The market isn't always wrong

[bmoag]

x86 reigns supreme as Snapdragon X Elite chips captured just 0.8% of the market with 720,000 units sold in Q3 2024 — Qualcomm misses out on rising AI PC sales with Intel and AMD taking charge | Tom's Hardware

Who would have guessed that launching a Windows on ARM platform, for the second time, without guaranteeing compatibility with existing X86 apps would fail for the second time for the exact same reasons?

Who could have guessed that developers would not spend the resources to port their code to a platform with no established user base without financial and technical investment from the two companies who would benefit the most in the long term?

That sort of thing is SOP for nVidia, AMD, Apple and even Intel.

I hope its not too late to right that sinking ship but Intel, and to a lesser extent AMD, have shown that they can match battery life in the kinds of laptops that most buyers want, if buyers even care that much about uber extended battery life.

Not to mention Copilot and NPUs.

 

[CAcreeks]

I feel it's premature to judge that Snapdragon X has failed. Laptops with that system-on-chip only began to appear in July 2024. Choice isn't very good yet. I haven't seen one that I'd buy. Few consumers understand why they'd want CoPilot+ or how they'd use it.

Microsoft sells Office 365 for ARM but not ARM native Office. Game selection is poor. It's probable that Office will appear eventually, and perhaps some games.

Cost of production for Intel's Lunar Lake, fabricated by TSMC, is high. AMD doesn't fabricate their competitive AI 300 either. If 25% tariffs are imposed on chips made in Taiwan, it will be difficult to make a cost-effective laptop with them.

 

[Awkward_Swine]

I feel it's premature to judge that Snapdragon X has failed. Laptops with that system-on-chip only began to appear in July 2024. Choice isn't very good yet. I haven't seen one that I'd buy. Few consumers understand why they'd want CoPilot+ or how they'd use it.

Microsoft sells Office 365 for ARM but not ARM native Office. Game selection is poor. It's probable that Office will appear eventually, and perhaps some games.

Cost of production for Intel's Lunar Lake, fabricated by TSMC, is high. AMD doesn't fabricate their competitive AI 300 either. If 25% tariffs are imposed on chips made in Taiwan, it will be difficult to make a cost-effective laptop with them.

Actually, Microsoft Office 365 apps are all ARM native and have been for quite a few years now. Even in 2012 on the Windows RT/Surface RT, which had no x86 emulation at all, you could run MS Office on ARM.

The reports said that about 800,000 Snapdragon X PC have been sold in the last 4-5 months from just a handful and PC vendors. That seems like a pretty good start to me considering the lack of AAA Game support. If they can improve on that support and compatibility, there is room to grow. A recent Windows Insider build added improved x86 compatibility features to enable a bigger set of games, and further improved performance, so the situation is still improving.

What you can't run today is Adobe Lightroom, which is the one thing that is preventing me from considering a Snapdragon X PC. I should be getting a Asus ProArt 16 with the new AMD Ryzen 300 AI CPU + 4070 gpu. Battery life may not match Snapdragon X, but will run everything I need for longer than my existing Intel 11th gen Surface Laptop Studio.

 

[Austinian]

I feel it's premature to judge that Snapdragon X has failed. Laptops with that system-on-chip only began to appear in July 2024. Choice isn't very good yet. I haven't seen one that I'd buy.

Agreed. I think the MS Surface Laptop comes closest to what I'd want, but it's not great enough to make me spend the money on it when I already have laptops.

Few consumers understand why they'd want CoPilot+ or how they'd use it.

I see nothing wrong with plain ol' Copilot, as long as it's not fully trusted with anything important. IDK what extra the + brings unless perhaps one wants to run local 'AI' models.

Microsoft sells Office 365 for ARM but not ARM native Office. Game selection is poor. It's probable that Office will appear eventually, and perhaps some games.

Another concern for gamers. Copilot says:

"Graphics Adreno X1 GPU, decent performance but not as powerful as Intel'sXe2 GPU,"

Cost of production for Intel's Lunar Lake, fabricated by TSMC, is high. AMD doesn't fabricate their competitive AI 300 either. If 25% tariffs are imposed on chips made in Taiwan, it will be difficult to make a cost-effective laptop with them.

Indeed.

 

[kelpdiver]

the success or failure of the latest ARM push is going to take longer than 1 quarter How many snapdragon CPUs were produced in that same Q? Did they sell most of them?

ARM support is markedly stronger than it was in prior eras. Amazon/AWS is pushing it aggressively with their Graviton offerings and my company is one of many taking them up on it. Linux dists are pretty much at parity between amd64 and aarch64.

Though as I remarked here before the release, inertia is powerful and the mere offering of longer battery life isn't compelling to most consumers. So it was going to be most attractive to the Chromebox customers, and those who only use the standard application suite.

 

[Sean Nelson]

Microsoft sells Office 365 for ARM but not ARM native Office.

Actually, Microsoft Office 365 apps are all ARM native and have been for quite a few years now. Even in 2012 on the Windows RT/Surface RT, which had no x86 emulation at all, you could run MS Office on ARM.

Forgive my ignorance - I'm still on Office 2007 ( :-O ) but it's my understanding that Office 365 is a cloud-based app that has only a thin client front end. I assumed that @CAcreeks was referring to the classic MS Office where the programs actually reside on your desktop computer and require no cloud connectivity. Am I mistaken in thinking that these are two separate things?

I also assume that the ARM versions of Windows provide x86 emulation capability which would let you run pretty much any application. Emulation sometimes has issues with performance, but it doesn't seem to me like Office apps would be the sort of software that would be sensitive to performance issues - they're pretty light loads compared to some.

I'd expect the biggest issue for ARM to be with more resource consumptive apps like games, video editors, etc., and with specialized hardware that requires native drivers which may not be available.

 

[Awkward_Swine]

Microsoft sells Office 365 for ARM but not ARM native Office.

Actually, Microsoft Office 365 apps are all ARM native and have been for quite a few years now. Even in 2012 on the Windows RT/Surface RT, which had no x86 emulation at all, you could run MS Office on ARM.

Forgive my ignorance - I'm still on Office 2007 ( :-O ) but it's my understanding that Office 365 is a cloud-based app that has only a thin client front end. I assumed that @CAcreeks was referring to the classic MS Office where the programs actually reside on your desktop computer and require no cloud connectivity. Am I mistaken in thinking that these are two separate things?

I also assume that the ARM versions of Windows provide x86 emulation capability which would let you run pretty much any application. Emulation sometimes has issues with performance, but it doesn't seem to me like Office apps would be the sort of software that would be sensitive to performance issues - they're pretty light loads compared to some.

I'd expect the biggest issue for ARM to be with more resource consumptive apps like games, video editors, etc., and with specialized hardware that requires native drivers which may not be available.

That's an awful lot of speculation and conjecture.

The Office apps are not a "light load". They create huge graphics and video based documents. Run spreadsheets that consume gigabytes of RAM, and include the fattest Email application in the world. These are serious apps. They work offline but are extremely connected and integrated with web services.

There are web apps as well but that is is not the point of this thread.

 

[Sean Nelson]

...it doesn't seem to me like Office apps would be the sort of software that would be sensitive to performance issues - they're pretty light loads compared to some.

That's an awful lot of speculation and conjecture.

The Office apps are not a "light load". They create huge graphics and video based documents. Run spreadsheets that consume gigabytes of RAM, and include the fattest Email application in the world. These are serious apps. They work offline but are extremely connected and integrated with web services.

Firstly, I'm guessing (again) that the extreme end of the spectrum you're describing is relatively uncommon among Office users. Secondly, gigabytes of RAM does not necessarily translate to GFlops of processing power. For example, a 100GB video file doesn't require any more processing power to play than a 1GB video of the same resolution, it just needs more space on your media. It doesn't even need any more space in memory, since you only buffer a small amount of the file that you're about to play. That's true whether you're viewing it in a player or in a document.

Sure, they're serious apps, but in the spectrum of apps out there I find it hard to believe that a typical Office user would require anywhere near the processing power of something like a video editor where you have to rapidly scrub multiple layers of video that have effects applied. Or a game trying to generate textured 3D scenes at 60fps or better.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what my gut tells me. I guess the area where I'd be unsurprised would be if Office users are starting to rely heavily on processor-intensive AI features - but that's not something you mentioned.

I have no doubt that there are specific use cases where an ARM architecture emulating an x86 CPU might not be acceptable, and some of them might even be heavy duty Office users. But I'm very skeptical that Office alone would be the reason why ARM is having trouble gaining acceptance in general.

 

[CAcreeks]

Microsoft sells Office 365 for ARM but not ARM native Office.

Actually, Microsoft Office 365 apps are all ARM native and have been for quite a few years now. Even in 2012 on the Windows RT/Surface RT, which had no x86 emulation at all, you could run MS Office [365?] on ARM.

My experience is that Office 365 is a subset of real Office. When I last used it several years ago, many things didn't work. Maybe they do now, but back then there were missing features.

As for resource consumption, all of Microsoft Office takes up less storage space than Acrobat Pro, and Office applications usually run with less memory.

Forgive my ignorance - I'm still on Office 2007 ( :-O ) but it's my understanding that Office 365 is a cloud-based app that has only a thin client front end. I assumed that @CAcreeks was referring to the classic MS Office where the programs actually reside on your desktop computer and require no cloud connectivity. Am I mistaken in thinking that these are two separate things?

Is Office 2007 before the so-called ribbons? They work for me in PowerPoint but not in Word or Excel, where they take up valuable text or spreadsheet space.

Speaking of Excel, work-alike Google Sheets is IMO a technological marvel. I handles huge spreadsheets with excellent performance, and like Excel 365, can handle multiple users.

I also assume that the ARM versions of Windows provide x86 emulation capability which would let you run pretty much any application. Emulation sometimes has issues with performance, but it doesn't seem to me like Office apps would be the sort of software that would be sensitive to performance issues - they're pretty light loads compared to some.

I guess the emulator isn't fully functional. If anyone is interested, here is a Reddit thread about what works and what doesn't. Games are the main problem, it appears.

https://www.reddit.com/r/snapdragon/comments/1djxyeu/snapdragon_x_elite_laptops_what_works_and_what

 

[Awkward_Swine]

...it doesn't seem to me like Office apps would be the sort of software that would be sensitive to performance issues - they're pretty light loads compared to some.

That's an awful lot of speculation and conjecture.

The Office apps are not a "light load". They create huge graphics and video based documents. Run spreadsheets that consume gigabytes of RAM, and include the fattest Email application in the world. These are serious apps. They work offline but are extremely connected and integrated with web services.

Firstly, I'm guessing (again) that the extreme end of the spectrum you're describing is relatively uncommon among Office users. Secondly, gigabytes of RAM does not necessarily translate to GFlops of processing power. For example, a 100GB video file doesn't require any more processing power to play than a 1GB video of the same resolution, it just needs more space on your media. It doesn't even need any more space in memory, since you only buffer a small amount of the file that you're about to play. That's true whether you're viewing it in a player or in a document.

Sure, they're serious apps, but in the spectrum of apps out there I find it hard to believe that a typical Office user would require anywhere near the processing power of something like a video editor where you have to rapidly scrub multiple layers of video that have effects applied. Or a game trying to generate textured 3D scenes at 60fps or better.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what my gut tells me. I guess the area where I'd be unsurprised would be if Office users are starting to rely heavily on processor-intensive AI features - but that's not something you mentioned.

I have no doubt that there are specific use cases where an ARM architecture emulating an x86 CPU might not be acceptable, and some of them might even be heavy duty Office users. But I'm very skeptical that Office alone would be the reason why ARM is having trouble gaining acceptance in general.

Yes, you are wrong. I don't know why it's necessary to speculate on things that can easily be looked up for reference.

Office is not a problem for ARM adoption, it's 100% supported and works great.

This issue is that Windows on ARM with Snapdragon is finally performant and competitive, but compatibility on Windows is always the #1 issue upgrade adoption. Compat is good on Snapdragon X but it's not complete, mostly because a lot of games use DRM/Anti-cheat drivers that need to be updated to support ARM. Give it another year or so and another rev of Snapdragon (and similar competitors) and I think there is a real chance that x86 might finally fully surpassed.

 

[Sean Nelson]

...I'm still on Office 2007 ( :-O )...

Is Office 2007 before the so-called ribbons? They work for me in PowerPoint but not in Word or Excel, where they take up valuable text or spreadsheet space.

I believe that the ribbon was introduced with Office 2007.

Speaking of Excel, work-alike Google Sheets is IMO a technological marvel. I handles huge spreadsheets with excellent performance, and like Excel 365, can handle multiple users.

I'll likely just keep plugging along with Office 2007 until something forces my hand, and at that point I might just move to LibreOffice. My needs are pretty light.