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Comment by pseudosavant | Hacker News Reader

This may finally be the chip family ARM on Windows has always needed. Qualcomm's chips have always been dogs with slow off-the-shelf ARM CPU cores that have pathetic single-threaded performance compared to x86 AMD/Intel or ARM Apple Silicon designs.

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For reference, this is just a single benchmark, but as an idea of each vendor's top mobile CPU single-threaded performance:

Geekbench Single Thread Score:

- DGX Spark (same CPU as RTX Spark): 3125

- Snapdragon X1 Elite: 2950

- Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme: 4050

- AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX: 3225

- Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus: 3175

- Apple M5 Max: 4350

I'm happy to be wrong about Qualcomm's latest X2 chip performance, even if it is shipping in only a single product so far. Their previous best was the lowest in this list.

This will likely have worse single threaded performance than recent Qualcomm CPUs.

Qualcomm Snapdragon x1 and upcoming x2 use their Oryon core and have much faster single-thread performance than Intel/Amd and this nvidia soc that uses off-the-shelf arm cores

That wasn't true of the X1, but apparently the X2 (which is only in a single device so far) does appear to finally be fast. The first Windows ARM CPU to be faster than any of its x86 rivals. Competitive with Apple Silicon single-thread performance even.

I was disappointed to see that the RTX Spark has the ARM cores from the DGX Spark. I was hoping it had their new in-house developed cores that Nvidia is starting to use on their latest gen server parts. They look really fast. That said, if RTX Spark has CPU performance like the DGX Spark, it will be almost as fast as the top AMD/Intel parts.

These chips also appear to be using off-the-shelf ARM cores.

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