Bit-Rauschen: Windows on ARM should finally make it in 2024

Windows on ARM chips is about to get exciting. At any rate, there are increasing indications that Microsoft and Qualcomm are finally going to get it right. As already reported in previous issues of Bit Noise, benchmark results from several different notebooks with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors have emerged. How accidentally and inadvertently such data ends up in the public domain remains to be seen – we suspect that companies are deliberately using at least some of these supposed leaks to fuel speculation about upcoming products. In Geekbench 6, the Snapdragon X Elite with twelve Oryon cores and 4.3 gigahertz in Turbo outperforms all previous ARM chips for Windows laptops. Depending on how strongly the cooling is designed – i.e. depending on the Thermal Design Power (TDP) – the Qualcomm processor comes close to the current AMD Ryzen 8040U and Intel Core Ultra. However, it is unclear whether it can manage without a fan.

There are still few Windows apps that use code adapted for ARM. And the emulation for x86 and x86 –64 in Windows 11 eats up a lot of performance. Qualcomm is therefore proud to announce that Google has completed an ARM version of the Chrome browser for Windows. And the Snapdragon X Elite is expected to provide more computing power for AI apps than previous x86 mobile processors. Qualcomm promises 45 tops for the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) alone – more than AMD and Intel's NPU, CPU and GPU can achieve together. Thanks to fast LPDDR5X-8533 RAM, the Snapdragon X Elite should access the RAM at up to 136 GByte/s.

Windows laptops with Snapdragon X Elite are set to launch in the middle of the year, i.e. in a few weeks. The Geekbench data mentioned above comes from Lenovo and Samsung devices, but Microsoft will most likely also send its own Surface notebooks with ARM into the race.

AMD driver battle

Meanwhile, AMD continues to be clumsy when it comes to drivers and firmware. In March, AMD described in a blog post how easy it is to run an AI language model (Large Language Model, LLM) under Windows 11 on a PC or notebook with Ryzen AI or a Radeon 7000 graphics card. All you have to do is install the LM Studio software and download the desired LLM.

This actually works easily, as demonstrated in the c't lab. However, LM Studio does not yet use the NPU built into the Ryzen processors with Ryzen AI. Instead, the integrated Radeon graphics processor – i.e. the IGP – handles the AI calculations. AMD did not lie because "Ryzen AI" also explicitly includes CPU cores and the GPU/IGP. However, AMD is apparently still struggling with the integration of the NPU, which is supposed to deliver much more and, above all, more energy – efficient AI computing power than the other computing units. Microsoft will reportedly soon require at least 40 tops for an AI PC so that the co –pilot can run locally.

Initial results from the new UL Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark (see page 45) also show that AI under Windows is still a patchwork quilt. The NPUs from AMD and Intel still cannot be used via the standardized Windows API DirectML and Nvidia continues to cook up its own CUDA soup. The growing pressure has prompted AMD to announce that it will open up further parts of the GPU API ROCm. And Nvidia continues to pull ahead in AI servers, see page 46.

New code names

New CPU code names appear in patches submitted by Intel for future Linux kernels. After Meteor Lake (Core Ultra 100), Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake are expected at the end of 2024, presumably both as Core Ultra 200. 2025 will probably see Panther Lake and Nova Lake, and the name Beast Lake has already been mentioned. Now Adams Lake has emerged, a candidate for 2026.

In terms of fast performance cores, Redwood Cove is currently the latest (in the Core Ultra 100), followed by Lion Cove, Cougar Cove, Panther Cove and Douglas Cove. For efficiency cores, the replacement for the current Crestmont microarchitecture could be Skymont, followed by Sheldonmont.

It appears that AMD and Intel are deliberately inventing the most confusing code names possible. Intel's next – and hopefully urgently needed due to higher performance – Xeon generation Xeon 6 is called Granite Rapids, while AMD is developing the Zen 5 Ryzens, also expected in the fall, as Granite Ridge. The first BIOS updates are already being released for the latter so that they can run in existing AM5 boards – perhaps as the Ryzen 9000.

(ciw)