Okay, we finally got our hands on the Snapdragon laptop and I have spent about two weeks with this laptop. I was surprised, enjoyed its capabilities, was frustrated while troubleshooting, and eventually got a good idea of what the new Snapdragon laptops could do.
I know we’re late to the party – and here are my findings and what I experienced with this new slew of Snapdragon X Elite laptops. The laptop we’re using for this test is the ASUS Vivobook S 15 S5507Q, packed with:
- Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chip
- 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 8448MT/s
- 1TB SSD
- Qualcomm Adreno GPU with 3.8TFLOPS. Sorry, there are no details on what this Adreno GPU really is.
But we’re going to talk a little bit of history first. All of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips run on Arm. Arm is a company that designs the chips, and then licenses them to companies like Qualcomm to customize and integrate into their chip, then send it out to fabs like TSMC or Samsung or Global Foundries to make them into chips that we can use in our devices.
These new Snapdragon X Elite laptops are still referred to as “Windows on Arm” laptop because it is using Arm chip designs, and Arm uses RISC instruction set. Intel and AMD are based on x86, which uses CISC instruction set.
The new Snapdragon X Elite CPU is codenamed Oryon and it is based on Arm v8.7-A.
For the sake of brevity, I’m going to call x86-64 as x86 only, and Arm64 as just Arm architecture. Here’s a table of what the real names mean. I’m not concerned about whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit in today’s topic.
Back to the topic at hand – Windows is predominantly made for x86 software. So, a lot of work has to be done to get it running properly on Arm. We can achieve that by either:
- Rewriting all the software so that it runs natively on Arm architecture
- Through code translation.
If we run rewrite the software, then it’ll take much more effort to get it to work properly, and we’ll have to rewrite every single piece of software. However, it’ll perform the best that it can. Take a look at the tests that I’ve done.
First up is Handbrake. This is a free tool that many people use to transcode videos. I used our review video of the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra – you can watch it at the top right corner there – and transcode it using the fast 2160p60 AV1 preset but changed to 60fps.
I have two versions of Handbrake installed – one version for Arm and another for x86, and I can compare how much performance we will lose if we emulate x86 on Arm architecture – and the answer is about 30%.
Yeah, the transcoding took considerably longer on the x86 version of Handbrake running on the Snapdragon X Elite. With that big of a performance gap, we have to make sure we’re always using Arm software whenever possible.
Then comes DaVinci Resolve. The DaVinci Resolve version 19 public beta is available in Arm version and I used the Age of Airplanes sample file on DaVinci’s website to do the test – and it took only 6 seconds to render using the YouTube 1080p preset. However, when I tried to launch the x86 version – it just wouldn’t launch. It says GPU error, so we move on to CapCut.
It’s surprising to me that many people are using CapCut and this video editing app is also available on both x86 and Arm architecture – but you’ll have to download from the Microsoft Store to get the Arm version.
And while it does work, it’s… very buggy. The interface isn’t working that well, and the fan speed ramped up really high and the power consumption is nearly 82W. Remember, this laptop comes with a 90W charger only. If we need to charge the laptop while working on CapCut, it’ll hit that 90W limit easily.
While I can’t actually precisely measure how long it took to render the video – I can tell you it is “very long”. It’s just not a good app for Arm as of now – so stick with DaVinci Resolve if you can.
If you want some other alternative apps, then you can check out this website here. The amount of software that is made for Arm has also grown – and this is a great resource to keep up with what software has an Arm version.
Now, if we make a translation layer to just translate x86 software to run on Arm, then a lot of software can just work all of a sudden and developers don’t have to rewrite and maintain another variant of their software. This is great for Windows in particular since there are millions of software developers and it’s just impossible to get everyone to rewrite their software in Arm.
However, there are two problems. Firstly, even with a solid translation layer, it’s not guaranteed to be compatible with all apps. Before the Snapdragon X Elite’s release, x86 emulation on Arm is pretty iffy – and I guess Qualcomm partnered with Microsoft so much that Microsoft decided to write a new translation layer that they’re calling it as Prism.
This new Prism translation layer should also be beneficial to any of the existing laptops that are running on Arm chips – like the ASUS ExpertBook B3000 or the JOI Book SK3000 that are literally running on smartphone chipsets.
Again, it’s not perfect since I spent more time troubleshooting to get apps like OBS to work on this laptop.
I also want to mention this quickly – to those who said Apple did it better, no. Apple had its own fair share of problems when the M1 first came out. I know this because I use an M1 Pro Macbook Pro and there were many apps that didn’t have an Arm version for some time. And Apple literally forced all of its developers to migrate to Arm if they wanted to survive as there were no more x86 laptops from Apple.
With all of that said, why should you buy a laptop with an Arm chip? Well, the same reason why your mobile devices use Arm. When it is doing low-powered tasks, it can really be low-powered. I’m talking about single-digit power consumption. I compared this to the latest AMD Strix Point chip, by the way.
With that power efficiency, the battery life on this laptop is amazing. With its 70Wh battery, I can easily get 10 hours on a single charge through my usual usage of web-browsing, YouTube Music, and some YouTube videos in the mix. Seriously, the Vivobook S 14 and S 16 laptops which use the latest Intel chips we reviewed earlier – can only last half as long as this laptop.
Oh – since this laptop’s fan isn’t exactly spinning that much, I can actually use this laptop on the bed or on the sofa and it doesn’t have any thermal issues.
Speaking of that – the telemetries from HWInfo or MSI Afterburner just straight up don’t work and we can only see the temperature. So I used this to read all the power consumption data.
Then comes gaming. Of course, these laptops aren’t meant for gaming but they should be able to play some simpler games on it. For example, I published a video where I tested about like 15 games and a lot of games worked well. Indie titles that aren’t that heavy actually ran fantastically. GTA V ran better than AMD or Intel chips from a year or two ago.
Yet it only consumes less than 40W while we’re playing GTA V at 1080p on the lowest graphical settings, while also translating the game to Arm. As a comparison, the new AMD Strix Point laptop consumes around 60W.
However, certain games like Counter-Strike just don’t work at all. I have no idea why. On Qualcomm’s website, it says that this Snapdragon X Elite supports DirectX 12 too. There must be some changes in a deeper level of the Windows operating system that caused this incompatibility.
I still think that this generation of Windows of Arm laptops are quite successful and that’s largely thanks to Microsoft who decided that it’s time to take Windows on Arm seriously and develop the Prism translation layer. No idea why it took them so long to develop this translation layer since some of Microsoft’s Surface devices use the SQ series of chipsets that are Arm-based.
By the way, the Recall feature is not present on any Snapdragon X Elite laptops right now for obvious reasons, but I have tried it at Computex 2024 and it’s actually quite a neat feature to have. I just hope they can address our concerns before rolling it out.
And for this laptop in particular, the Vivobook S 15 is basically just a 15-inch version of the Vivobook S 14 and S 16 that we reviewed recently, comes with the same great OLED screen with magnificent color accuracy and brightness level.
Since it is using the Snapdragon X Elite that is based on Arm architectures, the fan speed is inaudible in most cases. I can still make it go loud and push it to its limits.
I also opened up the laptop because I was curious to know what we could do after we bought the laptop – and once I got it opened – I was not surprised. Basically, everything is soldered except the SSD. It’s using a standard M.2 2280 NVMe SSD which is great since we can swap it out to whatever we want.
I mean, this is great considering that the MacBooks with the Apple Silicon – which is also based on Arm, by the way, have everything soldered onto the motherboard.
Is Windows on Arm finally good?
Personally, I do think that these Snapdragon X Elite laptops and Windows on Arm in general to be good if what you’re doing is supported properly by the operating system. The battery life and near-zero fan noise are just fantastic.
However, if you’re planning to get this for gaming – then I’d say now is not the time.
Will it get better over time? I surely hope they do. Qualcomm needs to keep up with the momentum and Microsoft needs to further improve on the Prism translation layer. App developers will also need to have an Arm version of their software to take full advantage of the Arm architecture as well.
I’m optimistic when it comes to the future of these Arm-based laptops, but only if the software is done properly. More competitors are said to be coming as well – like NVIDIA and MediaTek’s partnership to bring Windows on Arm in 2025.
Imagine an Arm PC running on NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs. That’ll be insane in terms of performance.
Where to buy the ASUS Vivobook S 15 S5507? (Affiliate links)
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