Yes, yes and yes! Premiere Pro and Lightroom aren't the only programs that people use for work. These ARM PCs work great if you're using Office and a web browser for work.
Yeah it's so annoying. They make reviews and are totally ignorant to the apps their audiences use. Video editing is a niche use for a computer. The complaints are squarely video editing and gaming. Video editing is being fixed and if you want to game why would you not get a gaming PC 🤷
I wish I can upvote this comment hundred times ... it just feels meh when they pull up some video editing software or some game ... there are many other apps / IDEs / tools that can run into many other problems (compatibility especially in case of X elite) apart from performance issues ...
I think gaming. Is a legitimate test since we buy laptops for more than one reason. Also video editing is fair but not the only thing. Programming is an exciting one for me and that’s something I love this channel for and I’m thankful for TH-cam because we can have niche channels like this.
PSA, open-boxes of these laptops are already available on Best Buy for $200-$300 less than retail price. And the Galaxy Book is already being discounted by $350 barely 3 weeks after launch. It's not looking good.
These ARM based windows is just a marketing gimmick as not at least anytime soon developer are going to switch over from x86 so better buy intel or and based laptops if you want windows machine .
I returned mine, I had the Surface 7, I had so many graphical glitches, screen issues, and crashes that after a week I returned it and got myself a MacBook Air M3 16/512 instead. I will wait till next year with the Snapdragons. The GPU in the Surface was the same speed as my Intel Mac mini from 2018. They really messed up that part, the CPU had great performance though I will say that, and battery life was great!
The X Elite lineup has to stand out from all others in the future - but not with some cappy AI stuff. The only thing we want is a real competitor to Apple with great performance and usability. (and support for Linux; not only WSL)
I don't know what the ai hate is all about LoL. It made my college life so much easier. All the boring works can be done in a snap while u can use that time for something else.
@@50V0Nthe GPT and large LLM models you used while in college aren't the kind of thing that can run on NPUs inside mobile phones or laptop. The NPUs in these things can do at best face recognition or voice transcribing.
@@50V0N The big issue is that most of these ai models running on NPUs are borderline useless. Companies just think the users are stupid and would gush out when they read the word AI
@SpaceDoodle2008 the performance & battery life ARE already great. Every review so far said so. And as for Linux, there's like 6 people that care about that. It will come eventually, but it's really not a priority in this world.
These reviews of the new Snapdragon Laptops are SO MUCH better than most of the reviews who spend a minute complaining Premier Pro isn't available, DaVinci Resolve is Beta and Games don't work well on a PC not designed for playing Games and move on, even concluding rhe laptops are "bad" based on narrow, biased reviewing. Someone who's doing proper analysis. Thanks a million.
The selling point of pc has always been compatbility, to the point that the vast majority of laptops at this price range can play games even when they werent build for it. Might as well wzit for Strix and lunar lake
As @bradavon pointed out, we need to stop complaining about laptops when they’re pushed beyond their intended purpose. I remember back in the day when we’d try to build Hackintoshes on Windows systems, and they didn’t perform as expected. Was that Apple’s fault? Did it mean they had a bad OS? Of course not-it just wasn’t designed for Windows hardware. Similarly, these devices aren’t built for gaming, and expecting them to perform as such is unrealistic.
these laptops look amazing but the lack of physical function keys is a deal breaker for me. I would also be interested in a test with the Acer snapdragon laptop as it has an IPS display like the surface that won your battery test but with a way bigger 75 Wh battery
22:51 The trackpad issue could be due to poor grounding of the USB-C charging ports. This is unfortunately a common oversight in cheap metal windows laptops. To check if that's the case try using the trackpad while touching any metal part around the keyboard deck with a wet finger. Don't worry it wont hurt or anything) It'll just put you on the same ground charge as your laptop>monitor>power supply> ground house wire>the ground pole that is barried into the ground under the home you live in. If you decide to try it I would very much appreciate if you share the results)
Got a precision 5560. It has the same issue .now i use a mobile charger which has lower wattage and doesnt cause any lag in touchpad .the only downside is very slow charging or sometimes the laptop disharge at high load
19:03 While the Mandelbrot generator is a Python script, it probably just calls out to some C libraries, right? The Intel version could be using AVX math instructions to go way faster than the ARM.
Yeah I would bet it is due to some C library that is totally unoptimised for ARM. Though it does not make much sense, ARM has been out so long, compiler optimisations should be there already. Could it be a windows thing? Would running the same script through wsl in the ARM one be faster for example?
@@reddove17 This fancy new ARM CPU only supports 128-bit SIMD instructions, while the Intel can do 256 bits at a time. So when dealing with optimized code that does a bunch of math, about twice as fast is the expectation and that also lines up pretty close to reality.
The benchmarks-game mandelbrot test should be pure python. So whatever speed differences there are those should be in the interpreter itself. Which typically is written in C of course.
@jaaval to be complete, the benchmark should do a version calling optimized C libraries, wich will use x86 AVX stuff and simulate vector-heavy code. And also a pure Python version for code with little use of vector code.
My favorite is: complains about the stickers, doesn't know which laptop has which processor in it, then reads the stickers and gets the answer. Seriously, the stickers are just there to quickly advertise the processor, GPU, and RAM when you first buy the computer. Once you know your specs, just remove the darn stickers. They weren't meant to stay there and are not permanently attached to the computer.
@@k4everutI love TH-camrs. The come up with the same complaints and repeat them generating an echo chamber. A few weeks ago they all bought iPads and the. Complained the iPads didn’t have macOS. But they didn’t complain the MacBooks didn’t have touch screens which is what they really want. 😅
Thanks for the vid! I recently tried using an Asus Snapdragon X Elite laptop, and after opening Notepad, I typed some text to test out the keyboard. When I went to press Ctrl+A in order to select all of the text and clear it to type again, the Co-pilot feature activated (since they removed the right Ctrl key and replaced it with Co-pilot key). It's quite strange how so many companies have been persuaded to remove the right Ctrl key altogether. I'm really hoping that this trend doesn't continue
this is like when Apple M chips first came out, people were saying x86 is dead and that all future computer chips will be ARM based. As of now 94% of all chips used in computers are still x86 chips
@@kenhew4641 Well this the worst of arm and we pretty much have seen the best of x86. Year over year the IPC gains are abysmal and they're increasing on the power too. However with the recent improvements from the Intel & AMD in the laptop segment is quite good but still they don't match up to the efficiency of ARM. ARM is only going to get good from now on
Typical "create product to look good and sell to the uninformed" vs "create product to actually be useful". Dell lost it for several years already. Though they're so big, they can actually swing back before it gets too bad.
It's ridiculous that Android Studio doesn't support ARM64. It's based on Intellij which has had ARM64 support for a couple year now. I'm guessing it's entirely because they don't have an ARM64 android emulator ready
My guess that if you lower the power limit on the Intel processor, it will offer a comparable performance to ARM, with similar battery results. The performance/consumption ratio on x86’s is reeeeally non-linear; the difference in performance between, for example 30 and 60 watts is MUCH less than 2 times. Look at Steam Deck wattage tests if you’re interested.
well i was getting excited about Windows on ARM... not anymore. at least the tech TH-camrs got a free trip (including accommodations) courtesy of Qualcomm for hyping up this crap. hope it was worth it
What happens with the script at 18:00 is that Python's stdout mechanism on Windows is messed up. Even if Measure-Command should redirect it to something like /dev/null, it still looks like some OS interrupts are awaited.
If Intel ever gets its power consumption in check and offers very potent performance, there will be little need to use snapdragon, and deal with the headaches of compatibility. Lunar lake /arrow lake might be good. Zen 5 from AMD also appears good as well.
I have always enjoyed Alex's videos, but he keeps getting better and better. I now find myself going to the channel just to check if I missed a new vid...
I watched a Level1Techs video where he interviews a game dev and according the dev, some of the software may not be optimized yet because they didn't get a dev kit for the current version of the ARM chip. So I think the Intel laptop being faster is mainly due to developers not having a chance to optimized their apps before the retail launch. I use a MacBook and not every application is available, so it's gonna take some time before Windows on ARM get their time in the light.
Developers "not having a chance?" :) ARM64 has been out for years. They've had a chance to write ARM64 code for a long time (mostly the whole life of Windows 11). There just wasn't a compelling market for it until Elite X.
Snapdragon felt promising, but I believe its windows' x86 to arm translation layer not being as good as macOS' rosetta 2 translator... I genuinely want to see linux joining the chat, linux has better arm packages as far as I'm aware, and hopefully we see better performance on linux side.
I saw a review where they used WSL to run Linux and do the same benchmarks as Windows and,even trough virtualization, the results on Linux were better in every single test. Microsoft needs to rebuild Windows 12 from the ground up as much as possible if they want to succed with ARM, especially now that developers are investing in this architecture and x86 Socs look to be much more efficient then ever before.
The problem with xElite is the lack of support for arm in windows. Not everything can be emulated. I have my Surface Laptop 7 and I cannot for example install Goodge Drive app as Google does not plan to introduce ARM support for it on Windows. And this is just the beginning - we will see what else is not going to work. Since my workflow relies heavily on Google Drive (company policy) this is a huge issue.
I like this. There's a bit of beef between youtubers regarding these ARM processors, yet its weirdly reassuring hearing a comparison from a tech developer. Feels enlightening.
@ziskind I was using XPS 13 with i7 and this touchbar. Worst thing was that whenever he was overheating touchbar stops to work, it becomes untouchable-bar
my next laptop is definitely going to be arm, but I use a lot of engineering applications, so we will have to wait. Probably til the X elite 4. I am waiting for the igpu to be at least close to the laptop 3060 that i have.
2:54 Apple would have figured out something that would ensure that the stickers would always align perfectly. And they would highlight it in a keynote as a feature.
Thank you for this great comparison test. In Germany we literally say "neither fish nor meat", which means that none of the two solutions meet the demands. I have had problems finding the right set-up for years. The iPad is great for mobile working, but it also has severe limitations (you can't even scale an inserted photo in the Outlook app), the Surface gets hot quickly, is noisy and you can only work on a table, a Mac is great, but many professional programs are still not available and laptops with X86 technology have catastrophically poor battery life. I really hope that Arm technology will take a big step forward in the future.
I ordered a Surface Laptop 7 on ARM just to try it out. Started to install my usual programs and drivers and received too many 'not supported' or 'not available' messages for printers and programs. Sent it back. Has the potential to be great but there's no reason for this to be happening upon launch in 2024.
Not sure how you missed this, but USB4 is compatible with Thunderbolt. It doesn't have to mention it. Thunderbolt devices are supposed to work with that USB4 port. In fact, USB4 is largely an import of the Thunderbolt standard into USB. They're not identical, but it shouldn't have surprised you that it works. That's as designed.
I hate the XPS 13 keyboard. They made the keys bigger to make up for the fact that there's no spacing between the keys. But because you run the risk of hitting the adjacent key, the target becomes tiny. If you don't strike the key right in the middle, you have the chance of hitting the adjacent key which is super stressful.
Google android team members all get 32-cpu threadrippers for dev workstations, all google laptops are dumb telnet machines, most of them are probably celeron chromebooks now ...
I want to know what happened with that python test. Maybe if we can check the code we can confirm if its calling a x86 library, specifically AVX libraries? I'ver heard that prism doesn't really do a great job with AVX instructions
996 Seconds here for Mandelbrot 16000 iteration. Lenovo Slim 7x (Snapdragon X Elite - X1E-78-100), Visual Studio Code Arm64, Python AMD64 (since numpy currently does not provide pre-built binary wheels for Windows ARM64). Set to High Performance in powercfg, CPU utilization does not go above 15%, GPU utilization doesn't surpass 11%.
Hi Alex! Thanks for the in-depth reviews as always. I'm currently trying to decide between the Dell XPS 2024 models with the Snapdragon and Intel processors, specifically for heavy Excel usage. Excel is critical for my work, especially with large datasets and complex formulas, so processing speed and efficiency are key. Could you possibly share some insights or even a demo on how these two devices compare in handling intensive Excel tasks? It would be incredibly helpful in making my decision. Keep up the great work!
The trackpad lag after connected to external device are possibly related to grounding issues generally common in laptops. You possibly would notice the same with power supply as well. In some brands it's less noticeable but generally it can happen to even the best laptops.
@jb3839 if unplugged it works perfectly but plugged in it behaves with delay, you can try following: in Windows settings increase trackpad sensitivity to max, you could try to ground it to some metal chassis, sometimes plugging in an external device in USB with metal chasis helps like external hard drive.
Dell had to change two things in the design of this device The first is the rubber bottom of the device as you said The second is to line up two illuminated vertical lines to define the trackpad to match the functional lighting
I love your videos @AZisk... I have a surface pro 11 with the X1E-80-100 and 32gb ram...on Wsl2 it ran the Mandelbrot in 36 secs.... Something is definitely up with the XPS 13....
Hi Alex, is your python mandelbrot script publicly available somewhere and free to use? I am interested in understanding its slow performance on Snadragon X Elite. Thanks!
I got XPS 13 SnapDragon 6 days ago. I very happy with it and it rocks. I don't do Android nor Python . C#/Web/Docker everything run perfect as ARM64 Processes. The Dell is currently the only one in this form factor with proper quality having 64gig memory for LLM/NPU and 2TB for 2.6kEUR + discount of 160EUR with Dell Rewards for accessories - so I got a proper BTKeyboard/Mouse/Dockingstation to have a real dev machine with this kind of battery-life only m-macs have (almost same specs with mac is 5.4k€). So hopefully more ARM support/optimization is coming soon. May Intel is currently more compatible (x64VMs)... but I bet on this is going to change soon. Would be great to see a video with snapdragon on ollama (when arm version is here) or qualcomm ai hub compare in the future between the two XPS Snap / Intel ... when NPU kicks in.. I guess you can forget about mandelbrot Intel then ;-)
Interesting how the X Elite started off well, but fell behind when doing real world development work. I wonder if it's just Pthon that is slower on ARM 🤔 What would happen if you run the same program as .NET apps?
Touchpad CAN BE GREAT - on my XPS13 i went to AutoZone and got a roll of pinstriping and marked the edges of the touch area. GAME CHANGER! This is a "haptic" touchpad (which is WONDERFUL) but i agree the borders need to be shown - and the pinstriping is perfect because you can see AND feel the touch borders.
Snapdragon X elite laptops were never made for gaming. I don’t know why everyone talks about this so much. It’s like saying you bought an iPhone so you can game.
The cheapest arm windows laptop on market right now is 899 samsung galaxy edge 14 with 16gb + 512gb with all discounts applied. And bestbuy m2 macbook air 8gb + 256gb is also on sale for 799.
I do believe that these machines, just on the Snapdragon Chip not Dell specifically, can really help Windows get an edge on Macs in the laptop space. However I think these chips should have been put through a little more testing and some kind of dev kit be sent out or available to buy so a lot of apps, both consumer and professional, could have a version for them and these chips had the chance to really shine. ARM might be the future for everything mobile in tech, but Microsoft just can't quite get it right it seems.
@Alex: Look at 19:57 and 20:07 at the time of "user" and "sys" which indicates how much computing power was needed. And, as far as I understand, you see that the ARM CPU is indeed faster, but the Laptop has only 12 cores and the intel cpu has 16 cores. So intels more cores (and maybe higher clock speed) means it's finished faster, but needed more cpu cycles. That's the case because the test use all cores.
I will pass buying these kind of laptops with snapdragon chipset this year. There is too little support for them, and the translation layer is awful. At least macos translation layer was barely noticeable when it came out
It’s actually way more mature than when m1 was introduced, in my task manager I have only 4 to 5 apps running in emulation and they all run with no issues.
@@weiss588 neither is the snapdragon. My point is, the emulation layer is in much better shape than Rosetta was on day one. Because all of its games run through emulation. And the ones that don’t get stopped by anticheat run decently. So yeah, the translation layer is far from awful
The python test makes sense, I have surface laptop 7 with 32 gigs ram and another one thinkpad p1 gen 5 with 12700h/32/nvda graphics. For a small application my Thinkpad always beats my surface by 2 or some seconds. Even apple m1 by 1 and half second.
so sad to hear that there are compatibility issues on programming apps for windows on arm. The Chipset is already powerful enough and but sadly app's support aren't that great as of now. This should be ok for casual users that wants a lightweight and long lasting laptop but even with that id still recommend macbook air over this.
Hi Alex, Can you do a webcam comparison on your next video? XPS webcams are always craps till now, but yhey said, Snap Dragon has a dedicated image signal processor, and let's find out the difference😉
I believe your Python script used NumPy for mathematics, and it was built without native (C/ASM) optimizations or only with basic ARM things. I believe nobody supports Windows on ARM in the Python wheels.
Hp uses those strips and i lost mine in a year. And its very hard to find a replacement too. Dell must be insane to use those. What happened to four pads they used to use.
Hey @Alex Ziskind can you tell how you run python mandelbrot on arm, because the source code uses Numpy and i can't compile Numpy on Windows 11, i see from the video that seems to be in Windows, or was it in WSL?
The mandletbrot test emitting all that text to the terminal might cause some performance discrepancies between terminals and maybe even within the same terminal but configured differently. (ie windows terminal for windows vs wsl)
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 88 | คู่เอก "ป้อมเพชร vs อัสลามจอน"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ZqTVVbMgbo/mqdefault.jpg)
You're the only youtuber that does tests other than video editing. Doing god's work.
Yes, yes and yes! Premiere Pro and Lightroom aren't the only programs that people use for work. These ARM PCs work great if you're using Office and a web browser for work.
Yeah it's so annoying. They make reviews and are totally ignorant to the apps their audiences use. Video editing is a niche use for a computer. The complaints are squarely video editing and gaming. Video editing is being fixed and if you want to game why would you not get a gaming PC 🤷
I wish I can upvote this comment hundred times ... it just feels meh when they pull up some video editing software or some game ... there are many other apps / IDEs / tools that can run into many other problems (compatibility especially in case of X elite) apart from performance issues ...
@@bradavon you know people want to be able to game everywhere especially outside the house right?
Laptops are far more power efficient too
I think gaming. Is a legitimate test since we buy laptops for more than one reason. Also video editing is fair but not the only thing. Programming is an exciting one for me and that’s something I love this channel for and I’m thankful for TH-cam because we can have niche channels like this.
PSA, open-boxes of these laptops are already available on Best Buy for $200-$300 less than retail price. And the Galaxy Book is already being discounted by $350 barely 3 weeks after launch. It's not looking good.
If I can get an OLED surface for a discount, I’ll take that. Qualcomm should’ve been more transparent though
Being able to buy them for $300 cheaper sounds awesome to me lol
These ARM based windows is just a marketing gimmick as not at least anytime soon developer are going to switch over from x86 so better buy intel or and based laptops if you want windows machine .
@@sameersheriff7078 nope, too hot and poor battery life
I do web dev with python. These machines cheap, i ll buy a large screen one
I work in Bestbuy Geeksquad and those Snapdragon are getting returned like overburnt pizzas.
@@synen can you tell us the top 3 reasons, please?
@@synen why is that?
can you tell us the reason why people are returning it?
nice, looking to get an open box one of these. Coworker has one and loves it
I returned mine, I had the Surface 7, I had so many graphical glitches, screen issues, and crashes that after a week I returned it and got myself a MacBook Air M3 16/512 instead. I will wait till next year with the Snapdragons. The GPU in the Surface was the same speed as my Intel Mac mini from 2018. They really messed up that part, the CPU had great performance though I will say that, and battery life was great!
The X Elite lineup has to stand out from all others in the future - but not with some cappy AI stuff. The only thing we want is a real competitor to Apple with great performance and usability. (and support for Linux; not only WSL)
I don't know what the ai hate is all about LoL. It made my college life so much easier. All the boring works can be done in a snap while u can use that time for something else.
@@50V0Nthe GPT and large LLM models you used while in college aren't the kind of thing that can run on NPUs inside mobile phones or laptop. The NPUs in these things can do at best face recognition or voice transcribing.
@@50V0N its not people hating ai. Its just people dont want ai EVERYWHERE .
@@50V0N The big issue is that most of these ai models running on NPUs are borderline useless. Companies just think the users are stupid and would gush out when they read the word AI
@SpaceDoodle2008 the performance & battery life ARE already great. Every review so far said so. And as for Linux, there's like 6 people that care about that. It will come eventually, but it's really not a priority in this world.
These reviews of the new Snapdragon Laptops are SO MUCH better than most of the reviews who spend a minute complaining Premier Pro isn't available, DaVinci Resolve is Beta and Games don't work well on a PC not designed for playing Games and move on, even concluding rhe laptops are "bad" based on narrow, biased reviewing. Someone who's doing proper analysis. Thanks a million.
The selling point of pc has always been compatbility, to the point that the vast majority of laptops at this price range can play games even when they werent build for it. Might as well wzit for Strix and lunar lake
As @bradavon pointed out, we need to stop complaining about laptops when they’re pushed beyond their intended purpose. I remember back in the day when we’d try to build Hackintoshes on Windows systems, and they didn’t perform as expected. Was that Apple’s fault? Did it mean they had a bad OS? Of course not-it just wasn’t designed for Windows hardware. Similarly, these devices aren’t built for gaming, and expecting them to perform as such is unrealistic.
these laptops look amazing but the lack of physical function keys is a deal breaker for me. I would also be interested in a test with the Acer snapdragon laptop as it has an IPS display like the surface that won your battery test but with a way bigger 75 Wh battery
You might want to check out the Dell Latitude 7455
@@vjo03 it's not too interesting imo, it's very expensive and only has a 54 Wh battery, even the microsoft surface is cheaper for the same specs
I can't for the life of me understand what dell was thinking after seeing the 2-3 yr response to the Mac touchbar 😂
22:51 The trackpad issue could be due to poor grounding of the USB-C charging ports. This is unfortunately a common oversight in cheap metal windows laptops. To check if that's the case try using the trackpad while touching any metal part around the keyboard deck with a wet finger. Don't worry it wont hurt or anything) It'll just put you on the same ground charge as your laptop>monitor>power supply> ground house wire>the ground pole that is barried into the ground under the home you live in. If you decide to try it I would very much appreciate if you share the results)
Have been the issue since 2013 on XPS, precision and Alienware
My MacBook Pro gives me Daily Shocks while Charging. For some Odd Reason, Apple Cheaped Out on the Ground Pin. 😂
@@johnnydoe3603 that could be due to aluminium chassis and ESD.
Got a precision 5560. It has the same issue .now i use a mobile charger which has lower wattage and doesnt cause any lag in touchpad .the only downside is very slow charging or sometimes the laptop disharge at high load
@@Nova-tf3es damn that's bad. Might as disable touchpad from BIOS or in windows to use external mouse
19:03 While the Mandelbrot generator is a Python script, it probably just calls out to some C libraries, right? The Intel version could be using AVX math instructions to go way faster than the ARM.
Yeah I would bet it is due to some C library that is totally unoptimised for ARM. Though it does not make much sense, ARM has been out so long, compiler optimisations should be there already. Could it be a windows thing? Would running the same script through wsl in the ARM one be faster for example?
@@reddove17 This fancy new ARM CPU only supports 128-bit SIMD instructions, while the Intel can do 256 bits at a time. So when dealing with optimized code that does a bunch of math, about twice as fast is the expectation and that also lines up pretty close to reality.
The benchmarks-game mandelbrot test should be pure python. So whatever speed differences there are those should be in the interpreter itself. Which typically is written in C of course.
@jaaval to be complete, the benchmark should do a version calling optimized C libraries, wich will use x86 AVX stuff and simulate vector-heavy code. And also a pure Python version for code with little use of vector code.
@@necuz what about apple silicon chips ?
Thanks for installing the Android studio. I also had made a comment earlier.
2:45 complaining about tilted sticker and in next shot we can see your TH-cam sign tilted in back 😂😂😅
good point:)
They customized it just for him.
My favorite is: complains about the stickers, doesn't know which laptop has which processor in it, then reads the stickers and gets the answer. Seriously, the stickers are just there to quickly advertise the processor, GPU, and RAM when you first buy the computer. Once you know your specs, just remove the darn stickers. They weren't meant to stay there and are not permanently attached to the computer.
@@k4everutI love TH-camrs. The come up with the same complaints and repeat them generating an echo chamber. A few weeks ago they all bought iPads and the. Complained the iPads didn’t have macOS. But they didn’t complain the MacBooks didn’t have touch screens which is what they really want. 😅
@@zt9233A MacBook with a touch screen is not the same thing as an iPad. Otherwise nobody would want an ipad
Love the 'real' x elite vids- you are doing a good job at separating the hype from the day to day realities of living with such a machine 😅
@@billkigathi3492 and doing tests other than “let’s see how long it takes to export a video” gosh all TH-camrs think everybody is another TH-camr?
I have a 2022 XPS13 Plus 9320. Same design. The trackpad becomes second nature very quickly.
You've got so many machines Alex.
The name’s Aphex :)
@@AZisk do you want to sell one of the products to me? I’m interested in the windows surface laptop
Thanks for the vid! I recently tried using an Asus Snapdragon X Elite laptop, and after opening Notepad, I typed some text to test out the keyboard. When I went to press Ctrl+A in order to select all of the text and clear it to type again, the Co-pilot feature activated (since they removed the right Ctrl key and replaced it with Co-pilot key). It's quite strange how so many companies have been persuaded to remove the right Ctrl key altogether. I'm really hoping that this trend doesn't continue
My understanding is that usb-c 4 supports Thunderbolt 3 and it's part of the spec.
@@AmosAAnderson was about to leave this comment, yes the usb 4 spec includes thunderbolt 3 and the physical connector must be usb type c
Now that the hype is gone, reality kicks in
this is like when Apple M chips first came out, people were saying x86 is dead and that all future computer chips will be ARM based. As of now 94% of all chips used in computers are still x86 chips
@@kenhew4641 Well this the worst of arm and we pretty much have seen the best of x86. Year over year the IPC gains are abysmal and they're increasing on the power too. However with the recent improvements from the Intel & AMD in the laptop segment is quite good but still they don't match up to the efficiency of ARM. ARM is only going to get good from now on
@@kenhew4641and now Intel has come up with Lunar Lake.
As a blind person, I will not get a Dell XPS for the touchbar esc function keys, which I use all the time.
Invisible trackpads? Capacitive buttons?? Wtf were they thinking...
You know... a lot of executives that cannot create pdf doean't care about it.
Next thing we know it's 2 touchscreens opening up, one for keyboard and one for... screen.
Typical "create product to look good and sell to the uninformed" vs "create product to actually be useful". Dell lost it for several years already. Though they're so big, they can actually swing back before it gets too bad.
That is the only reason I would choose this computer, the looks are amazing
All worth it for the cleanest looking laptop out there
It's ridiculous that Android Studio doesn't support ARM64. It's based on Intellij which has had ARM64 support for a couple year now. I'm guessing it's entirely because they don't have an ARM64 android emulator ready
My guess that if you lower the power limit on the Intel processor, it will offer a comparable performance to ARM, with similar battery results. The performance/consumption ratio on x86’s is reeeeally non-linear; the difference in performance between, for example 30 and 60 watts is MUCH less than 2 times. Look at Steam Deck wattage tests if you’re interested.
well i was getting excited about Windows on ARM... not anymore. at least the tech TH-camrs got a free trip (including accommodations) courtesy of Qualcomm for hyping up this crap. hope it was worth it
What happens with the script at 18:00 is that Python's stdout mechanism on Windows is messed up. Even if Measure-Command should redirect it to something like /dev/null, it still looks like some OS interrupts are awaited.
If Intel ever gets its power consumption in check and offers very potent performance, there will be little need to use snapdragon, and deal with the headaches of compatibility. Lunar lake /arrow lake might be good. Zen 5 from AMD also appears good as well.
I have always enjoyed Alex's videos, but he keeps getting better and better. I now find myself going to the channel just to check if I missed a new vid...
I watched a Level1Techs video where he interviews a game dev and according the dev, some of the software may not be optimized yet because they didn't get a dev kit for the current version of the ARM chip.
So I think the Intel laptop being faster is mainly due to developers not having a chance to optimized their apps before the retail launch.
I use a MacBook and not every application is available, so it's gonna take some time before Windows on ARM get their time in the light.
That guy talked about the GPU driver being crap, these here are all CPU issues.
Developers "not having a chance?" :) ARM64 has been out for years. They've had a chance to write ARM64 code for a long time (mostly the whole life of Windows 11). There just wasn't a compelling market for it until Elite X.
Laptops are made slightly angled cause the initial warm of the HW make the whole chassy expand a bit to horizontal. It's like initial stretching.
Snapdragon felt promising, but I believe its windows' x86 to arm translation layer not being as good as macOS' rosetta 2 translator...
I genuinely want to see linux joining the chat, linux has better arm packages as far as I'm aware, and hopefully we see better performance on linux side.
From what I've heard (unconfirmed, I don't know how true it is) - Prism has better performance than Rosetta WHEN IT WORKS.
@@MadafakinRio that is interesting, considering the fact that (If I recall correctly) rosetta is hardware accelerated
I saw a review where they used WSL to run Linux and do the same benchmarks as Windows and,even trough virtualization, the results on Linux were better in every single test. Microsoft needs to rebuild Windows 12 from the ground up as much as possible if they want to succed with ARM, especially now that developers are investing in this architecture and x86 Socs look to be much more efficient then ever before.
The problem with xElite is the lack of support for arm in windows. Not everything can be emulated. I have my Surface Laptop 7 and I cannot for example install Goodge Drive app as Google does not plan to introduce ARM support for it on Windows. And this is just the beginning - we will see what else is not going to work. Since my workflow relies heavily on Google Drive (company policy) this is a huge issue.
I like this. There's a bit of beef between youtubers regarding these ARM processors, yet its weirdly reassuring hearing a comparison from a tech developer. Feels enlightening.
@ziskind I was using XPS 13 with i7 and this touchbar. Worst thing was that whenever he was overheating touchbar stops to work, it becomes untouchable-bar
The usb4 spec includes thunderbolt 3. That's why its not mentioned and why it works with your thunderbolt drive.
my next laptop is definitely going to be arm, but I use a lot of engineering applications, so we will have to wait. Probably til the X elite 4. I am waiting for the igpu to be at least close to the laptop 3060 that i have.
2:54 Apple would have figured out something that would ensure that the stickers would always align perfectly. And they would highlight it in a keynote as a feature.
Thank you for this great comparison test. In Germany we literally say "neither fish nor meat", which means that none of the two solutions meet the demands. I have had problems finding the right set-up for years. The iPad is great for mobile working, but it also has severe limitations (you can't even scale an inserted photo in the Outlook app), the Surface gets hot quickly, is noisy and you can only work on a table, a Mac is great, but many professional programs are still not available and laptops with X86 technology have catastrophically poor battery life. I really hope that Arm technology will take a big step forward in the future.
I ordered a Surface Laptop 7 on ARM just to try it out. Started to install my usual programs and drivers and received too many 'not supported' or 'not available' messages for printers and programs. Sent it back. Has the potential to be great but there's no reason for this to be happening upon launch in 2024.
thank you for doing all of this work so that we may benefit from your results!
regarding the touchpad lag: is it possible it lowered the refresh rate because of the two additional screens?
Thunderbolt 4 is USB4 with most optional features on (like basically all the other host implementations), and Thunderbolt 3 is mostly the same
As a existing user of Intel over the past decades we so appreciation and not depreciation. We arent tested the xelite so far so can not comment.
Sorry to nitpick, but I'm pretty sure he means "x86" every time he says "x64" when referencing the intel machine.
Not sure how you missed this, but USB4 is compatible with Thunderbolt. It doesn't have to mention it. Thunderbolt devices are supposed to work with that USB4 port. In fact, USB4 is largely an import of the Thunderbolt standard into USB. They're not identical, but it shouldn't have surprised you that it works. That's as designed.
Writing this on an old XPS 13. Great machine. Stood the daily test of live very well!
I'll wait for second gen 🤷. They have my trust but can't give them my productivity. Also: I love that you're working on BLAZOR!! ❤
Thank you very much for your efforts!
Thank you for doing this balanced comparison sir
I hate the XPS 13 keyboard. They made the keys bigger to make up for the fact that there's no spacing between the keys. But because you run the risk of hitting the adjacent key, the target becomes tiny. If you don't strike the key right in the middle, you have the chance of hitting the adjacent key which is super stressful.
I still don't understand why there isn't a ARM version of android studio for windows. The Mac has had a ARM version for years now.
market share
Google android team members all get 32-cpu threadrippers for dev workstations, all google laptops are dumb telnet machines, most of them are probably celeron chromebooks now ...
I want to know what happened with that python test. Maybe if we can check the code we can confirm if its calling a x86 library, specifically AVX libraries? I'ver heard that prism doesn't really do a great job with AVX instructions
996 Seconds here for Mandelbrot 16000 iteration.
Lenovo Slim 7x (Snapdragon X Elite - X1E-78-100), Visual Studio Code Arm64, Python AMD64 (since numpy currently does not provide pre-built binary wheels for Windows ARM64).
Set to High Performance in powercfg, CPU utilization does not go above 15%, GPU utilization doesn't surpass 11%.
Another great video. I love your coverage of these Snapdragon devices. That python performance really was weird.
Hi Alex! Thanks for the in-depth reviews as always. I'm currently trying to decide between the Dell XPS 2024 models with the Snapdragon and Intel processors, specifically for heavy Excel usage. Excel is critical for my work, especially with large datasets and complex formulas, so processing speed and efficiency are key. Could you possibly share some insights or even a demo on how these two devices compare in handling intensive Excel tasks? It would be incredibly helpful in making my decision. Keep up the great work!
MAN WE APPRECIATE YOUR HARD EFFORTS 🫡🫡🫡🫡👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
The trackpad lag after connected to external device are possibly related to grounding issues generally common in laptops. You possibly would notice the same with power supply as well. In some brands it's less noticeable but generally it can happen to even the best laptops.
@@MartinzW hey, I have the same issue. Can tell more about it or how to solve it.
@jb3839 if unplugged it works perfectly but plugged in it behaves with delay, you can try following: in Windows settings increase trackpad sensitivity to max, you could try to ground it to some metal chassis, sometimes plugging in an external device in USB with metal chasis helps like external hard drive.
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LocalDB does work on WoA now - but you have to use named pipes in your connection string to avoid an error.
What do you do with all these Laptops after testing (:
I wish I could give you an extra thumbs up for the Aphex Twin reference... :)
Dell had to change two things in the design of this device
The first is the rubber bottom of the device as you said
The second is to line up two illuminated vertical lines to define the trackpad to match the functional lighting
Finally, a review with comparison of comparable laptops instead of macbook with tests that aren't useful for bloggers only.
I think those strips expand either because of heat or chemical interaction like with oil.
I love your videos @AZisk... I have a surface pro 11 with the X1E-80-100 and 32gb ram...on Wsl2 it ran the Mandelbrot in 36 secs.... Something is definitely up with the XPS 13....
"I got my favourite knife." Officer...
Hi Alex, is your python mandelbrot script publicly available somewhere and free to use? I am interested in understanding its slow performance on Snadragon X Elite. Thanks!
I got XPS 13 SnapDragon 6 days ago. I very happy with it and it rocks. I don't do Android nor Python . C#/Web/Docker everything run perfect as ARM64 Processes. The Dell is currently the only one in this form factor with proper quality having 64gig memory for LLM/NPU and 2TB for 2.6kEUR + discount of 160EUR with Dell Rewards for accessories - so I got a proper BTKeyboard/Mouse/Dockingstation to have a real dev machine with this kind of battery-life only m-macs have (almost same specs with mac is 5.4k€). So hopefully more ARM support/optimization is coming soon. May Intel is currently more compatible (x64VMs)... but I bet on this is going to change soon.
Would be great to see a video with snapdragon on ollama (when arm version is here) or qualcomm ai hub compare in the future between the two XPS Snap / Intel ... when NPU kicks in.. I guess you can forget about mandelbrot Intel then ;-)
Interesting how the X Elite started off well, but fell behind when doing real world development work. I wonder if it's just Pthon that is slower on ARM 🤔 What would happen if you run the same program as .NET apps?
I would love to see a comparsion between x-arm based machines from different companies assus vs MS Vs lenovo
Touchpad CAN BE GREAT - on my XPS13 i went to AutoZone and got a roll of pinstriping and marked the edges of the touch area. GAME CHANGER! This is a "haptic" touchpad (which is WONDERFUL) but i agree the borders need to be shown - and the pinstriping is perfect because you can see AND feel the touch borders.
Not needed and you will dmg your display with those stickers eventually.
You could also compare it to the XPS 14 with the 4050 to see how current gen dGPU laptops fair against X-Elite
Nice of your fingers to give the intel a fraction of a headstart. But it's not exactly hard to optimise web apps for Arm.
Usb4 is/can be thunderbolt 3 compatible, it's essentially a open version of the standard
Wish i had programming skills like yours
Solution for your tactile trackpad feedback is duct tape. Not a fan of the F-key row, similar to Apple's touch bar, but worst.
this comparsion gives me new info about X-arm machines which is new in the market
Doesn't placing the laptops next to one another cause heat transfer?
I mean technically there’s the surface pro 10 and 11
Please do Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop on both.
Snapdragon X elite laptops were never made for gaming. I don’t know why everyone talks about this so much. It’s like saying you bought an iPhone so you can game.
Yeah and a laptop is not for gaming. Take a desktop and a big screen.
Gaming is a big reason for buying an iPhone.
Then maybe Microsoft and Qualcomm shouldn't have bragged about gaming on this prior to release.
Contrarians 😂
@@PrestoMoto02 how much is Qualcomm paying you?
Excellent review! Intel will be the default until most apps migrate to ARM. I want a video dedicated to Linux on both systems, that would be amazing.
8:09 you can see frame by frame comparison that intel xps actions appear quicker (not all the time)
The cheapest arm windows laptop on market right now is 899 samsung galaxy edge 14 with 16gb + 512gb with all discounts applied. And bestbuy m2 macbook air 8gb + 256gb is also on sale for 799.
I do believe that these machines, just on the Snapdragon Chip not Dell specifically, can really help Windows get an edge on Macs in the laptop space. However I think these chips should have been put through a little more testing and some kind of dev kit be sent out or available to buy so a lot of apps, both consumer and professional, could have a version for them and these chips had the chance to really shine. ARM might be the future for everything mobile in tech, but Microsoft just can't quite get it right it seems.
That touch function keys row is an absolute dealbreaker for me, I will never buy Dell laptops anymore until they bring back physical keys.
You can buy other models
@Alex: Look at 19:57 and 20:07 at the time of "user" and "sys" which indicates how much computing power was needed.
And, as far as I understand, you see that the ARM CPU is indeed faster, but the Laptop has only 12 cores and the intel cpu has 16 cores. So intels more cores (and maybe higher clock speed) means it's finished faster, but needed more cpu cycles.
That's the case because the test use all cores.
I will pass buying these kind of laptops with snapdragon chipset this year. There is too little support for them, and the translation layer is awful. At least macos translation layer was barely noticeable when it came out
It’s actually way more mature than when m1 was introduced, in my task manager I have only 4 to 5 apps running in emulation and they all run with no issues.
@@TalynOneyou keep lying to yourself to justify your purchase.
@@kspfan001nope that’s just the truth. M1 on day one was pretty bad. Especially for gaming. Much worse than the snapdragon
@@christianr.5868 and the water is wet... of course gaming on mac was bad, it wasn't made for that in the first place
@@weiss588 neither is the snapdragon. My point is, the emulation layer is in much better shape than Rosetta was on day one. Because all of its games run through emulation. And the ones that don’t get stopped by anticheat run decently. So yeah, the translation layer is far from awful
I bought one last year, used it for two weeks and returned it because battery was terrible. If I was lucky I got three hours of usage.
3:52 Design over function...... Now you have to mark the trackpad yourself. Or hope that you create muscle memory quickly.
The python test makes sense, I have surface laptop 7 with 32 gigs ram and another one thinkpad p1 gen 5 with 12700h/32/nvda graphics.
For a small application my Thinkpad always beats my surface by 2 or some seconds. Even apple m1 by 1 and half second.
How does the speaker audio compare? Can Dolby Access be installed for free from the MS Store to enhance the audio?
so sad to hear that there are compatibility issues on programming apps for windows on arm. The Chipset is already powerful enough and but sadly app's support aren't that great as of now. This should be ok for casual users that wants a lightweight and long lasting laptop but even with that id still recommend macbook air over this.
Hi Alex, Can you do a webcam comparison on your next video?
XPS webcams are always craps till now, but yhey said, Snap Dragon has a dedicated image signal processor, and let's find out the difference😉
I have the Intel XPS for over a month it's really nice just wish it came in the darker color
I believe your Python script used NumPy for mathematics, and it was built without native (C/ASM) optimizations or only with basic ARM things. I believe nobody supports Windows on ARM in the Python wheels.
Hp uses those strips and i lost mine in a year. And its very hard to find a replacement too. Dell must be insane to use those. What happened to four pads they used to use.
As usual great stuff from Alex. Lots of wishes from India
Fantastic review you're the go to man for developers when they want to upgrade for sure.
Hey @Alex Ziskind can you tell how you run python mandelbrot on arm, because the source code uses Numpy and i can't compile Numpy on Windows 11, i see from the video that seems to be in Windows, or was it in WSL?
The mandletbrot test emitting all that text to the terminal might cause some performance discrepancies between terminals and maybe even within the same terminal but configured differently. (ie windows terminal for windows vs wsl)
Any chance you could get your hands on the new ThinkPad T14s with the Snapdragon?
Please, get them on it.
You can install sql server x86 in docker on arm. At least on a mac. Cannot tell if it works on Win machines but if not it will.
Yeah, Docker apparently supports Windows on Arm so worth taking a look
How much they last , for a single charge after your test?
right clicking is 2 fingers click right