I'd expect them to start around 1k. Not many people are going to be buying these devices so there's no economies of scale.

Also I love how qualcomm announced this CPU and a day later Apple releases the M3 which is finally a real upgrade from the M1.

New tech always comes at a cost, hopefully with the many manufacturers partnering with Qualcomm in this project we’ll have competitive pricing better than the current offering that Apple silicon provides.

Youre right, just like the first risc-v laptop which was more than 1k with awful performances. This will probably follow the M series trend at about 1,5k , but arm has a lot of competitors...

IIRC Microsoft’s woes in the ARM space is two-fold. First is the crushing legacy compatibility and inability to muster developers around anything newer than win32, and second was signing a deal to make Qualcomm the exclusive ARM processors for Windows for who knows how long.

That'd be based, but I don't think there's anything in that for them.

Qualcomm is my main fear also. They will ship it with lots of closed source firmware digitally signed with their private keys which users can't replace so expect a shitty bootloader and don't forget about always running hypervisior, trust zone and world most kept secret modem

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I'm more interested in something that has an actual hardware and software ecosystem. I'm no longer interested in soldering my computer and it's peripherals together.

If you want to kill x86, you need to do what Valve and the Wine foundation did with Proton/WINE (mostly proton at this point though), but for x86 to ARM and maybe other architectures like RISCV (especially because the milkV pioneer is a thing).

There is too much legacy software that will never be converted that people still use to this day. Once you make it easy to transition, it will slowly but steadily start to happen.

Box86/Box64 are promising, but need help from contributors like you. If you want it to happen, go make it happen, or continue to live in the world you have now.

Check out the milkV Pioneer.

That's absolutely not true. The M3 Max just about brings Apple performance up to similar levels as Intel and AMD. The Ryzen 9 7945HX3D for example is a laptop processor which trades blows with the M3 on benchmarks - single core the M3's slightly faster and multi core the Ryzen's slightly faster - and in performance per watt the Ryzen's marginally better. So really it's just catching up with older laptop processors from other manufacturers.

And if you venure outside the laptop space to compare ultimate speed it's nowhere near the fastest, particularly in multi-threaded. Its multi-threaded performance is around 13% of the AMD EPYC 9754 Bergamo for example.

Keep in mind this is with up to an 80 watt TDP vs an effectively 3 year old architecture in a select few tests. The M2 was basically just an overclocked M1, with the Pro/Max models getting 2 extra cores. This is qualcomms best case scenario.

Apple cooks only with water too.

The Qualcomm x elite benchmarks as faster than the M3 for multicore. Not too surprising as I think it's 12 cores vs 10. For single core its something like 2700 vs 3200.

Laptops running x elite are supposed to be available mid 2024.

Microsoft has a pretty good translation layer, it's the hardware x86 acceleration that most windows ARM chips lack, that Apple's CPUs have.