Hands-On Windows 191 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands-On Windows, we're going to look at something I've been dying to look at. The second gen Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 based Copilot plus PC podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-On Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott and this is a big one for me. I've been waiting for this for a long, long time. I think some of you have too. But you may know that two years ago Qualcomm came out with Snapdragon X, the Windows 11 on ARM based chipset for PCs.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:38]:
That's incredible. We've gone through a kind of an evolution of that platform and now two years later, almost, we finally have the second generation X2. And the X2 has a dramatically improved CPU, a dramatically improved NPU, which is crazy because it already had an awesome NPU, I would say a subtly improved GPU. The GPU did not advance as much as the other components of the SOC for some reason. But we talked about copilot plus PCs in the last episode. These are things that have certain hardware requirements. You have 16 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of storage at MPU, et cetera. Since the launch of the first Copilot Plus PCs, which was, I guess May June 2024, you know, Qualcomm has, like I said, released different versions of that first gen chipset so they can meet different price points.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:30]:
AMD and intel got into the game with their newest gen mobile chips, which are also copilot plus PsyNC compliant. But the copilot plus PC thing has just been like the perfect storm for, especially for Windows 11 on ARM, this was a platform that just didn't make any sense. Before 2024, the hardware got incredible. Qualcomm did an amazing job with that. Through a new via acquisition and years of work, Microsoft improved their emulator so that it can emulate x64 software. And it you wouldn't even know that it's not running, you know, natively. It's full speed, excellent, huge compatibility gains, meaning lots of native ARM apps, especially in things like web browsers and creative apps and so forth. So most of the time you'll probably just be running the native ARM version of whatever app anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:17]:
And then the one big asterisk here of course, is gaming. Emulating an x64 app is one thing. Emulating an x64 game is a problem, right? Especially when the Snapdragon chips have good GPUs, but not dedicated massive Nvidia type GPUs. And so that's something that's lagged. But we saw gains for that over the past year, especially late 2025. Fortnite's available, the anti cheat stuff is available. The Xbox app is fully running. So I'm running one of these systems now.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:53]:
You bring up the Xbox app at launch. When you brought this up, you couldn't browse your library, you couldn't go to the store. There's nothing in Game Pass. You know, all you could do is cloud gaming, which is the cloud streaming service. But today if you, if it's in your library, if you have Game Pass, you can download those games and they will or will not run, you know, depending on the power of that computer in the game of course. Right. And so we'll see, we're going to, we'll take a look at that in a moment. But as we move into early 2026, we're starting to see these first computers.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:25]:
I'll show you the computer because, you know, it's a computer. I mean there's no surprise it's a computer. I have two of them here in Mexico. There is a third one waiting for me at home. And let me actually just bring up a chart so you can see this. I apologize for the tiny text, but this is kind of the, the Qualcomm image here. So the top two sections are the X2 generation of chips. This is the top of the previous gen.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:50]:
So these are the best chips that they had, you know, from last year and back. The top two are actually different from the other ones. These are actually x2 elite chips. And what makes an elite chip, I'm sorry, Elite extreme chips. The differentiator there is that the RAM is built into the SOC so it has less distance to travel and is faster. And you can see it right here. The memory bandwidth is 228 gigabits per second compared to 152. That's a big jump.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:19]:
And. But if you compare that 152 number to the previous gen Snapdragon X Elite, which used to be the highest in chip, it was 135. So this from here to here is an evolution from here to here or from here to here is a dramatic improvement. The other thing you see across the board for X2 is 80 or 85 tops npus vs 45 for the first gen. Obviously more cores, faster clock speeds, more cache, which is huge for processors, faster gpu. But you can see it's, you know, this is where you can see it. This is why I call it subtle. The fastest GPU in the original x series was 1.5 GHz.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:01]:
The fastest, not including the Elite Extreme, but the, the one that's in this computer. In fact, I think the one that's in the computer is right here, but is 1.7 gigahertz. So it's a, it's a bump, you know, 1.5, even 1.85. And Elite Extreme is, is a bump. It's better, but it's not dramatically better. It's not 45 to 85. Right. Which is kind of interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:22]:
But the computers that I have here, like I said, the one I'm using, I believe I can just look. Let's look and see what it is. I believe it is the 88. Yeah. The 8800, 100. So that's this one here. This is probably roughly this one. This top level X Elite from two years ago you basically cannot find anywhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:44]:
It was in a dev kit that Microsoft or Qualcomm put out. And I think it was in one laptop. I think it was a Galaxy Book, had it. Most of them had this. The Surface Laptop 7 I had has this processor here. So you go from 4.2 to 5 gigahertz. You go from 42 megs of cache to 53. A small bump on the GPU like I said, 45 to 80 on the NPU tops.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:10]:
And then the memory bandwidth is, you know, a little bit better. It's still LPDDR5X RAM but. And it's off the chip. So kind of a small bump there. Let me get rid of this isore. Sorry. So there's that. Now what I have waiting for me at home is an Elite Extreme laptop.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:28]:
So couple weeks I'll be back in the United States and I can test that. I'm kind of curious to see what's going on there, but that will be an even more performant system. Okay, so we have the Snapdragon X2 family of chips. There's three gen or three sorry tiers at first. So we have Plus Elite and Elite Extreme. I think in the previous gen they went out with Elite and Plus and then they added, they went down market from there. So they had plus 8 core and then just X without the plus. So they had multiple tiers there as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:03]:
Like I said, big cpu, big MPU and you know, reasonable GPU updates. So far I've only had these two computers for a couple of days. You know, I go through the whole process where I Install all the stuff, I run all the apps and you know, day to day, both of them are fine. Like one of the best computers I've ever used is basically the 20, 20, 25 equivalent of this thing, which was an HP on the book five, which has a Snapdragon X. So this was the lowest end processor that was available. This one is an X2 plus, but it's the lowest end version. And even though it's not called X versus plus, it's kind of, it's slotted into the same basic spot in the, in the, you know, in the hierarchy. Unfortunately, because of component price increases and availability problems, these are a little more expensive than maybe they would have been a year ago or two years ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:57]:
So where an Omnibook, you know, when it first came out, might have started $500, this is closer to 800 or maybe even $850. And I think the computer I'm actually using for this demonstration is going to be north of, you know, 12 or $13, but still in that kind of, you know, standard, you know, premium laptop price range. Okay, so like I said, battery life, not battery life. Sorry, I didn't say that. Day to day performance, you know, productivity apps, whatever it is, office, web browsers, affinity, which is what I use for graphics or visual studio, whatever, that stuff all works perfectly normal. It's wonderful, Everything's great. Nothing to say there. Battery life, I haven't had it long enough to say.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:39]:
I mean, one of the big advantages of Snapdragon X compared to anything x64 is battery life, but also just efficiency and reliability. You know, you open the lid, it actually comes on, you know, you don't have to worry about it. So that's, you know, I've only like, it's only been a couple of days, but so far it seems like that's worked pretty well. The first thing of note though is when you look at the version number of Windows, it's not 25H2, it's 26H1, which is kind of an oddity. In fact, it's literally an oddity. This thing is an outlier. It was created specifically for this generation of chips just so they could come to market quickly. It's basically the same as 25H2.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:19]:
There are some weird differences here and there. It doesn't. For example, one thing that I should have gotten by now but do not have is Xbox mode, which is a replacement for game mode. But you don't even see game mode in here. And I don't, I can't. Explain that. But it will come to this thing eventually. Of course, it being a copilot plus PC, it has all those, you know, advantages of whatever copilot plus PC has.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:49]:
So what is 26H1? Well, it's Windows 11. It's fully supported. So it has whatever lifecycle that all Windows 11 versions have. When 26H2 comes out at the end of 2026 and it will come out. If you have a currently supported x64 computer running Windows 11, 24H2 or 25H2, you will be upgraded to 26H2. If you're running this type of computer and 26H2 has come out, you will not get 26H2. And I have no idea why Microsoft does not explain this. What they basically done is punted on this and said, look, sometime in the future we're going to explain what the upgrade path is.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:26]:
So there'll be some other thing. I'm guessing it might be called Windows 12, you know, so we'll see. But what they've said so far is that this thing will not be upgraded to 26H2. It will be upgraded to something else. So we'll take that mystery for what it is. And then the third thing, the first, you know, so the first two, you know, Copilot plus PC, right. It's got the 80 in this case, 80 tops MPU. There are versions of the chip with 85 tops MPUs.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:52]:
I don't, I haven't tested what that means in real world terms, but if you think about like the local AI stuff I was talking about a couple episodes ago, you could imagine that there'll be models optimized for MPUs that would, you know, be twice as fast. So we'll see. I'm. That's something I will test. So Copilot plus PC, Windows 11, 26H1, and then there's that game thing, right. As I had finished configuring one of the computers and had moved on to the other one, it occurred to me, wait a minute, what's the, what does it look like to play games on this thing? So move this off screen. But I have, I don't want to run them and bog this thing down. I've got all this recording equipment going and everything.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:35]:
I don't want to kind of ruin the experience. I've tried that in the past and hasn't been great. But I'm going to show you some screenshots from games and then I'm going to show you some one video just to kind of Give you an idea. So I started small, meaning old, and installed Steam. I installed Half Life 2 off of Steam. And this thing is, you know, 60 frames a second. It's what it does, you know. This is an older game.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:58]:
To me it looks great. This is Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. This is probably 4 or 5 years old. Ish. Again, gorgeous. This one I can't remember, but somewhere between 30 and 60 frames per second. Control is an interesting game. This is a fairly recent game.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:17]:
This is a sequel coming out this year. But this is I think the Ultimate Edition or whatever it's called. But this is a game that can do ray tracing. I don't use ray tracing on this, but with things like AutoSR, which is automatic super resolution, you can run it natively at a lower resolution and it just looks beautiful. And of course the frame rates are great. So this thing has run really, really well. And this is Doom Eternal. So there's the, the modern trilogy of Doom games.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:44]:
I haven't been able to get the latest Doom to work. I think it's called Doom Dark Ages. It stalls, it runs, but once you get try to load a game or start a new game, it just goes black. And I don't know what's going on there. But Doom Eternal is the one in the middle. And this one looks gorgeous. I only have one good picture. I have a couple other shots, but you can see the detail in the gun and just the environment and everything that's in it.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:07]:
But this thing runs over 60 frames a second. It's somewhere between 1680 depending on the scene. It's unbelievable. Like this runs great. It runs better than the first one, which we'll look at in a second. So the video, the one video I made was of doom 2016. This is the first of the modern era Doom games. I'll just get this thing going here.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:27]:
And this is just a minute of gameplay. So to me this looks very similar to the Eternal, except what you can see in the corner, it's only running at 30ish frames per second. It might exceed that sometimes. But this, you can see this is a pretty busy scene. You know, there's things going on, but there's no lag, there's no latency, there's no, you know, little jerky issues where it doesn't quite work right. And thinking back to the, the first gen Snapdragon X stuff, you know, one of the goals there was that hopefully games will run at full HD 30 frames a second. So this is above that. I mean this is probably.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:11]:
Well, this is literally, I should say 1920 by 1200. It's just a little north of Full HD. It is running north of 30 frames a second and it's, you know, again, these games, this is the type of thing. When Snapdragon first came out it's like, yeah, we're not, we're never going to be able to this kind of thing on these computers. But this stuff works great now. So it works so well that. Let's get out of that. I'll probably begin testing some more demanding games going forward.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:39]:
I don't expect it to run. Modern Call of Duty games, you know those, you know, they're just top heavy gigantic games. But to me that's a dramatic improvement. So battery life is still a question. High end gaming is still a question. But gaming suddenly is on the table. Right? I mean it was getting better already at the end of last year. I think we looked at Fortnite at one point.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:58]:
That runs great obviously in the X2 as well. But now that it's like this is a possibility, I'm going to start looking into other games and seeing if we can't extend this a little further. So overall it's good news. I think the only asterisks here now is I wish the GPU was a little better. The game stuff could be even better. But the bigger problem is just the component crisis. Right. Which is affecting the whole industry.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:22]:
So unfortunately the prices are a little higher than they might have been a year or two ago, which is unfortunate. But I should also mention I have installed some of these games on the X2 plus laptop, the silver one here. Right. So this is the lower end processor. In fact it is the lowest end processor. And the one I know, Half Life 2 is on there and I don't remember the other one, but the two I've tried actually run just as well on this they do on the more expensive one. So that's good news too. So we will have more about x2.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:54]:
There's a lot more testing to come. We'll see whatever Microsoft has to say about how we get off 26H1 at some point. So there's definitely more coming. But for now I'm just excited to finally have access to some of these laptops and there'll be more down the road as well. So there'll be more. Well, thank you for watching. I hope this was useful. You can learn more about Hands-On Windows at twit.tv/how.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:21]:
We have a new episode every Thursday. Thank you for watching. Thank you. Especially if you're a Club Twit member. We love you guys. If you're not a member, please do consider joining. You can learn more about that program at twit.tv/clubtwit.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:37]:
Thank you. I'll see you next week.