SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A report from AnandTech:
Lenovo on Thursday introduced the world’s first laptop based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 850 SoC. The Yoga C630 promises to deliver a considerably higher performance than the first-generation Windows-on-Snapdragon machines because of SoC improvements as well as optimizations made to the OS. Lenovo says that the Yoga C630 can work for over 25 hours on one charge, thus beating every other convertible PC available today.
Lenovo’s Yoga C630 comes in a convertible laptop form-factor featuring a 13.3-inch Full-HD display with multitouch support. The notebook is made of aluminum, it is just 12.5 mm thick and weighs about 1.2 kilograms, thus being both thinner and lighter than the company’s previous-gen Miix 630 2-in-1 detachable PC powered by the Snapdragon 835. Being based on a mobile SoC, the Yoga C630 does not require any fans and therefore does not produce any noise.
As noted above, the Lenovo Yoga C630 is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 SoC featuring eight cores and Adreno 630 GPU. The chip is accompanied by 4 or 8 GB LPDDR4X memory as well as 128 GB or 256 GB of solid-state storage featuring a UFC 2.1 interface. As for wireless connectivity, the convertible laptop naturally has an integrated Snapdragon X20 LTE modem that supports up to 1.2 Gbps speeds over appropriate networks as well as a 802.11ac Wi-Fi controller that also supports Bluetooth 5. In addition, the system has two USB Type-C ports, a fingerprint reader, a webcam, stereo speakers, a microphone, and an audio jack for headsets.
Qualcomm itself promises that its Snapdragon 850 offers a 30% higher performance, a 20% longer battery life, and a 20% higher Gigabit LTE speeds when networks permit. That said, it is more than reasonable to expect systems based on the S850 to be faster than notebooks powered by the S835 right out of the box. Meanwhile, there are other important factors that makes Arm-powered Windows 10 systems more attractive in general: Microsoft has re-optimized its Edge browser for the WoS (Windows on Snapdragon) device, whereas Qualcomm has implemented a 64-bit SDK for developers looking to optimize their code for the WoS. Assuming that software makers are interested in the platform, they will release optimized versions of their programs in the coming months or quarters.
Related reading from Anandtech:
- Lenovo’s Miix 630 Snapdragon 835-Based 2-in-1 Now Available
- Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 850: A Second Generation For Windows
- HP’s Snapdragon 835-Based Envy X2 2-in-1 Available for Pre-Order, Starts at $999
- Lenovo Unveils Miix 630 2-in-1: Windows 10 S, Snapdragon 835, Gigabit LTE, 20 Hrs
- ASUS Announces the NovaGo (TP370): A Snapdragon 835 based Windows 10 PC
- Microsoft Launches Windows 10 On ARM: Always Connected PCs
- Microsoft and Qualcomm Collaborate to Bring Windows 10 & x86 Emulation to Snapdragon Processors
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday September 04 2018, @01:41PM (6 children)
Back in about 2010 or thereabout I speculated (on other forums) about why Microsoft could never successfully transition to ARM (or other) processors.
Even if Windows really is written to be hardware portable,
Even if Windows can be ported to another processor, (which at this point it clearly has)
Even if Microsoft, for some reason, invests in actually porting Windows to another processor,
the problem is the legacy applications.
Microsoft could build an emulator on ARM to emulate Intel processors and run legacy apps in emulated mode. Problem: poor performance, and poor battery life. But as Zathrus says: at least there is symmetry.
Some apps, the lucky ones, can be simply recompiled for ARM. Or alternately, the interpreter their intermediate code runs on can be ported to ARM.
Other apps may have some embedded assembly language code for performance critical operations. (signal processing, specialized high performance calculations, certain graphics calculations, and other examples) These would have to be rewritten.
Some apps may be deeply wedded to the Intel architecture for various reasons. (Hypothetical contrived example: a Lisp system that takes advantage of how the processor works, using certain bits of address words to "box" immediate values like integers, possibly using hardware trickery to overlap map multiple regions of address space onto the same virtual memory so that the "box" flag bits of the address word are ignored.)
Now, even for apps which are trivial to port (my first example above, the "lucky" ones), the developers of those apps are not going to offer the ARM version of their app for free. They're going to see an opportunity to price gouge for it. Especially apps like Photoshop.
So, if you buy ARM based Windows:
* your legacy apps run very poorly if you're lucky enough that they run at all, with poor battery life
* you get to re-buy all of your legacy apps
When you have to re-buy all of your legacy apps, any possible price advantage of an ARM based Windows laptop suddenly evaporates. If you don't re-buy your legacy apps, but they run emulated, then any other justification for buying an ARM based Windows laptop is overshadowed by the poor performance / battery life. Assuming emulation is even possible or offered by the OS.
Apple has switched microprocessors, twice. The first time from Motorola 680x0 to PowerPC. The emulation was perfect, and worked because Apple was moving to a more powerful processor. Furthermore, the ROM routines were rewritten for the PowerPC, and much of the performance critical operations of an application happened in Apple's code, not in the application.
Another problem with Windows on ARM processors is market confusion. Consumers buy a Windows ARM system and find their legacy software doesn't work. "But it says Windows on the box!"
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday September 04 2018, @01:45PM (5 children)
The entire value of Windows is the legacy applications.
Without the legacy applications, Windows is a new OS on the same footing as Linux.
Google can introduce a new OS, such as fuschia, and it would probably be able to run the vast majority of open source software. How much open source software already runs on Linux, BSD variants, and Mac OS? And, sometimes even Windows. But most commercial Windows apps aren't trivially recompiled to other OSes.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday September 04 2018, @01:59PM (4 children)
> The entire value of Windows is the legacy applications.
And yet, M$ keeps mucking up M$ Office on purpose, changing the file format to force people to upgrade and to break compatibility with other, non-M$ office software. They even break compatibility with older versions of M$ Office. So much for legacy applications.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday September 04 2018, @03:00PM (3 children)
Perhaps substitute "legacy workflow" and "first mover advantage" then? People know Office. They don't care what Office is (to an extent...) so long as it *is* Office and works with all their proprietary-format Office documents.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday September 04 2018, @07:59PM (2 children)
I think it's actually that legacy workflow, that familiarity with Office, which has given FLOSS a boost in recent years. That is, the FLOSS evolved to be compatible with, and to work like, those earlier versions of Office that people were familiar with. So when Microsoft decided to break those metaphors in recent versions of its software, moving to FLOSS alternatives that felt more familiar was the easier lift for average users.
I don't have any numbers I can cite for how things have shaken out in the broader world, but that was how many in my professional and personal circles made the jump to Linux--it was just easier than trying to figure out what MS was doing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday September 04 2018, @09:41PM (1 child)
Oh yes, I'd been pointing out to people since 2013 that "Hey, remember when Office didn't look like shit and force you to subscribe? Remember how you're still hanging onto Office 2003 because you hate the Ribbon UI? Remember when your data was YOURS and none of "the Cloud's" fucking business? Try this LibreOffice thing, you might be pleasantly surprised...
I can't say MS is the only company being taken over by "UI/UX experts" (you know...the same people who gave us, Madokami help us, Gnome 3...) but that sort of internal damage is a lot more dangerous to them than to (most) F/OSS projects because of what a huge audience their core products have.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 04 2018, @11:21PM
You over the hill motherfuckers just never quit bitching, do you? Just pick another desktop environment!! If you were a real linuxer, you wouldn't even need a DE.