Qualcomm says most Windows games should “just work” on its unannounced Arm laptops
Qualcomm says most Windows games should “just work” on its unannounced Arm laptops
How well will they run, though?
How well will they run, though?
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.
By saying most windows games he actually means minesweeper and solitaire but not pinball. Pinball has too many sweet fx.
My first flatpak was Space Cadet Pinball, I still play it when I'm bored
“Just work” and “be playable” are two vastly different things.
I'm assuming that it'll still use an ordinary GPU such as Nvidia or AMD?
If they don't, they need to do a much better job than Intel did at launch of their GPUs.
Maintaining at minimum full DX 8 and newer compatibility and all the esoteric fixes.
Plus Vulkan and full OpenGL support.
On top of all that, it'll need a flawless x86_64 environment.
I went to OpenSauce and ARM had a booth showing a ARM-powered gaming PC. It had an Nvidia graphics card in it and was running a Unity demo.
As long as it supports PCI Express and the device manufacturers compile their drivers for ARM (which may require some changes depending on the details of the hardware integration), I don't see any reason why an ARM gaming PC couldn't use existing graphics cards.
In the same way the Bethesda games 'just works' or the same way Microsoft patching 'just works'