Exactly. And Linux already has a lot of ARM support… The question is, will Qualcomm’s instruction-set translation system be available to non-windows users or not. It’s possible they have a deal with Microsoft (like the chip will initially be exclusive to Surface devices, and only later be available to other hardware vendors like AMD giving Lenovo first dibs on their big workstations CPU’s) and work together to do it, and then it would mean that x86 emulation on Linux would take longer to catch up, but if they make it available, this could be really cool.
Either way, if the hardware exists, you can run Linux on it. You can even run Linux on Apple Silicon thanks to Asahi Linux, it’s amazing how fast they are progressing to a quite usable machine with zero help from Apple (I don’t have one but one of my buddies is using it on his Mac mini).
Also, I want this chip on a smaller version of the steam deck to basically run a Switch sized system with a decent battery life.
Honestly I don’t even care about x86 software support that much for a laptop. The only reason I would want it is games and I rarely use my laptop for that. If I really needed some x86 thing I could always connect to my desktop remotely
Exactly. And Linux already has a lot of ARM support… The question is, will Qualcomm’s instruction-set translation system be available to non-windows users or not. It’s possible they have a deal with Microsoft (like the chip will initially be exclusive to Surface devices, and only later be available to other hardware vendors like AMD giving Lenovo first dibs on their big workstations CPU’s) and work together to do it, and then it would mean that x86 emulation on Linux would take longer to catch up, but if they make it available, this could be really cool.
Either way, if the hardware exists, you can run Linux on it. You can even run Linux on Apple Silicon thanks to Asahi Linux, it’s amazing how fast they are progressing to a quite usable machine with zero help from Apple (I don’t have one but one of my buddies is using it on his Mac mini).
Also, I want this chip on a smaller version of the steam deck to basically run a Switch sized system with a decent battery life.
Honestly I don’t even care about x86 software support that much for a laptop. The only reason I would want it is games and I rarely use my laptop for that. If I really needed some x86 thing I could always connect to my desktop remotely