Qualcomm Talks Up Their Linux Support For The Snapdragon X Elite

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qualcomm Talks Up Their Linux Support For The Snapdragon X Elite

While much of the emphasis for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite laptop SoC has been around Windows on Arm PCs, Qualcomm has also been working to have upstream Linux support for this high-end SoC and everything is coming together for said support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite

[dlq84]

Oh ok, so it's about 5-6 months until somewhat supported? And then who knows how much longer until full support? That's a bummer.

I do hope the performance and power efficiency they promise is real though. And if so It would be great to see a replacement board for Framework laptops.

[peterdk]

Looking forward to this. Strongly considering buying one to test it out.

[samuelec]

Qualcomm was always mostly mobile focused but between AMD APU, handled devices and AI competition I believe they should invest more on Linux desktop and Linux server side computing because they would catch both Linux developers and server side environment (mostly Linux) that could naturally push their business further

[joaquinvacas]

Give us a Framework + Snapdragon machine and I'm yours.

[user1]

If only Arm was as standardized as x86...

[edxposed]

We hope to work closely with OEMs and distro vendors soon to create similar, easy-to-use installers for commercially available devices powered by the Snapdragon X Elite.

As Qualcomm has done in the past, this is completely empty talk.

[Ladis]

If only Arm was as standardized as x86...

ARM is standardized, e.g. you use the original binary packages from the Ubuntu repository on Apple Silicon (no need to recompile or emulate). If you mean booting, that's independent on the CPU arch. Many devices support UEFI (e.g. Microsoft standardized it in servers). And UEFI supports running its bytecode (e.g. like .NET or Java), so the PCIe card initialization is one universal code being able to run on any CPU arch (no need to flash card's BIOS or emulate x86 when booting).

[Artim]

As Qualcomm has done in the past, this is completely empty talk.

But now they have an incentive. Windows won't make them nearly enough money. Just look at how many times Windows on ARM has crashed and burned. I don't want to know how much money the likes of Lenovo, Samsung and Nokia (together with their life and soul) have burned with Windows Phone and Windows RT alone.

On the other hand, take a Distro like Debian. Besides Steam I don't know a single package in their repo that's not natively running on arm64. That's over 70.000 packages compared to probably not even 1000 on Windows. So if Qualcomm wants to make actual money off of this - they did pay a couple millions already for they acquisition of that one ARM server chip designer, plus the cost to even get to these chips - they have no choice other than heavily advertise for Linux machines. I don't believe Windows will ever run as great as Linux, macOS, Android and iOS do on arm64 unless proven otherwise. And even Qualcomm can't deny Microsoft has been losing many users on one hand to Linux an macOS, on the other hand to Android and iOS for a decade now. And Android OEMs are going for their own chips more and more. Also, with their ability to enter the server market and offer solutions for that, Windows basically isn't even an option. Pretty much everything is running on Linux there, nobody's got time for Microsoft's abysmal security.

[Ladis]

they have no choice other than heavily advertise for Linux machines

What's the point to advertise to a 2% marketshare? Those Linux fans will buy it even half working, for fun, and will fix the drivers themselves (e.g. that's the principle of PinePhone).

And Steam is very important for people to use Linux at all. People also want occasional gaming and not to be limited to 1/100th of games, where there's a Linux port. In fact, half of the ports will not work either, as they are for x86.

PS: Qualcomm didn't lose money, it was Microsoft and the device makers ($1B + $1B on Windows RT).