Isn't it a bit exaggerating to say that users cannot use Snapdragon laptops except for running LLMs? Qualcomm and Microsoft already has a translation layer named Prism (not as good as Rosetta but pretty good nevertheless): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
>Isn't it a bit exaggerating to say that users cannot use Snapdragon laptops except for running LLMs?
I think maybe what OP meant was that the memory occupied by the model meant you couldn't do anything alongside inferecing, e.g. have a compile job or whatever running (unless you unload the model once you've done asking it questions.)
to be honest, we could really do with RAM abundance. Imagine if 128GB ram became like 8GB ram is today - now that would normalize local LLM inferencing (or atleast, make a decent attempt.)
Apparently 3M was a serious player back in the day on magnetic tapes and floppy diskettes. But today they are not present in a similar market (digital storage) at all.
I wonder what was it like to go through that timeframe, as the management and the employees, where the floppy disks were becoming obsolete. Did they purposefully took the decision to not pursue CD, flash memory market? Or was it just a shortsightedness of the management where they fell behind and eventually had to exit that market?
Of course 3M still managed to be successful and today it is one of the big market cap companies...
We call those “specialty chemicals” and it’s smaller volumes but much higher profit margins. Evonik (Germany) is another example.
Things like- not the asphalt shingle, not the granules on the asphalt shingles, but a COATING ON the granule on the asphalt shingle that provides weather protection.
Or, not the memory foam mattress, and not the liquid precursors that are combined to create the foam in the mattress, but an ADDITIVE to the precursors to the foam in the mattress which regulates/ensures a consistent size of foam bubbles during manufacture.
Decent example of a basic (vs specialty) chemicals company, although they are huge of course and quite diversified, they make a crap ton (millions of tons) of basic stuff like propylene, ethylene, ammonia, methanol, etc
3M was indeed a big player in those markets. I purchased both 5.25" and 3.5" 3M floppies and they were good quality and reliable.
I expect they left the market because of declining use and the entrance of much cheaper foreign manufacturers. I expect they didn't enter the flash memory market as they had no existing manufacturing base for them to build on. They would have had to rebrand another firm's chips and circuit boards.
They were not in the storage market. They were in the tape market. It just so happens tape was used for storage at the time (floppy is essentially tape in a circular shape).
No, there were quite a few Symbian models which used capacitive touch, combined with a modern Qt based Symbian OS. Check out "Symbian Belle" and the phone models released with that OS version. I loved my Nokia 603 :)
But I think they only released such models with Symbian for a couple of years, before switching to Meego and then later Windows Mobile OS.
They were in parallel, due to the whole Symbian vs Linux politics at Nokia between teams, both platforms got ramped down to Windows Phone 7 introduction and burning platforms memo.
The N900 was released more for a question of honour than anything.
Looks like M5 Macbooks will still have an edge over PC equivalents, but I am glad that with the new Qualcomm CPUs, PCs are at least getting close. Unfortunately Intel and AMD are falling so much behind that they cannot compete on laptop form factor anymore. The best Intel and AMD laptop CPUs, regardless of their TDP, are still around 3000 score on Geekbench single core.
The idea behind modern stanby is a good one, when it is implemented correctly (like how Macbooks do it). Unfortunately most PCs have a terrible implementation and instead get hot and drain the battery overnight.
There are a lot of theoretical articles which claim similar things but on the other hand we have a lot of empirical evidence that ARM CPUs are significantly more power efficient.
I used laptops with both Intel and AMD CPUs, and I read/watch a lot of reviews in thin and light laptop space. Although AMD became more power efficient compared to Intel in the last few years, AMD alternative is only marginally more efficient (like 5-10%). And AMD is using TSMC fabs.
On the other hand Qualcomm's recent Snapdragon X series CPUs are significantly more efficient then both Intel and AMD in most tests while providing the same performance or sometimes even better performance.
Some people mention the efficiency gains on Intel Lunar Lake as evidence that x86 is just as efficient, but Lunar Lake was still slightly behind in battery life and performance, while using a newer TSMC process node compared to Snapdragon X series.
So, even though I see theoretical articles like this, the empirical evidence says otherwise. Qualcomm will release their second generation Snapdragon X series CPUs this month. My guess is that the performance/efficiency gap with Intel and AMD will get even bigger.
A client CPU spends most of its life idling. Thus, the key to good battery life in client computing is, generally, idle power consumption. That means low core power draw at idle, but it also means shutting off peripherals that aren't in use, turning off clock sources for said peripherals, etc.
ARM was built for low-power embedded applications from the start, and thus low-power idle states are integrated into the architecture quite elegantly. x86, on the other hand, has the SMM, which was an afterthought.
AFAICT case for x86 ~ ARM perf equivalence is based on the argument that instruction decode, while empirically less efficient on x86, is such a small portion of a modern, high-performance pipeline that it doesn't matter. This reasoning checks out IMO. But, this effect would only be visible while the CPU is under load.
I was also very excited about it and that's why I immediately upgraded to Android 16. But it turns out that it is not part of this update. The same with the new Material design, it doesn't come with Android 16 update. So weird that they announced both of these features as if they are part of Android 16.
I agree with losing faith in Intel chips though.
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