Matisyahu's Blog

Rather uneventful day at work followed by a brisk walk – I decided to have a shorter walk tonight because I wasn’t in the mood for a longer one but I always like to make sure that I get out of the house and get some exercise after sitting on my backside all day. Anyway, I went for my walk, came back home and then jumped into the shower and now I’m relaxing in bed watching some YouTube videos followed by catching up on the local, national and international news before I head off to sleep.

Qualcomm have announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite which will be shipping in 2026 (link) with the interesting part being that they showed off not just laptops but also mini PCs. It appears that Qualcomm have decided to start moving up from portables to mini PCs which make me wonder how far away are we from workstations and servers given that the Oryon processor was originally designed for the server. Although nVidia is linking up with Intel given that there are many systems and workflow designed around the x86-64 architecture I wouldn’t be surprised if the long term goal is to to have their bases covered by also having their own offering in the ARM space so that whichever architecture ends up coming out on top they end up winning either way.

I kind of wonder whether the delay with the shipping of the nVidia ARM based computer has to do with Windows given that I see Adobe working to get their own software on ARM for Window with plugins of Photoshop for example making use of CUDA so it would serve as a good incentive to provide support for nVidia’s own platform on WIndows as well. It makes me wondering whether we’ll see another big push for ARM64 and Windows when Windows 11 26H2 is released next year for the 2700/2800 series which probably includes many under the hood changes to support new ARM architecture not to mention working to bring more native applications to Windows. For me I would love to see dbpoweramp made available for ARM because at the moment it is available for macOS on ARM64 but only on WIndows 11 for x86-64 – I’m hoping that with the drop of support for 32bit Windows that we may see a version for ARM64.

I’m still holding off getting a desktop because there is a rumoured Arrow Lake refresh but then again the next big upgrade after the Arrow Lake refresh is Nova Lake with the interesting piece I found in an article (link):

AMD and Intel are planning several innovations to the x86 architecture. They joined forces in fall 2024 to form the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group (EAG). According to a post by AMD Vice President Robert Hormuth on LinkedIn, the x86 partners have agreed on FRED, AVX10 and APX, among other things.

Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) is an updated concept for processing interrupts. AVX10 and the Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) reorganize the AVX versions and bring, among other things, twice as many registers. Intel’s Nova Lake, which is expected to arrive at the end of 2026 as the Core Ultra 400 for LGA1954 boards, could be the first Intel CPU with APX and AVX10.2.

It appears that it is going to require Microsoft to make changes to the Windows kernel to support APX and FRED but hopefully it should mean some of the hairy parts of the x86-64 are going to be gradually replaced overtime with maybe Nova Lake and Zen agreeing on the architectural changes. Linux has already started working on it (link) so I wouldn’t be surprised that Microsoft if Microsoft has been busily working on it behind the scenes given the close relationship they have with Intel and AMD to ensure that when Windows 11 26H2 is launched that these technologies are supported out of the box.