" yet.
Looking forward to the arm future on windows based laptops.
I wonder why though when there are better X86 chips that can get more performance, compatibility and very close battery life at a cheaper price. It seems like a far reaching senseless pitch from Microsoft. I think Qualcomm should have made this better before launching them because they are not worth it yet.
Long live to x64
I have been watching every single video you have produced in the past month or so, and tell you the truth what's inspired me to watch your videos is that in every single video you produce yourself there is something new on it man keep up the good work
I'm trying not to be too judgmental yet, because hey, translation optimizations could improve the performance in some games substantially and maybe this does turn out to be a competent, low-spec gaming chip.
That being said, I'm not too optimistic here. I was more excited at the prospect of strong performance in a small package, more-so than ARM architecture, and may wait to see how Lunar Lake Xe-2 turns out.
I think a handheld Windows ARM in the size of a Switch Lite would be nice, as the battery life wouldn't be horrendous like it is with the current x86 handhelds.
@@astrahcat1212 I don't disagree with you there; if they can work things out I could see this being a nice option. For my use case though, I'm mostly looking at tablet laptops for drawing / animating that can do gaming on the side.
I'm excited for progress on either the ARM or x86 front honestly. I'm not picky and am just waiting for one to improve or the other to release in a device that's my preferred tablet/laptop/convertible form factor haha.
All the hype for these chips leave a lot to be desired!
I'm curious to see a benchmark Linux vs Windoze on this hardware.
Thank you for this video! Can you try Magicka 2 or the cave?
Im impressed i was expecting more issues running apps in an emulator.
Doesn't the Ultra series of processors have just as good of battery life and better 3D performance, and x86 native support, or am I wrong about that?
I`m curious to see how the gpu performance is going to improve over time, and especially on next year`s chips, and on the chips mediatek are supposedly also developping for pc, because I can pretty much guarantee that it`s only a matter of time before we start seeing arm gaming handhelds, and if efficiency and battery life is as good as is hyoed about, than I`m vary interested to see them arrive, and to see what they can do once software optimisations become a thing
Presumably it will get better as companies optimize for ARM chips, but I wonder what that means for applications in general. If developers now have to optimize for both ARM and x86, surely that just takes up resources and results in either longer development teams or less optimized versions of both ARM and x86 (unless they prioritize one).
I remember them mentioning "coming to "all PC form factors," including desktops."
I really am looking forward to the desktop part :3
Hope they won't mess up
We need this power in our smartphones
Why? What are you gonna do with 12 cores? If anything 6 cores are more than enough for modern gaming atleast on phones.
Without active cooling like in gaming phones it's highly unlikely.
Sadly. No one in the game industry is wanting to port their games to mobile even if it has that power. Most current phones are already stronger than the switch.
no
Wouldn't work mate
During the initial announcement it was mentioned that there would be support for eGPUs unlike Apple silicon. Is this something that you've tested? I'd love to see a video attempting to connect one among other experiments. It would also be cool if you were able to boot another OS on to the laptop via the BIOs. Having something like Linux, Chrome OS, or Android boot on these chips would be really interesting,
I'd buy this laptop in near future if it is fully suitable for my workspace, using ARM architecture I will be facing a lot of development issues
Looks like it will be an awesome product in 2-3 years.
They need to continue to improve this , because competition always good thing , hopefully this will age like fine wine
Ngl, pretty impressive for how early in its lifecycle it is
Can't wait to see what the future holds
Still waiting on that E-GPU pairing with this. I wanna see performance!
Driver?
the drivers are not compatible with arm
lol
Good luck that is not happening this generation!
Intel with his new ultra series processors gonna nail it
NVIDIA AMD and Intel should really consider ARM64 market. All Tensor, Exynos, Kirin, Mediatek, Unisoc, and Snapdragon need to do is increasing their performance which they always do every year.
Great review, thank you. Do these things support EGPUs?
In theory they can, but no GPU vendor has made drivers for them yet.
Great review! Hopefully Qualcomm can get this optimized. We really need another competitor out there. AMD makes great chips. Intel does too, but the pricing has gone off the rails
I can't believe Windows on ARM is finally viable! After the mess they made on the past few attempts, I wondered if they could pull it off. The good things is, everyone is very positive about it and we have to remember this is only Gen1 of the X Elite. Hopefully MediaTek and others will also bring some competition to the game!
I do think they held back on the GPU to really focus on the Oryon CPU cores. I can see the X Gen 2 having a significantly more powerful GPU.
Gonna watch for updates and stuff and if promising look to black friday, if not ill check in next year
I would appreciate the snapdragon’s chip performance upto this level releasing it for the first time.
I think the Ryzen HX AI 370 is gonna be the laptop chip-of-the-year, it should 2x the GPU on this qualcomm snapdragon in most cases, but will fall short in battery life / video playback.
It would be interesting to test an app or game that has both ARM and x86 versions, run them on the same laptop, and compare the difference to see what is the performance hit from using Prism emulation.
A step in the right direction. Hopefully they keep it up. To the point people can build their own arm pc
Did you try touching the screen during gaming and benchmark tests? One youtuber encountered a bug with a laptop with SD X chipset that touching the screen increases performance for a while.
Are you going to re-run the Cinebench test using the ARM version of it? You pretty much invalidated your scores using the x86 version
Most people will be running Windows on this, so it makes sense to use an X86 benchmark to get a better idea of the performance you'd actually see.
@@Chalky. Maybe, but when he was also showing the Apple ARM benchmarks, he was using the ARM version of Cinebench, not x86, so I think he should do the same for WIndows for it to be fair
@@Chalky. Not really, a ton of windows programs ship ARM binaries alongside their x86 ones now.
Any news on when Plus version are coming? I wanna know how those will perform. And more importantly what they will cost. Performance isn't that big of a deal for me because I'm probably still going to keep my gaming PC around in my den. But having a light media station that I can lug around and my wife can do some work on will be great.
Excited for the new generation but let down by the product launch tho. I think the laptops unveiled outside the Surface Laptop 13.8 which hasnt had a proper review yet because microsoft wont let folks talk about it yet. All the laptops so far unveiled have such a lack of IO. I really dont wanna carry more dongles and crap around that I dont need. Something that others have also stated is that sometimes higher wattage actually didnt give better FPS gains, apparently it was more optimized on a lot of applications for lower wattages than higher power.
ETA said "if he can get a higher end X Elite chip device" Does this mean Qualcomm confirmed if there will be more models of the x Elite? Was thinking it would be like M1 is to SD X Plus as M1 Plus/Pro is to SD X Elite.
Funfact: ADRENO is a acronym for RADEON
anagram 🤓
@@SlipknotRevan well shit, you're right 😂
Instead of emulating if it run natively it will be much better and best for handheld
Early adopters always pay the price of development. Vision Pro, this thing, EVs, etc. Can’t wait to see this tech in 10 years at 10% of the price.
Surprisingly good. I think Streaming will be the answer. Local productivity and light indy gaming, and streaming from an x86 machine for triple A.
Yeah these are so over hyped but never bad to have more options. Since this is first good attempt maybe 2-3 generations from now it will be worth using all around
The true is that if everyone wants good performance and better battery life at the same time then, everything under x86-64 must be recompiled to be fully native under arm
The best part about ARM laptops is that it’s going to lead to better x86 laptops. If we get eventually x86 with power draw and battery life comparable to ARM, we can have our cake and eat it too.
"But can it run Crysis" used to be the catchphrase. Now it's, "But can it run Cyberpunk?" which is the acid test, and unfortunately, it essentially fails, sub 30fps at 720p with low details.
It will improve as translation improves, saw the same thing with the m series on Mac, though it was stronger at the onset …still a good start at first gen…
very good review thx i love gaming test
What software are you using to get the performance overlay, like the CPU usage ?
looks amazing, windows on arm is the future with this kind of performance....
There's promise here, even if I'd still take a Ryzen Mini PC over this. But there future on ARM is looking a lot more promising than it did before this.
Arm future is starts looking more promising after m1)
AMD 9 AI HX 370 is better than X Elite and M3!
9 AI HX 370 (can have lower TDP than X Elite & M3, 15W vs 20W)
CPU G6: 17 900
IGPU 5.94 TFLOPS (15W) OpenCL: 42 000. (Near M3 PRO (14 cores , 24W) 43 000)
X Elite E84
CPU G6: 15 200
IGPU 4.6 TFLOPS (15W) OpenCL: 23 000.
M3
CPU G6: 11 800
IGPU 4.1 TFLOPS (15W) OpenCL: 30 600.
People who think of Windows ARM laptops as anything else but alpha-beta test products for which they pay the price of a real decent laptop are laughable to me. Specifically with future Intel/AMD prospects. Maybe it's the hype of "copying Apple is good" though it's commonly Apple who copies. But anyways thanks to all the enthusiasts/testers who would invest into making some additional competition to Intel/AMD.
Battery is all that people need.
@@hokus.pokusss all cpu and laptop companies are playing deaf when hear that
@@andreiguzovski7774 Microsoft has been desperately copying anything that Apple/Google comes up with for years now, remember Windows 8 a too little too late attempt to follow the iPad cash cow, Windows phone being a crap and late iOS/Android clone, and now they're playing catchup again with Apple even though Microsoft were dabbling with Windows on ARM a decade ago with the Surface RT. Microsoft are a company who follows, not a company who leads (well aside from making the most privacy invasive piece of shit operating system possible).
@@hokus.pokusss 💀
People in the comments seems to gloss over the fact that these all are in emulation and able to run smoothly is amazing. Doesn't that let you wonder when the games are Native ARM?
doesn't genshin runs on ARM too? the performance was straight ass tbh
@@X10Z24 It does - on Phones, not Windows. The windows version of Genshin is still x86 only, not build for ARM
Could you try using a eGPU via thunderbolt or oculink? Would be great to see the performance if compatible with a nice external gpu such as a rtx 4060 or a rx 7700 xt, thanks!
That’s really impressive if someone needs to prioritize battery life over gaming. The fact that it can run windows games as all blows my mind
Anyhow Hacki Tosh posible then 🔥🔥❤
As of yet, developers and even Qualcomm will have to work on it. I want to jump to to ARM as soon as possible
Waiting this video for the long time 🤠
is it possible to add egpu?
if yes , upto which level of card this cpu can handle?
So far not, afaik, the drivers just aren't there yet and Qualcomm has not shown any interest in developing them... Gaming is not a priority for them.
Nope, no Windows on ARM based GPU drivers for AMD or Nvidia. Nvidia has some for ARM on Linux but they don't work for Windows. I'd not be surprised if Nvidia and AMD decided to add support in the future when they eventually make their own ARM processors for Windows.
I think symbiote spiderman IS going to allow a reactivation. I think it will be like Odin. Unlike odin that reactivates everything in that location (and hence its 6 cost value), this will only reactivate one card in the locaton....hence its lower cost stat
5:25 Wait, the text says 900p Low, you're saying 1080p high getting 140fps, which one is it?
His channel is a joke he doesn’t care what he posts
Laptops with Snapdragon processors! About time!
Genshin Should be playing at 4K fine. The Android version with GFX tools can run at 4K 30FPS on Snapdragon 8Gen3 with the only downside being the heat since smartphones don't have good thermals.
Android and pc versions are not the same.
Waiting for rog ally vs MSI claw rematch. 🔥 🔥 🔥
prims is good enough for online game, but for offlline game, windows should be able to use a compiler, to compile x86 games into arm optimized games
Can you link it to an external GPU? And does the performance get better?
Snapdragon X Elite is the first great processor for PC's from Qualcomm. They can improve GPU and Microsoft can improve drivers. So, it's just a matter of time
Can you compare it with Parallels on Mac? (Mac running Windows ARM in Virtualisation). I think a few games run better on mac than on Copilot+ PCs
Most compatible games actually will run better on m2 and up macs with parallels, I'm pretty sure rosetta is better for gaming though
Well the performance is exactly what I expected it to be. Good CPU performance per watt but gpu lags behind AMD. Better driver optimisation will help the Adreno chip but I'm guessing that'll come in 6 months by which time Strix Halo would have launched.
Still, I expect these laptops to have better battery life in real work because they can clock lower and I'm looking forward to using AI features.
So when we going to get these with dedicated graphics for gaming? :D
If pc games only handle up to 720p low at ease. Definitely only use this as a emulator laptop if you actually don't have an Ally X or a Steam Deck OLED. But even if you don't, it's still perfect up to potential PS3 low based on these pc games either way too with upgradable storage, while still only needing external storage for rendering videos/photos when traveling too
Qualcomm needs to develop the power full GPU for the arm chip
reminder for warframe; warframe is an old game but warframe takes a lot of graphical improvments. recently they implemented a new lighting system. so warframe is not a very light title to run while not so much heavy.
I'm very interested in your take on the X1E78100 vs X1E84100?
with the oled screen and great battery life those laptops should be amazing for cloud gaming
its not time for arm yet, maybe 2 or more years
On Apple its very time)
Emulators on sd x elite. Can we run retro
Emulators on it??
when will you try emulations
I hope Valve will invest efforts into arm x86 emulation and that the next SteamDeck in 2 or 3 years will be an arm device...