A lot of people here seemed excited for these chips. It’ll be very interesting to see the gaming performance as this could bring in an entire new segment of portable devices running Linux if powerful enough to deliver solid battery life and CPU performance.

  • M500@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    It would be great if we could get a steamdeck that runs one of these arm chips.

    I wonder if valve is already experimenting with something like this. Maybe another they will have something like box64 too

    • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Not sure why you’d want an ARM-based handheld to play PC games at this point in time. Pretty much all PC games are available in x86 only, and any efficiency gains these fancy new ARM chips supposedly have will be lost when translating x86 to ARM.

      • ShortN0te@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        and any efficiency gains these fancy new ARM chips supposedly have will be lost when translating x86 to ARM.

        Not a given. Translating can still be more efficient.

        • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          If both AMD/Intel and Qualcomm do a good job with their core design and the same process node is used, I don’t see how a translation layer can be any faster than a CPU natively supporting the architecture. Any efficiency advantages ARM supposedly has over x86 architecturally will vanish in such a scenario.

          I actually think the efficiency of these new Snapdragon chips is a bit overhyped, especially under sustained load scenarios (like gaming). Efficiency cores won’t do much for gaming, and their iGPU doesn’t seem like anything special.

          We need a lot more testing with proper test setups. Currently, reviewers mostly test these chips and compare them against other chips in completely different devices with a different thermal solution and at different levels of power draw (TDP won’t help you much as it basically never matches actual power draw). Keep in mind the Snapdragon X Elite can be configured for up to “80W TDP”.

          Burst performance from a Cinebench run doesn’t tell the real story and comparing runtimes for watching YouTube videos on supposedly similar laptops doesn’t even come close to representing battery life in a gaming scenario.

          Give it a few years/generations and then maybe, but currently I’m pretty sure the 7840U comfortably stomps the X Elite in gaming scenarios with both being configured to a similar level of actual power draw. And the 7840U/8840U is AMD’s outgoing generation, their new (horribly named) chips should improve performance/watt by quite a bit.

          • ShortN0te@lemmy.ml
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            7 months ago

            Not what i am saying. I said that it is not a given, that translation means less performance.

            In theory you can achieve similar or even higher performance, all depending on how well or how bad the original machine code is. Especially when you can optimize it for a specific architecture or even a specific CPU.

            And yes ARM has shown to be more power efficient then x86 CPUs even on higher load (not just low powered embedded stuff).

        • uis@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Translating can still be more efficient.

          You would need some ISA that greatly benefits from translating. Like ELBRUS.

      • uis@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Rephrasing you: “Pretty much all PC games are available in Windows only, and any efficiency gains these fancy free Linux OS supposedly have will be lost when translating Windows to Linux.”

        • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          No, that’s not at all what I said. Translating between CPU architectures and translating API calls isn’t even close to the same thing.

          • uis@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Rephrasing you

            No, that’s not at all what I said.

            Obviously. Games are compiled for Linux natively. Same can be done for Linux on ARM. Opensource games like Xonotic already do this, proprietary games like War Thunder are compiled for ELBRUS and I’m sure can be compiled for ARM. If Valve wanted, they could release their games compiled for ARM tomorrow.

            • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
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              7 months ago

              Porting games to a different architecture is normally quite a bit more involved than just recompiling them, especially when architecture-agnostic code wasn’t a design goal of the original game code. No, Valve couldn’t release all their games natively running on ARM tomorrow, the process would take more time.

              But even if Valve were to recompile all their games for ARM, many other studios wouldn’t just because a few gaming handhelds would benefit from it. The market share of these devices wouldn’t be big enough to justify the cost. Very few of the games that run on Steam Deck are actually native Linux versions, studios just rarely bother porting their games over.

              I’m not saying ARM chips can’t be faster or otherwise better (more efficient) at running games, but it just doesn’t make sense to release an ARM-based handheld intended for “PC” gaming in the current landscape of games.

              Apple can comparatively easily force an architecture transition because they control fhe software and hardware. If Apple decides to only sell RISC-V based Macs tomorrow and abandon ARM, developers for the platform would have to release RISC-V builds of their software because at some point nobody could run their software natively anymore because current Macs would be replaced by RISC-V Macs as time passed by. Valve does not control the full hard- and software stack of the PC market so they’d have a very hard time to try and force such a move. If Valve released an ARM-based gaming handheld, other manufacturers would still continue offering x86-based handhelds with newer and newer CPUs (new x86 hardware is still being developed for the foreseeable future) and instead of Valve forcing developers to port their games to native ARM, they’d probably lose market share to these other handhelds as people would naturally buy the device that runs current games best right now.

              In a “perfect world” where all games would natively support ARM right now an ARM-based handheld for PC gaming could obviously work. That simply isn’t the world we live in right now though. Sure we could ramble on about “if this and that”, it’s just not the reality.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 months ago

      As the article says, there is no graphics driver yet, so nobody is experimenting with these chips in the gaming world yet in that sense 😉

      Maybe somebody is prototyping a Windows platform in the meantime, and I haven’t seen the benchmarks, but I would be surprised if these chips could outperform AMD’s similar APU packages.

      • uis@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Isn’t it using adreno GPU? Freedreno exists for a long time.

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    When did Qualcomm start giving a shit about Linux? They’ve been on my “hardware and chipsets to avoid if possible” list for pretty much ever.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 months ago

      Since they started targeting the PC segment with these chips to take on Apple’s insanely priced m-class chips, and Amazon and Google’s custom ARM datacenter chips.

      They partnered with Canonical to do the first run of development for kernel support in the past year, and now it sounds like they’re moving to get the graphics driver developed and upstreamed.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      They are shit, but not as shit as Broadcom. The problem with Qcm is their monopolistic behavior and closing details on RF part of chips.

    • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      You are very wrong here. They open-source a lot of things and they even used to have their own open-source modified version of Android for their phone chips.

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        OK, correction accepted. I probably did conflate them with Broadcom. Someone should let those ubuntu folks know though… ;)

        • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          Oh it’s ok. Broadcom is a very bad company in terms of open-source and Linux support. Their most known products are WiFi modules for laptops. Qualcomm on the other hand is probably one of the most open-source friendly commercial companies and it’s known for very popular mobile processors such as the Snapdragon series.

    • chrash0@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.

  • fluxx@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    From my small experience with Qualcomm in the past, I’m not too hopeful. In a company I used to work for, we wanted to use one of their SoC with Linux, which they claimed they supported. It was many years ago. But was full of closed binary blobs which even when signing NDAs, we couldn’t get the source for. We’re talking user-space drivers, sensors offloaded to a separate core with closed source firmware etc. It’s Linux, but it’s not Linux in spirit, it feels so closed and proprietary and secretive. They’re coming from Android, which google architecturally enabled vendors to close their drivers by utilizing HAL. It’s the single most significant blow to Linux by any corporation so far. It enabled thousands of vendors to close their shitty driver in user-space and not maintain it for newer kernels (kernel driver is just an IO proxy for user-space drivers). I get that without it, there wouldn’t be Android phones we have today, but I expected them to slowly open up. 10+ years later, almost nothing changed, in fact - things seem worse to me.