News Qualcomm Claims the Transition of PCs to Arm Is "Inevitable"

[Admin]

Qualcomm expects its next-generation Snapdragon to become the benchmark for Windows PCs. Initial availability is slated for August 2022, with a full release in 2023.

Qualcomm Claims the Transition of PCs to Arm Is "Inevitable" : Read more

 

[King_V]

If they can really do it, at a competitive level, and pull of excellent power efficiency as well, then I think this would be a welcome shift in the market.

On the other hand, I wonder - is it difficult to compile an extra version of any and all software? I mean, as it is, I see we had 32 and 64 bit versions of a lot of things for Windows, even today with drivers, though it seems 32 bit overall is finally falling by the wayside.

Will having an additional one, ARM, be a huge problem?

 

[InvalidError]

On the other hand, I wonder - is it difficult to compile an extra version of any and all software? I mean, as it is, I see we had 32 and 64 bit versions of a lot of things for Windows, even today with drivers, though it seems 32 bit overall is finally falling by the wayside.

How difficult it is depends on how much of your code base including dependencies requires bitness-awareness and endian-awareness for things like handling hard-coded binary structures that isn't already coded-in.

Or you can write in C# and equivalents where code gets locally re-compiled and let the runtime sort out platform-specific stuff.

 

[spongiemaster]

Uh huh. Should coincide with the inevitable Linux on the desktop take over we have been hearing about for over 20 years.

 

[chulak]

Uh huh. Should coincide with the inevitable Linux on the desktop take over we have been hearing about for over 20 years.

Lol! My exact sentiment

 

[techconc]

Uh huh. Should coincide with the inevitable Linux on the desktop take over we have been hearing about for over 20 years.

The failure of Linux on the desktop was completely predictable. I said it would fail for obvious reasons. Its biggest strength was also its biggest weakness. Customization is great, but when you have no standards, it's tough to get developers to support it properly.

The fact is, the industry really has no choice. Apple is absolutely crushing it on performance / watt and their M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max chips make for far more compelling laptops than ANYTHING Intel based. Intel doesn't have an answer for this. They can match performance, but at huge energy costs. Nobody wants a laptop that has to be plugged in to run properly and that has fans like a turbojet. Microsoft sees the writing on the wall and clearly Qualcomm does too.

 

[King_V]

How difficult it is depends on how much of your code base including dependencies requires bitness-awareness and endian-awareness for things like handling hard-coded binary structures that isn't already coded-in.

Or you can write in C# and equivalents where code gets locally re-compiled and let the runtime sort out platform-specific stuff.

I was under the impression that, at the PC level, hardware-specific coding was a thing of the past, and that everything is done at higher level languages. Er, well, higher than assembly, at the least.

 

[USAFRet]

I was under the impression that, at the PC level, hardware-specific coding was a thing of the past, and that everything is done at higher level languages. Er, well, higher than assembly, at the least.

Witness the evident performance difference between Intel and AMD on Win 11.

 

[InvalidError]

I was under the impression that, at the PC level, hardware-specific coding was a thing of the past, and that everything is done at higher level languages.

If you are writing cross-platform stuff using binary structures for storage and networking, the onus has always been and still is on you / the programmer to ensure consistent byte ordering and structure sizes between platforms.

 

[Deleted member 1353997]

Uh huh. Should coincide with the inevitable Linux on the desktop take over we have been hearing about for over 20 years.

Given what Apple has achieved with the M1 (Pro/Max), I don't think this is as unlikely as Linux dominating the PC market.

 

[maik80]

They're going to steal Apple's technology through Nuvia, and Apple has already said that if it violates any of its designers they'll take it to court.

 

[Kenneth Hans]

Uh huh. Should coincide with the inevitable Linux on the desktop take over we have been hearing about for over 20 years.

Or the "inevitable consoles taking over PC gaming" we've been hearing about for about as long LOL

 

[USAFRet]

Or the "inevitable consoles taking over PC gaming" we've been hearing about for about as long LOL

Similarly, tablets. Specifically the iPad.

 

[hotaru251]

tbh i doubt it...at least anytime soon.

AMD is doing wonders with Zen. fast in both single and multi thread and reasonable power use.

we still have no idea how ARM scales long term in a desktop style.

 

[InvalidError]

we still have no idea how ARM scales long term in a desktop style.

There is no reason to believe ARM cannot scale as much as x86 does.

The main reason ARM was so far behind x86 until recently is simply because ARM was still avoiding some of the more energy-intensive tricks for power efficiency and die size reasons which are no longer much of a problem at 5-7nm and $1000+ MSRPs.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Talk is cheap, proof is in the pudding.

Qualcomm needs to put up, or shut up.

x86 ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

 

[watzupken]

I feel the "inevitable" will take a long time to happen. The problem is that Qualcomm will run into issue with software compatibility that will cripple their chip performance. I think we have seen Windows' poor support for ARM x64, and also other software running into the same issue. And because of big players like Intel that will make this transition miserable to defend their turf.

Conversely, Apple had it easy because they optimise their own OS, and because some of the professional software sells very well on MacOS, software developers are more inclined to optimise their software for the ARM/ M1 chip for Mac.

 

[hotaru.hino]

If you are writing cross-platform stuff using binary structures for storage and networking, the onus has always been and still is on you / the programmer to ensure consistent byte ordering and structure sizes between platforms.

If you're an application developer who has to do that, your tools have failed you and you should get better ones. This would be more understandable if you were a system software developer, but they know that's part of the package.

The failure of Linux on the desktop was completely predictable. I said it would fail for obvious reasons. Its biggest strength was also its biggest weakness. Customization is great, but when you have no standards, it's tough to get developers to support it properly.

The problem with Linux isn't its customization. It's the way apps are primarily distributed. Every distribution's package manager runs on the principle that no app is stand-alone. If it depends on something, you have to get its dependency which is a problem for two reasons:

1. Does that dependency even exist?
2. Is the version of that dependency compatible with the app you want to run?

And if nobody's maintaining the app or its dependencies and you run into a compatibility issue or something, well, you're kind of out of luck. But since everything is open source, you're free to try and fix it yourself.

Granted there are now app distribution platforms like Snap that aim to distribute apps as standalone apps, but it kind of feels bleh with what little experience I've had with it. Apple has the best app packaging system I've found (and no, it's not the App Store, it's how macOS used to distribute applications)

 

[korekan]

if arm can make the ML/ AI read any architecture under it and perform 11-12 comparison then yes. if it still need ARM based build then it will be hard way

 

[samopa]

If it can run DirectX competitively, it would attract many eyes.

 

[ottonis]

Finally some stiff competition for AMD and Intel.
Apple Silicon was only "half a threat", since the closed Apple ecosystem ist not really attractive to large parts of typical pc users, in particular the gaming crowd.

Now, with Windows compatible ARM based SoCs that promise to be faster and more efficient than whatever AMD and Intel can offer, will certainly bring down prices and stimulate technological development.

Bring it on!

 

[Romanio0089]

As if I will ever use an ARM CPU on a laptop, don't even think about it for desktops.

 

[TerryLaze]

Finally some stiff competition for AMD and Intel.
Apple Silicon was only "half a threat", since the closed Apple ecosystem ist not really attractive to large parts of typical pc users, in particular the gaming crowd.

Lol, arm is available to anybody that can pay for the license fees, intel and amd can make arm cpus at any time they want to.
intel with MS on windows 11 just came out with the bridge technology to run arm apps seamlessly on windows 11 under x86.
Intel could at any point change the gracemont cores with arm cores or throw additional arm cores into the mix.
That would give us all the pros of arm without loosing any of the pros of actual big x86 cores.
A pure arm core will never be able to reach the power of an x86 core unless it becomes a x86 core, and that goes vice versa, both arches have different pros and cons.

Now, with Windows compatible ARM based SoCs that promise to be faster and more efficient than whatever AMD and Intel can offer, will certainly bring down prices and stimulate technological development.

Bring it on!

Meh, they say challenge intel/amd offerings
and they will target only notebooks in 2023 so there is not a lot of a bar there, they are targeting the lowest x86 possible, especially if they target amd/intel offerings of today in a notebook in 2023 where intel/amd will have moved on.

 

[InvalidError]

A pure arm core will never be able to reach the power of an x86 core unless it becomes a x86 core

I don't see any reason why it couldn't when running native code. Most performance enhancement tricks that can be used in x86 CPUs can also be applied to ARM too if they haven't already and ARM has the benefit of much simpler instruction decoding which should both reduce the cost of instruction/trace cache misses and make it easier to scale up fetch/decode throughput.

 

[TerryLaze]

I don't see any reason why it couldn't when running native code. Most performance enhancement tricks that can be used in x86 CPUs can also be applied to ARM too if they haven't already and ARM has the benefit of much simpler instruction decoding which should both reduce the cost of instruction/trace cache misses and make it easier to scale up fetch/decode throughput.

The whole concept that separates arm from x86 is that it runs supported instructions in one cycle at low clocks to make it extremely efficient at the instructions that it supports.
Trying to do the same at high clocks to compete with x86 will be using a lot of power, basically it's what we see with AVX on intel, it's a special circuit that does these calculations in way less cycles than simple x86 does, so at low clocks it's incredibly more efficient than using x86 would be, but pushing it to high clocks uses up huge amounts of power.

It's the same for any instruction, to get to the speed that x86 has from clocks alone arm would have to do exactly the same as x86 does, it doesn't work any other way.

The only alternative is for every single piece of software to only run power efficient code which is what the scaled down mobile versions of software do, for the most part. If every user is ok with running compromised software, then arm replacing x86 in PC could become feasible.
Hence why qualcom is pushing notebooks, those users could very well be completely fine with running fewer things if that gives them a better experience overall.