[geerlingguy]

Qualcomm still hasn't shipped any of the Snapdragon X dev kits, two months and counting. If they can't deliver on their promises (that and CoPilot PCs having very disappointing sales), how could they do anything besides further drag down Intel?

Not only that, it sounds like a major customer (Apple) is close to finally ditching Qualcomm's wireless chips? (At least that's been rumored [1])

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/24/apple-has-reporte...

[kev009]

Qualcomm's RF design is best in class. This is their bread and butter and they have been consistently good at it forever.

Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not because Qualcomm is bad.

It bears in mind that just because you are good at one thing does not imply you will be good at another. For instance, Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product or various entities trying to produce MIPS and ARM products failing time and time again.

[StillBored]

How quickly we forget Huawei... QC's fine, but I think the huawei situation shows that QC has probably been getting a little fat/lazy on the modem side for a few years too. Only a real competitor could prove that if true, 2013 intel looked like they were best in class too but the rot was already firmly entrenched.

So, I wouldn't say intel's modems were awful, maybe not as good as the QC's of the time, but it could just have been immature, and underfunded. Apple OTOH, is famous for taking somewhat failed teams and having a long enough vision to create great products. They seem to understand that 9 women can't create a baby in 1 month and are willing to keep iterating until its right if it solves a problem for them.

[MichaelNolan]

> Apple … has been working on it in secret for years.

I keep hoping Apple will release a MacBook with a 5G chipset. The rumors are saying their in house one will ready in 2026 at the earliest. It sure seems like a long road given they bought the intel RF division in 2019.

[snitty]

My understanding is that Intel's chips weren't great and making power efficient 5g chips is wildly difficult. Thus ends my understanding of these issues, though.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

And Qualcomm patents. I just don't see how you can patent anything related to complying with a radio spec, there has to be limited ways to comply

[static_motion]

> Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product

That's an interesting statement, as their Wi-Fi cards are some of the best on the market and common laptop-purchasing wisdom says to buy anything with an Intel Wi-Fi adapter and avoid everything else.

[kev009]

I was talking more about wireline networking there, which are all rife with silicon errata and fairly shoddy drivers (which is sadly the norm in the industry). Most of the damage is mitigated in i.e. upstream Linux but it's not pretty and if you are doing datacenter networking you are much better off with Mellanox(nvidia) or Chelsio (a small but mighty player with interesting capabilities) who have good chips and good drivers.

On the 802.11 wireless front, intel maintains a marked advantage in having inbox drivers in Linux by the time you need them. I would take an ath11k/ath12k over equivalent Intel parts but Qualcomm's driver upstreaming process takes way too long while Intel tends to integrate before the products are generally available.

[wmf]

Companies should do what they say they're going to do, but these dev kits are an example of something that's relevant to HN but not to Qualcomm's business.

[cowmix]

A large part of the success of this new platform is how fast devs can adapt / fix their apps to work natively. Apple, for instance, provided dev mules for OSX ARM --- and their rollout of Apple Silicon was smoother than anyone could have hoped.

Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.

[com2kid]

> Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.

Internally, nearly 20 years. It was kept alive for a long time by a single individual as a side project. When I first got out of college I actually helped update tests that were being used for it (I maintained the ARM compiler test harness, and it was being used for some Windows on ARM stuff as well).

Microsoft has never went fully in on arm, whereas Apple was willing to burn bridges and start brand new.

[tonyedgecombe]

To be fair to Microsoft Apple did have the advantage of controlling the stack from top to bottom.

[freehorse]

How can you expect your products to have good software support by developers then?

[wmf]

Snapdragon laptops have been available for a few weeks already. Although laptops cost more than this dev kit they're also more usable as a daily driver. If Qualcomm wants real adoption they'd send them out for free, not require devs to pay.

[geerlingguy]

Dev shops would rather not have piles of laptops with batteries to maintain sitting in their racks/shelves for build and remote testing.

For individual devs laptops are fine, usually, but there's also no solid "reference" platform, since all the laptops are targeting different consumer lines.

That's a bit beside the point though, the Dev kits should've come out months before the consumer products were launched... and failing that at the same time.

Qualcomm and Arrow said the units would ship "tomorrow" in July... and it took over a month (after accepting many orders) before they even updated the stock to a more realistic timeframe, late September.

[cowmix]

When this platform was heralded as the “AI” desktop, I pre-ordered both the dev kit and a laptop. Like many of you, I’ve experienced a months-long delay in the delivery of the dev kits. Although I STILL don't have my devkit, I received my laptop pretty much on time. -- and I quickly discovered that despite Windows on ARM (WOA) being over a decade old, the support for open-source tooling is as complete as Swiss cheese. Key Python modules are missing, and even the Git command-line (git bash) client isn’t functional yet!

I mean, forget about basic open-source development, let alone performing AI inference work on your new Snapdragon laptop.

After some digging, I’ve learned that just four overworked developers in Prague make up the core team unclogging this tooling dependency log-jam. Gah!

For what it’s worth, WSL2 (Linux on Windows) actually runs quite impressively on the Snapdragon X.

[nine_k]

Why run Windows on ARM, when Linux on ARM is so.much more mature? Or are you buildings a Windows-specific product?

[cowmix]

My plan was to run the laptop Windows and the 'devkit' Linux. This first batch of laptops (AFAICT) can NOT dual boot.

My thinking is this, if Windows ARM is a success -- there will be more units out there that can ALSO run Linux too. If Windows ARM is a failure, then Linux will suffer too.

[andrewmcwatters]

> After some digging, I’ve learned that just four overworked developers in Prague make up the core team unclogging this tooling dependency log-jam. Gah!

What an embarrassment. So basically, it’s not a serious product.

[pas]

... Intel wasn't able to ship on EUV, so they would be in great company.