Snapdragon-Powered Acer Aspire 1 Laptop Nearing Mainline Linux Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Snapdragon-Powered Acer Aspire 1 Laptop Nearing Mainline Linux Support

While Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s has generated a fair amount of attention for being a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC powered Arm laptop that supports running on the mainline Linux kernel, another option on the way is the Acer Aspire 1 that also makes use of a Qualcomm Soc...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Acer-Asprie-1-Snapdragon-v3

[brucethemoose]

I wonder how fast the NPU on this thing is? And how much much of a pain it is in PyTorch... looks like a massive pain in the butt just looking at Qualcomm's docs, if it would even work on mainline linux at all.


The big "heavy" thing I want out of a laptop these days is running Stable Diffusion or a LLM quickly. Even 3000 series Nvidia GPUs are kinda iffy because (as fast as they are) they have such a small memory pool.

[Quackdoc]

ive been using a 4GB n3050 laptop for the last few years. maybe this might be the device I migrate to

[schmidtbag]

While ARM in my experience tends to use less RAM, even 4GB seems rather low for a 2021 laptop. It'd be adequate for a tablet. With more RAM I'd be interested; the rest of the specs are fine with me.

[dylanmtaylor]

Any machine with 4 GB of non-upgradeable RAM is already ewaste

[horizonbrave]

does this stuff even compete with Apple Silicon?

[RejectModernity]

does this stuff even compete with Apple Silicon?

Look at the price of it.

[Quackdoc]

While ARM in my experience tends to use less RAM, even 4GB seems rather low for a 2021 laptop. It'd be adequate for a tablet. With more RAM I'd be interested; the rest of the specs are fine with me.

it depends on what you are doing, i've been served just fine with 4gb of ram on my laptop for the past well, very long time. im only using six now because a tablet was donated to me with 6gbs . but that 4gb laptop is still usable, and sits on my desk now to work as a second device I dont need to tab out on my main device

[coder]

does this stuff even compete with Apple Silicon?

The 1st gen 7c looks to be made on Samsung 8 nm and have cores equivalent to 2x A76 + 6x A55. Qualcomm "customizes" them and rebrands the cores as "Kryo", but I suspect that's mostly to make it harder for people to do specs comparisons.

https://www.androidauthority.com/qua...mbers-1080105/

At best, you might be looking at a SoC comparable to an iPhone of at least 5 years ago.

However, I assume you saw where the article mentioned these "laptops" (or Chromebooks, to be more accurate) are already discontinued? They were bottom-tier, even when they first launched probably 2-3 years ago.

[t1r0nama]

So not only these qualcomm laptop soc suck when they get released, they do not even have day 1 linux support. It takes several years to get it working on linux. Why do they keep making ewaste? And why do developers waste time on such trash devices to get it working under linux. Who will use this with it's 4 GB RAM over anything intel celeron or other efficient system that just works under linux and windows