Windows on Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is finally what Arm laptops should have been
Posted by tuldok89@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 86 comments
The reviewer calls it their favorite laptop of the year. Thin, light, powerful, and finally a legit ARM Windows machine.
FrogNoPants@reddit
Costs $1700, only has 1 TB SSD, doesn't even have 4k display.. is this normal for laptops?
R-ten-K@reddit
DRAM and SSDs all went up in cost the past few months.
MrDetectiveSir@reddit
Have u been living under a rock? Memory is 5x more expensive now
DemonBoyJr@reddit
it is now. I went to Costco recently and all the 2026 model refresh machines are several hundred dollars more expensive than last years equivalent.
Melbuf@reddit
Yes
basedIITian@reddit
I have two WoA laptops - SP11 and Lenovo T14s. I also have a Ryzen 7 T14s from work.
The difference could not be more night and day. I hate to do anything on my work laptop, it is so frustrating - bleeding battery and when it's supposed to be in sleep, constant fan noise even doing nothing, WiFi just randomly disappearing, just a very slow and buggy experience. And it runs so hot and has maybe like 3 hours of battery life.
The two WoA laptops on the other hand are practically perfect machines, specially in comparison. I never hear the fans, the devices run cool and have long battery lives and everything feels so smooth and super snappy. And I've faced no compatibility concerns till date.
Question-master3@reddit
If you ever get a chance, give a Lunar Lake/Panther Lake laptop a try! They've become really good, hoping Zen 6 Laptops are able to also bring some competition to bring prices down as a whole
R-ten-K@reddit
The battery life is OK, but performance for those SKUs is kind of a let down.
DerpSenpai@reddit
The issue with PTL and LNL is that their perf/W sucks. they got good idle but the CPU is still bad.
LNL is literally worse than a phone chip too
basedIITian@reddit
I have briefly tried a Lunar Lake laptop (Dell XPS 13) and it did not feel as snappy for my workflow. PTL laptops are too expensive right now for what they offer.
R-ten-K@reddit
Same here.
We have a bunch of T14 in our team, both WoA and x86 same gen SKUs.
Better performance for productivity workloads (Office, internet, WSL, etc much faster) and significantly better battery.
Very similar "mac" experience in regards to sleep and low fan noise.
If productivity is the main use case, the SD WoA devices are pretty decent, and the closest to the macbook experience in windows land.
dahauns@reddit
I don't know who's ultimately to blame in your case - the Ryzen T14s being a work machine I immediately get flashbacks from efficiency-destroying security software and intrusive GPOs ruining energy settings (combined with outdated BIOSes, oh the irony...) - but Lenovo's AMD Thinkpads do have been disappointing for a while. (Well, their Thinkpads in general, but that's a different discussion :) )
The Lunar Lake Yoga I got recently behaves exactly like you describe your WoA machines: silent, cool, snappy, flawless standby, impressive battery (even with the 2.8k OLED!).
Melbuf@reddit
The outdated bios this made chuckle. I was having an issue with my work issue Dell earlier this year so it logs in to do some things and when running one of the dell updaters it said "last update - never". We push security updates but buy other things are handled manually and only when there are other issues
basedIITian@reddit
I briefly tried a Lunar Lake powered Dell XPS 13 and compared the app launch times and excel performance and it felt worse than the X1P-powered SP11. Otherwise seemed like a fine machine.
jaksystems@reddit
This is a problem born of how Microsoft has implemented modern standby, not a hardware issue.
Lazy programming is lazy programming. We are coming up on almost 2 decades of sloppy programming practices coming home to roost.
basedIITian@reddit
It may be a Windows issue, but it's definitely not a WoA issue. They work perfectly when put to sleep.
maZZtar@reddit
I recently installed Ubuntu on Asus laptop with Ryzen AI 9 365 to for testing purposes and I've gotten a feeling that it handles battery drainage much better than Windows even with Waydroid and Docker running in the background. At the same time it could be just a feeling because I have never cared to measure better life on Windows
basedIITian@reddit
Maybe Windows is the issue, but it is not an issue on my WoA devices. They sleep well.
ash_ninetyone@reddit
Of all in this article, my first thought was "what kinda of name is that for a cpu"
EloquentPinguin@reddit
In contrast to? "Ryzen AI 7 Pro 350" Or "Core Ultra X7 Processor 368H"
Naming is currently not that great in the industry. But I think it is better than the average competition.
DerpSenpai@reddit
Qualcomm SKUs are easy to understand, their only issue is labeling the 12c and 18c both Elite (but the sticker is different!)
R-ten-K@reddit
Still, QCOM would benefit from adopting a clearer, more consistent product-naming approach, closer to what Apple does.
As it is, they have to work harder to reduce confusion, since it already faces an added hurdle in terms of mindshare compared to x86 competitors.
RageDebator@reddit
What I'm waiting to see is if consumers actually start buying these. It's like choosing between a CVT or Automatic or Manual.
Most people know what an Automatic or Manual was growing up but CVT was new and despite it working well and even giving more it took a freak ton of time for people to get comfortable with it.
ARM is the same, new but clueless adopters will get it and not notice a difference. If companies start seeing their margins going up they'll slap a shiny ARM sticker on it like Intel or AMD and TADA! A genuine new competitor is born. Will it replace the i3 or compete in the i5 margins or laptops?
faisalkl@reddit
When do we get these Linux flavoured? I'm going through a bit of a window-less streak at the moment and absolutely loving it. I hope it's not something that does out when the shiny new feeling wears off.
spazturtle@reddit
Qualcomm have scrapped their plans for Linux support, so unless the community writes drivers these are Windows only devices.
turtleship_2006@reddit
Are you sure? Why are they still active in Linux mailing lists of they've stopped supporting it?
https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=glymur
DerpSenpai@reddit
That's not true, they have hired people for Linux support, specially for drivers. Their issue is device trees. These cannot be like x86 chips yet as it was explained by a QC engineer, yet. But in the future it will become just like Intel or AMD chips regarding linux
NerdProcrastinating@reddit
It's good that there's some progress on integrating drivers.
Until there's at least one retail unit with an option to ship with Linux/easily have it installed (with most hardware features functional), then I wouldn't classify it as supported.
It would be amazing if they could do a collaboration with Framework for a Framework 13 Pro board option.
DerpSenpai@reddit
They need to colab with Framework and tuxedo. They need to create a linux laptop grant for smaller OEMs
ChefLeBoef@reddit
Hired people? You know they have arm choosers which run Linux for quite some time. They decided to not give these Linux support
DerpSenpai@reddit
They have done their work for the X2 part lmao, X2 supports linux but laptops still need device trees for it to work correctly and that's on OEM
VenditatioDelendaEst@reddit
If laptops need device trees, they have not in fact done their work yet.
X86 computers do not require device trees. They use ACPI, like they should.
yreun@reddit
A Qualcomm engineer has said they won't use ACPI for Linux until the spec goes through a radical change because as it stands with the current ACPI you need to deal with PEP to make the hardware work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/snapdragon/comments/1she2o3/comment/ofr652g/
DerpSenpai@reddit
having read the argument QC makes here (in other forums too), i wonder why they haven't pushed the industry further on this issue. this should have been fixed ages ago considering how reliant on the Linux Kernel they are
yreun@reddit
They brought up this argument elsewhere as well? Was it more or less the same or did they bring up more information.
Also, I think it's just a lack of interest, Linux might be growing in popularity but arguably there just isn't a financial incentive for OEMs to actually pursue it, otherwise we would see high end laptops sold at retailers with Linux distros (I know some countries do sell some but they're mostly meant as affordable devices).
Android doesn't have this issue since most Android devices will only ever run the exact flavor of Android they came with, a build compiled specifically for that device. So there's little point in moving away from devicetrees to ACPI on those devices and also Google has improved this on their end with GKIs, Generic Kernel Images that load in vendor-specific modules and allowing OEMs to use old kernels for longer in newer Android versions with LGRF, Longevity Google Requirements Freeze.
ChefLeBoef@reddit
Ok, then you weren't talking about Qualcomm as the discussion indicated, hut referring to laptop oems which do have Linux teams, and could have made the integration with Qualcomm engineers, but decided for monetary reasons to skip this.
nbates66@reddit
Being qualcomm, I suspect the duration of driver support on Windows is going to suck as well.
Admirable-Extent2296@reddit
Qualcomm haters baited by literal misinformation while spreading even more on their own, color me shocked
spaceman_@reddit
Where was it reported that they scrapped their plans for Linux support?
Exist50@reddit
I asked the same. Sounds like they're just lying.
faisalkl@reddit
I have a surface pro x and would love a fully supported Linux install.
ragnanorok@reddit
me when i spread misinformation
Exist50@reddit
Where has that been reported?
Jakka47@reddit
Might have been 'reported' but it's most definitely not true.
cabbeer@reddit
As long as it says qualcom, we dont. They don't like open source, they actively make it hard to support.
spaceman_@reddit
I'm waiting for Phoronix to test one of these, but I'm not hopeful.
yreun@reddit
Qualcomm has continued to post drivers in the Linux mailing lists, just not being reported much. If you want to stay up to date you can search for "Glymur" (The codename for the X2 Elite).
https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=glymur
EmptyVolition242@reddit
Looks very active but we won't know for sure until these laptops get properly tested.
yreun@reddit
One thing to note is that although Qualcomm posts these patches they sometimes need to be manually added to every device to get them to work because they only develop them with their CRD / dev kits in mind rather than any particular retail device. Like the video codecs iirc needed extra attention to make work on retail devices.
IMO with Snapdragon chips people need to shift most of their blame from Qualcomm to individual OEMs. Even just uploading the firmware binaries to linux-firmware like Lenovo, and Dell as of recently, would go a long way in making Linux better OOTB. (If the OEM does not upload them you need to extract them from a Windows partition or the OEM's driver package)
General-Cookie6794@reddit
Yes Linux is where the line is towed
jhenryscott@reddit
This article is BS it still doesn’t handle windows well. Linux is probably worse. They are android chips.
maZZtar@reddit
Have you even seen Android chip which is even comparable to X series?
CataclysmZA@reddit
Mediatek Kompaniano is going to be the only option for a while. Qualcomm's focus is on Windows because that's where the market share is.
moxyte@reddit
I don't believe it, the entire Snapdragon drama arc has been nothing but overpromise and underdelivery.
Saranhai@reddit
Exactly. They've only gotten a tiny amount of the PC marketshare even after 7+ years of trying. What a joke
emotionengine@reddit
I'm enticed by these ARM machines but what is the general state of app compatibility on WoA? Also what is the performance penalty for using the translation layer?
tarmacjd@reddit
We have two developers at our company who absolutely love theirs. I was genuinely surprised.
We don’t do anything special - but it’s still a decent workload
turtleship_2006@reddit
Most of the comments I've seen of people speaking from experience (at least for models from the last year or two) have been great.
Most comments I've seen trash talking WoA are from people who haven't actually used it.
I haven't personally used it and I'm sure there are times where it slows down etc, but most people who actually have them seen to like them
DeuzExMachina_@reddit
I still see a lot of issues with drivers for random peripherals (for me, printers are the worst offenders here, both at home and in the office) and severe slowdown on random x86 apps (sometime, even seemingly light apps for unknown reasons). It's not terrible, but also not great (definitely, not MacOS level if you had experience with x86 emulation on this platform).
Bur overall, I think it's not worth it even if it's almost headache free for you your particular use case. Mostly because of intel's panther lake (or even lunar lake if you wanna save money). You pay the same, have the same battery life, better GPU and 100% compatibility with everything. The only downside is multi-core perf, but you're unlikely to feel the difference (debatable).
I'll say this, it's fun for tinkering! (however, the lack of proper linux support is a downside on this front too, for me at least)
Exist50@reddit
There's a significant difference in ST perf as well.
And is battery life actually measures as equal?
void_nemesis@reddit
In the Framework 13 Pro, Panther Lake supposedly beat the M5 MacBook Pro in 1:1 battery life testing. I say supposedly because it's a manufacturer benchmark, even if they apparently filmed it and will be releasing it.
Hifihedgehog@reddit
I can’t understand the downvotes here on your posts. You have my upvote. For mainstream users, yes, Windows on ARM is more than adequate. The issues are development and broader power user hardware where it falls to pieces.
yreun@reddit
Performance under Prism drops overall by about 40% to 60% compared to native according to Geekbench. You can look at the individual subtests performed to see where the emulator struggles most and least:
ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607OA vs ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607OA - Geekbench
tcarambat@reddit
If you are using the computer for work/personal - basically running apps and such it is now basically a non-issue except for really old legacy apps that are not maintained.
If you are developer, I really would urge you to reconsider. I develop on one of these for a WoA distribution of my app and holy shit it is extraordinarily rare to import a library and it have WoA support, I actually cannot think of a time where I needed some hefty lib/binary for dev of a feature and it just worked. This is true for Node, Python, and Rust - you are either recompiling basically every binary from scratch 90% of the time. Very very frustrating.
Soft_Neighborhood223@reddit
I'm doing primarily C++ development and I've been pleasantly surprised by how little extra effort it's taken to develop on and support my Qualcomm laptop. I suppose the difference is that we're used to compiling everything from scratch.
Hifihedgehog@reddit
Exactly. Then don’t get me started on drivers. Embedded development is pretty much a dead end since the industry is built around x86 drivers. I can’t stress how much that Windows on ARM is a royal pain in the butt for power users like myself.
OafishWither66@reddit
as long as you don't use any gpu heavy programs, most things work fine
344dead@reddit
I've been running WoA for over a year now for my personal laptop where I mainly do development, browse web, and watch videos, and it's been amazing. Zero issues and Windows feels so freaking snappy it's wonderful.
My gaming pc is a 9800x3d and my work laptop is a Dell latitude with some Intel chip. I love this laptop the most for daily use of the 3. But obviously my desktop is where the gaming happens.
TimeRemove@reddit
For non-gaming day-to-day, it is fantastic. I haven't seen much it won't run, and battery life just sings. This site has a search tool about halfway down:
https://windowsonarm.org/
Put in your favorite software and see if it is native ARM or just works correctly via the compatibility layer.
EloquentPinguin@reddit
In general it seems to be much improved and most stuff just works. Much more apps have now arm native modes, but also the x86 emulation has improved a lot. But some things, which interface with more specific things might just fail.
cabbeer@reddit
windows it dog shit spyware, any hardware that forces you to use it is ewaste.
Name835@reddit
But aren't the new intel panther lake chips just as good as good or even better AND they can run on win or linux no problem? I still see too many limitations with these arm chips unfortunately, especially with the leaps x86 seems to be taking at the moment.
Polar_Banny@reddit
Especially when it comes to boot other operating systems than Windows.
whispous@reddit
I'm super tired of Microsoft's ARM game. So tired.
Apple moved to ARM in one fell swoop with full featue support and a very decent invisible compatibility layer.
Microsoft's approach to ARM in the modern era started with Windows 8 RT - and it sucked. It couldn't do anything.
Then Windows 10 on ARM arrives and it's super locked down to specific chips rather than being a "generally installable OS" Like Windows on x86 has been.
I'm so tired, Microsoft. All you had to do was take this seriously from day one - and you didn't, then you kept on treating it like an unwanted kid. At this stage there is zero chance i'll ever consider Windows on ARM - I'll use Linux or MacOS.
mduell@reddit
I think that’s due to the ARM/chip OEM side of things, not the Windows side of things.
x_andi01@reddit
As a designer, I'm curious how Adobe apps run on these. Creative Cloud is the main reason I'm still on Intel. If the translation layer handles Photoshop and Illustrator smoothly, I might finally switch. Battery life sounds amazing though.
Alone-Ad6979@reddit
app compatibility is biggest question .
Various-Inside-4064@reddit
Idk why you got downvoted?
Anyway this is actually still bigger reason depending on of course what you do on laptop. For example still no android emulator support! its arm and it will run emulator better but no!
Also ton of stuff is not supported when it come to data science workflow. So if i have to get arm i will just get macbook which is far ahead.
DeuzExMachina_@reddit
Add OS compatibility to that list too. Linux support is still really bad and unlikely to improve anytime soon
Going_Solvent@reddit
Revit? Navisworks? Ableton?
Emulation - Nah!
MainFunctions@reddit
If it wasn’t borderline impossible to run Linux on these I would buy one immediately
Taki_Minase@reddit
What's the price? Probably more than a Macbook.
travelin_man_yeah@reddit
What an Arm laptop should be is what an M series Mac has been... 😆
dropthemagic@reddit
Doesn’t matter if the OS is still shit
Fearless-Area-532@reddit
These suck my mate bought one current gen compatibility is horrible software just doesn't work or breaks
zerinho6@reddit
The X1 laptops have finally started to hit Brazil with good prices (~R$4000) and for some odd reason, the MacBook Air has drastically reduced its price on major stores too from R$ R$ 7200 to ~R$5500. I'm thinking of getting a X1 once I'm back working since I only use a laptop either to watch video or to remote into my pc with parsec.