Qualcomm Aiming For Snapdragon X Elite GPU Support In Linux 6.11
Just a moment...
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.
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.
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.
Graphics driver for sc8280xp are already a thing. There are more issues in convenience daily driving linux, currently. From the top of my head:
I suspect that these issues are common between their ARM chips and will be addressed for both chips almost simultaneously. But I have no real idea on kernel development. And their documentation is only shared with linaro so one can only guess.
always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.
Until recently, that "support" had been a barely supported forks of the linux kernel that were barely updated, and was so locked down that custom rom support was a pipedream on snapdragon processors. Which to be fair, is par for the course on most ARM chipsets (It's the reason you see a lot of custom roms for android have extremely old and outdated kernels)
I'm glad to see more ARM companies moving towards working with upstream projects, and not just making working on their stuff a PITA to protect "Trade Secrets" or some bullshit like that.
I'm sorry for leaving out the word "desktop". I'm well aware that Android runs the Linux kernel and that many embedded systems run Linux.
Possibly I conflated them with Broadcom, but I feel sure I recall Qualcomm's lack of openness being problematic in the past also.
Edit - yeah, folks jumping through hoops for their wifi at least as recently as Ubuntu 20.04. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1277359/my-qualcomm-atheros-qca9377-wireless-adopter-is-not-working-in-ubuntu-20-04-lts
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.
Are there Benchmarks for the CPU yet? Still can't tell if the claims they made are for real or are just marketing bs.
It probably wouldn't help phones but I wouldn't complain if it did
They haven't widely released the chip yet, but they made a lot of public claims during trade shows, which I'm sure you can find.
Yeah, that would be the marketting bs, probably.
That's not true at all friend, they released this week: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/copilot-pcs-are-here-11-snapdragon-x-elite-laptops-you-can-buy-right-now
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.
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
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.
Not a given. Translating can still be more efficient.
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."
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.
Isn't it using adreno GPU? Freedreno exists for a long time.
Or maybe they will compile natively for arm.
It would be viable with foss games
most games are not foss, and it makes sense.
(games are more like works of art ranter than software after all, so it just doesn't matter)