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Qualcomm says most Windows games should “just work” on its unannounced Arm laptops
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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This is very exciting. I would love to have an Arm laptop with 20 hours of battery life that would compete with Apple Silicon.
If linux support ends up being reasonable for these I'll seriously look into one for my next laptop. I'm always so envious of how my friends with apple silicon macs can just never really worry about battery life.
Lenovo already ships these https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/thinkpad--x13s-(13-inch-snapdragon)/len101t0019
Lenovo claims 28 hours of video playback when running Windows. Bad part is that they don't allow this configuration without an OS, and it's quite expensive.
I don't know much about them beyond knowing this. But this looks promising. Unfortunately, ARM laptops are usually quite locked down unlike x86.
edit https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X13s & https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Thinkpad_X13s-- well, it might even work
Exactly. And Linux already has a lot of ARM support... The question is, will Qualcomm's instruction-set translation system be available to non-windows users or not. It's possible they have a deal with Microsoft (like the chip will initially be exclusive to Surface devices, and only later be available to other hardware vendors like AMD giving Lenovo first dibs on their big workstations CPU's) and work together to do it, and then it would mean that x86 emulation on Linux would take longer to catch up, but if they make it available, this could be really cool.
Either way, if the hardware exists, you can run Linux on it. You can even run Linux on Apple Silicon thanks to Asahi Linux, it's amazing how fast they are progressing to a quite usable machine with zero help from Apple (I don't have one but one of my buddies is using it on his Mac mini).
Also, I want this chip on a smaller version of the steam deck to basically run a Switch sized system with a decent battery life.
Honestly I don't even care about x86 software support that much for a laptop. The only reason I would want it is games and I rarely use my laptop for that. If I really needed some x86 thing I could always connect to my desktop remotely
Is putting Linux on a macbook not an option?
I haven’t looked in a few months but it didn’t seem like the Asahi Linux project was necessarily ready to be a daily driver yet, but they’ve made a lot of progress in just a few years with a small team of volunteers and as far as I know no support from Apple. Seems like it’s only a matter of time before they really get it nailed down. For now you can run ARM versions of Linux in virtual machines on Apple silicon.
Asahi Linux is amazing, and they progress really fast without any help from Apple, but I really don't want to buy an Apple product; I don't want to give Apple money, and I also don't want to buy a machine that's intentionally designed to be hard to repair and obsolete quickly.
Once my old laptop dies, I'll probably get a Framework 13.
Yeah this is pretty much my thoughts exactly. I wish there was an ARM (or eventually maybe even RISC-V) Framework laptop, maybe someday
It all depends on how hard Arm SoC vendors like Qualcomm, Samsung, and MediaTek push in that direction. Once they figure out the compatibility stuff, the average consumer won't care that it isn't x86, and would happily take the better battery life offered. At that point pretty much every laptop maker will have at least one Arm laptop available, and Framework will probably follow suit, as they managed to get the AMD version released faster than I expected for a new company, and their 16" laptop shows they are not only innovative but also ambitious, so I'm sure this will be in their pipeline.
As for RISC-V, it doesn't seem to have a lot of steam in the desktop/laptop direction, but I'm sure we will see a lot of SBCs with these, increasing public interest and eventually even desktop/laptop... If I had to guess, its going to be at least a decade before we see a mainstream laptop brand offering a model with a RISC-V SoC...