You misunderstand, I don’t have any allegiance to Intel/AMD or ARM or Apple.

I am interested in factual reality though. This is not about Qualcomm versus AMD or whatever. It’s common sense. If you have a use case (e.g. x265 encode or god forbid an AV1 encode) that takes many hours, you laptop is going to suffer due to cooling issue. This is even true for an ARM laptop versus an ARM desktop.

I think the results you mention back up what I said?

So you’re saying that throttling after 5 min is not an issue with MT (or even ST) workloads?

I would be happy to be proven wrong (I am not kidding), but I would need solid proof from a 3rd party.

No offence, but random claims online is not how it works.

Mind you, I am not saying you or your friend are lying. There are likely other factors at play.

I thought you said your friend used applications not benchmarks. You know something like x265 encoding, AI video upscaling, mining XMR (CPU based crypto) or complex single-thread dependent strategy games; I say this as someone involved in computers for hobbies and leisure, not in a professional manner.

No offence, but what you are saying does not sound convincing in the least.

A high level X Elite GB6 ST/MT score is around 2,800 ST and 14,300 MT.

A high level 5950X GB6 ST/MT score is around 2,400 ST and 14,300 MT.

And this is a short GB benchmark (i.e. not sustained for hours on end).

You’re saying if I give you a complex (lots of water, storms, seas) 2+ hour BD source to encode into x265, your friend’s X Elite laptops won’t start to throttle in ~5 min and it will complete it in the same time as your 5950X? You’ll have to provide proof.

But he’s been using it for a while now and says everything works just fine. Replacing a big box workstation with a thin and light notebook and have it perform better is pretty wild.

Some specifics would be interesting. What applications were being used on the big box workstation?

But I do have a result screenshotted of 27.9 in Speedometer 3.0

Not aware of Speedometer 3.0, this does seem like a very solid result, but what does it show? Do you have any context on it? This is the first time I’ve encountered this particular benchmarks, would be interesting to hear about what it means.

I am not saying x86 apps don’t work (well some don’t work at all), but emulated apps usually have a bunch of strange bugs or issues like the provider refusing to honour commercial support when using the application on WoA. Here is one example:

Adobe Acrobat and Reader work on Windows on ARM (Windows 10/11) primarily via 32-bit (x86) emulation, with native ARM64 support actively in development. While usable, it may exhibit slower performance, lack PDF thumbnail previews, and have limitations with Outlook integration

I have other examples of applications that I use. For whatever reason, this piece often gets ignored when discussions about WoA come up.

And I am ignoring thing like line-of-business apps, regional commercial applications (local enterprise accounting software is not going support WoA) and consumer applications (less common than enterprise).

Not to mention issues like lower re-sale value, higher cost of repair and generally a pricier and much less developed support ecosystem. This is a big deal if you live in a developing country (or you have below median income in a place like the US).

you often see them on discount for $600 as opposed to the $1200+

The discount reflects the low level of demand.

The fact of the matter is that the current crop of X Elite devices are worse in every way relative to comparable x86 devices. This might change with Nvidia backed WoA devices, but I have a feeling they’ll be more focused on selling ML enterprise GPU than being fully committed to fighting it out in the relatively low margin consumer sector.

Valve’s compatibility layer for ARM making games work

I thought this was for Linux not WoA?

Sure, but Qualcomm is not Apple and they sell to multiple OEMs.

What’s the application and what are the benchmarks? ST? MT? What is the high level profile of the use case/application?

X Elite is generally very weak in most benchmark. The originally released Geekbench 6 results were never achieved by any devices available to consumers (because they were run on a custom cooled setup with a version of Linux optimized for running that benchmark on X Elite).

garbage marketing, overpriced laptops, and bad compatibility layer

I don’t believe any of this has been fixed, but we’ll see what happens.

I somehow doubt this will be the case.

If you don’t care about gaming (or heavy duty desktop applications), you might as well get a Chromebook or a Mac (depending on your budget).

I am not a fan of American attitudes to what is marketed as free speech, but this does seem extreme.

Although I can see the point of this outside of corporate type stuff. For an individual, one could argue it makes sense. For a corporate entity (or even a private business), no way.

A c/pcgaming and c/games UT2004 server would be a lot of fun!

You definitely need a little bit craziness and unpredictability to make a truly landmark game.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think truly good games (the ones that go down in history) need a certain amount of jank. Not jank for jank’s sake, but because something new, that makes you go “wow”, cannot have the same true and tried game design/gameplay approaches that have been done before.

Just look at the classics, they are considered milestones, but they have a lot of issues:

• F01 / F02 - It is very easy to mess up your build, but the flip side of this is you have a living world where you can play as a slaver, play as a character with development disabilities and discover a whole new approach. Even if you’ve played the game many times and are comfortable with older CRPGs, the early game can be a slog. I find I constantly have to kite and use cheese tactics in the first ~20% of the game.
• VTMB - Combat was generally subpar, especially if you went with weapons. Many abilities/skills were unbalanced. Late game was subpar.
• Deus Ex - Early to mid-game combat is a bit of a slog and considered unpolished by modern standards (but the flip side is that you feel the progression). Some of the stealth gameplay can feel a bit cheesy. I would argue weaponry is unbalanced. Arcanum - Picking the industrial direction resulted in much more tedious and difficult gameplay than going with magic. Both real-time and turn-based combat was shit.
• Morrowind - For some of the quests, I literally had to almost try a “point and click adventure” approach to figure out how to complete it. I was never a fan of the combat in Morrowind.

And yet I strongly prefer this approach (and modern versions such Space Wreck, Age of Decadence, Colony Ship, Consortium, New Vegas, UnderRail) to Obsidian’s recent output (let alone Bethesda with Starfield and Fallout 3).

Haven’t bought an EA game since the SimCity 2013 reboot. They straight up lied about the nature of the game.

This is a very naive and ignorant take. In the major cities, quality of life is on part with EU for many.

Furthermore, even with demographic splits (e.g. russians aged 18-24, urban russians), all major demographic groups show at least strong majority support for chauvinism, authoritarianism and genocidal imperialism.

There are some variations of course. But it’s more along the lines of overwhelming/near absolute majority support (e.g 50+) or strong majority support (18-34). You also find interesting variantions where “middle age” segments tend to be less supportive (on a relative basis, the segment as whole still shows strong majority support) of genocidal imperialism than young adults/early middle age (18-34); likely because they have more to lose.

Russians have the capability to build a better future for themselves (without invasions), they just don’t want to because they haven’t gotten a taste of their own medicine (where they are treated like they treat others).

EU is massive in enabling this attitude. Consider the fact that Merkel, even from retirement, is promoting russian genocidal imperialism by claiming that Poland and the Baltic nation are responsible for the full scale invasion:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/10/06/angela-merkel-poland-baltics-blame-ukraine-war/

When it’s the russians and putin (a symptom, with the cause being russians) who are to blame for their own invasion.

“Crypto/NFT disclosures make no sense, because all games will become “Play to Earn” and have NFT objects where you can transfer your Mario hat to COD 2028.”

I am being glib, Sweeney probably has a point, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a critical look at his intentions.

To my knowledge, PCIE4 versus PCIE5 is irrelevant at 1440p.

You probably can’t find compatibility info because PCIE is always backward and forward compatible when it comes to a 1:1 slot:card ratio. Unless you are splitting the PCIE lane, using one of those GPU + SSD combo cards, you should be fine.

I was more thinking about Qualcomm being particularly dishonest (which is a massive achievement in their industry).

Why not 99.99%?

Office applications (Excel, Powerpoint, PowerBI, Word) is one area where I can’t have any friction at all, since that’s how I get my income. I need the latest version of these applications for desktop, web version does not cut it and Linux emulation seems very spotty unless you are OK with using a much older version of office like 2013/2016.

That just on the Microsoft side, there is also Tableau desktop, some Adobe applications and even open source Windows applications that I rely on that don’t have native Linux versions (Notepad++, Paint.net).

I am planning to buy a new laptop, might be worth trying to switch to Linux on the laptop and experiment with emulated Office solutions (while always having a reliable fallback on desktop).

I wish the EU would require Microsoft to release the latest desktop (no cloud subscription required) version of Office for Linux (and broad, open ended criminal liability if they try any tricks).

I cannot switch without a native, official supported version of Office.

You can continue getting updates for Window 10 for free and they don’t really add new software to Windows.

Microsoft Office and lots of line of business apps (e.g. I prefer Tableau desktop over the web version) require Windows. Many game (not only multiplayer ones) continue to have issues with Linux (although there have been massive improvements in the last ~5 years).

From what I remember while HL2 was demanding it was relatively well optimized at release. That being said, I would have been fine with 30-40 FPS back then.