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.
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.
@@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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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'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.
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 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
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!
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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
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 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.
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`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
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
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
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?
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.
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).
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.
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…
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.
@@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.
Apple will really compete with x elite. Emulating x64 on Windows and being able to run Direct X 12 for gaming is the biggest improvement over Apple Metal
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.
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!
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.
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 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?
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 am interested to see better drivers and optimizations.
Give it a few years to mature.
no one's gonna support it bro😢
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.
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.
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. 😨
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
A handheld with the Snapdragon X Elite would be great.
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
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.
Would love to see some Linux benchmarks with translation layers for comparison.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Just impressive to see those x86 gamea running on that arm chip.... They make a good translation work this time
All the hype for these chips leave a lot to be desired!
Looking forward to the second generation released in October, hoping to greatly enhance the GPU
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
At least we got strix halo to look foreword to. Btw what is the performance with native ARM applications?
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'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.
Im impressed i was expecting more issues running apps in an emulator.
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.
Intel with his new ultra series processors gonna nail it
Looks like it will be an awesome product in 2-3 years.
I would appreciate the snapdragon’s chip performance upto this level releasing it for the first time.
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 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
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
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!
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 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'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.
Waiting this video for the long time 🤠
I'm curious to see a benchmark Linux vs Windoze on this hardware.
Instead of emulating if it run natively it will be much better and best for handheld
looks amazing, windows on arm is the future with this kind of performance....
Funfact: ADRENO is a acronym for RADEON
anagram 🤓
@@SlipknotRevan well shit, you're right 😂
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.
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.
Laptops with Snapdragon processors! About time!
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
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!
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?
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.
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
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
"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.
very good review thx i love gaming test
A step in the right direction. Hopefully they keep it up. To the point people can build their own arm pc
Gonna watch for updates and stuff and if promising look to black friday, if not ill check in next year
As of yet, developers and even Qualcomm will have to work on it. I want to jump to to ARM as soon as possible
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)
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
Thank you for this video! Can you try Magicka 2 or the cave?
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 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.
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.
Waiting for rog ally vs MSI claw rematch. 🔥 🔥 🔥
Surprisingly good. I think Streaming will be the answer. Local productivity and light indy gaming, and streaming from an x86 machine for triple A.
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`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
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
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
Anyhow Hacki Tosh posible then 🔥🔥❤
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
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.
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 💀
What software are you using to get the performance overlay, like the CPU usage ?
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.
Great review, thank you. Do these things support EGPUs?
In theory they can, but no GPU vendor has made drivers for them yet.
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…
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.
This is the first time a snapdragon GPU has been viable for PC gaming. It’s gonna take time for drivers to catch up to the competition.
Qualcomm needs to develop the power full GPU for the arm chip
its not time for arm yet, maybe 2 or more years
On Apple its very time)
I'm more impressed about the compatibility than about the performance ... Can't wait for microsoft to design their own CPU
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.
Snapdragon X Elite 💐🎉🔋🔋
with the oled screen and great battery life those laptops should be amazing for cloud gaming
Emulation video please !
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.
very interesting definitely need more optimization
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.
Hello, I'm *Evil Twin,* your Microsoft Representative, but you can call me Copilot!
Next gen snapdragon laptop will be for me!
Apple will really compete with x elite. Emulating x64 on Windows and being able to run Direct X 12 for gaming is the biggest improvement over Apple Metal
Can't wait for someone to put these chips in a handheld pc
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.
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!
I wanna see Helldivers 2 on this thing!
Great start for WoA but not enough to slow down x86. Lunar Lake and Strix Point are gonna smoke this before X Elite chips even get off the ground.
This arm on windows needs some ballers translation layer to be performant enough to game
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