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'Snapdragon 1000' chip may be designed for PCs from the ground up
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 850 processor may be intended for PCs, but it's still a half step -- it's really a higher-clocked version of the same processor you'd find in your phone. The company may be more adventurous the next time, though. WinFuture says it has obtained details surrounding SDM1000 (possibly Snapdragon 1000), a previously hinted-at CPU that would be designed from the start for PCs. It would have a relatively huge design compared to most ARM designs (20mm x 15mm) and would consume a laptop-like 12W of power across the entire system-on-a-chip. It would compete directly with Intel's low-power Core processors where the existing 835 isn't really in the ballpark.
By comparison, the Snapdragon 850 has a maximum TDP of just 6.5 Watts.
A reference design for the chip includes 16 GB of LPDDR4X memory, 2 × 128 GB of UFS 2.1 internal storage, and Gigabit WLAN.
See also: Snapdragon-based Chromebook could rival always-connected PCs
Related: Windows 10 PCs Running on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 to Arrive this Year
First ARM Snapdragon-Based Windows 10 S Systems Announced
Snapdragon 845 Announced
Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 850 processor will arrive in Windows PCs this year
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday June 24 2018, @04:04PM (16 children)
So you went out and bought a brand new laptop with a Qualcomm chip. Good luck finding software that will run on it. The x86 may be a crappy ISA but it's entrenched. Until the ecosystem moves to something like Java we're stuck with it.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2018, @04:24PM (2 children)
The Snapdragon line was introduced in 2007. It wouldn't have lasted that long if it couldn't run software. One device based on the Snapdragon 410 offered "support for Android, Windows 10 IoT Core, and Yocto, Debian, and Ubuntu Linux." (source [linuxgizmos.com])
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2018, @04:26PM (1 child)
> It wouldn't have lasted that long if it couldn't run software.
Scratch that, I forgot Itanium.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 25 2018, @03:43PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2018, @04:24PM (3 children)
People buy low-end laptops to run Chrome and Office.
FIN.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KritonK on Sunday June 24 2018, @07:34PM (1 child)
Even a Raspberry Pi 2 is an almost decent desktop machine and a good media player. (I got one for the latter purpose, realizing the former, while setting up the machine.) With a faster processor and more memory, I can very well imagine an ARM processor being in the heart of a good Linux system.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:42PM
I have one of the new Raspberry Pi 3's which runs at 1.2 GHZ and has 1Gb of RAM. At the moment it runs Volumio for me and does it very well, but I did install one of the Ubuntu images available, and it ran absolutely fine.
It would be a great low-power solution for anyone wanting a basic PC.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday June 25 2018, @07:29PM
Low-end laptops ?
In both 2016 and 2017, smartphones shipments got close to 1.5 Billion. That's almost 100% ARM, and makes OP either a succesfull troll or slightly misinformed.
That's not even counting feature phones and embedded products.
There's a lot of software out there running on ARM cores. The x86 exclusives are shrinking to just Pro software and most AAA games.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2018, @08:19PM (1 child)
Or .NET
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @02:22AM
Until the ecosystem moves to something like Java
Or .NET
Bite your tongue.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:48PM (1 child)
I hate Qualcomm with a passion. Sure, they occasionally make good things, but I have always hated them for their reliance on H1-B labor even though they're smack-dab in the middle of a big city with a lot of American engineers looking for work.
Anyway, I interviewed with them twice. Here's how they went.
The first interview was for a hardware debugging position, so of course at least one White interviewer had to be involved in the discussion. The other two were Oriental and Indian. During that interview all of them had a strange fixation for logic analyzers. I told them no, I have never used a logic analyzer, but I have used 4-channel oscilloscopes for analyzing logic signals, sniffers with spectrum and vector network analyzers, custom test equipment, and anything else that blooped or bleeped; in both the RF and optical domains. I also reminded them that yes, I believe I am capable of quickly learning how to use a logic analyzer. At the end of the interview they told me they were looking for somebody who had experience using a logic analyzer, and that I wasn't going to cut it.
The second interview went much worse. It was for a less-prestigious position. 15 minutes before the interview I got a call from an Asian lady asking if I was looking for a job (at another company for a totally different type of position) and I said that of course I was. After declining the offer I went into my interview and was greeted by an Asian lady who sounded exactly like the Asian lady who had called me minutes earlier. The other two interviewers were Indian, and asked me a variety of questions regarding my resume. The Oriental woman looked ridiculously disinterested in being there in the first place, as if somebody told her to be there for female diversity reasons and would much rather have been fucking off on the internet. I explained that I did programming for the Kinect but decided not to continue because the Kinect was a discontinued product. The Indian said, "Oh, so you unplugged it from your TV and that is why you didn't want to program it?" The other Indian, who clearly knew better English, visibly facepalmed. The interview ended with the dumber Indian telling me, "well, it seems from your resume that you are overqualified for this position." Then why the fuck did you invite me in to interview for this position in the first place given that my resume was the first thing you saw before you ever met me?!
Both experiences have given me even more of a seething hatred of not only Indians, but Qualcomm. I wonder how much more efficient they'd be if they just hired American engineers and shelled out the extra 10K a year each for the quality and language proficiency boost. Indians, like other immigrants, are nepotist cancers which should never be allowed to hold a cultural majority in your American or European organizations. You could say that I'm just salty because I wasn't hired. No, I interviewed for a lot of places throughout the years and wasn't hired, my ego can survive something like that. What I am angry about is that it's obvious that they blatantly wasted my fucking time. There is a shit-ton of better-paying work around here with less incompetent people running the show, so don't treat my like I should be begging for an interview with your fucks. Go fuck yourselves, and a good bath with some soap wouldn't hurt either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:55PM
Long-winded stupidity is still stupid.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:24PM
You mean like Android, Dalvik, Chromebook....
Use case, mainstream OS with millions of apps, cross-platform VM and a device you can buy in the shop now and sells millions that "only runs Chrome".
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:41PM
I hear a lot about JavaScript. It works on computer and it works on phone. And it make the websites look INCREDIBLE!!!
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday June 25 2018, @03:47PM
According to https://www.anandtech.com/show/10889/microsoft-and-qualcomm-bring-windows-10-to-snapdragon-processors [anandtech.com] some of the Qualcomm processors will have some kind of x86 emulation. So you might be able to run your copy of Planescape: Torment on your new machine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @05:21PM
ARM chips are pretty good these days, although GPU support is pretty shitty if you care about being FOSS at all. libhybris means you can use all the hardware with the blobby Android drivers, and aarch64 is 1st tier on quite a few distros. The main thing missing from most ARM boards is ECC (very necessary if you're running off of SD or eMMC) and memory support/capacity/bandwidth. More expandability would be nice too - a good bare bones board with a couple PCI slots and a real SATA or M.2 port would be nice. They're fast and cheap enough CPU-wise that there aren't any issues using them as a budget replacement for traditional "box" computers and all those cores really give them an edge over the low-power intel chips.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Tuesday June 26 2018, @01:25AM
You can download and install ARM-based Linux distributions that are just about as complete as their x86 counterparts. In other words, just about any package for whatever open source application you might want to install for is available. It's really only a problem if you need to run closed source software, especially if it involves Windows.