We took a shot every time Qualcomm said 5G, AI or mobile gaming in its Snapdragon 865, 765 system-on-chip launch... On Tuesday Qualcomm teased three upcoming Snapdragon system-on-chips at its aptly named Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii. The US giant hopes the processor components will feature in next-generation smartphones, notebooks, and similar gear landing next year. Specifically, it announced the premium-tier Snapdragon 865 – a …
Nope.
Never gonna happen.
A desktop is plugged into the mains, a phone has a battery that has a finite - and very limited - duration.
Even if you plug the phone into a charger, it is designed for a heat envelope that is orders of magnitude less than what a true desktop - with watercooling these days - is designed for.
So go on and say that your new design is the highest performer, sure, but a desktop it ain't and never will be.
iPads have laptop level performance for 1 year-old laptops. And there are a lot of desktops out there that use U-series chips, so it would match them as well.
While I am sceptical about Qualcom managing it this year, they are not *that* far off it, and in 2-3 years time, I think they will manage it.
"Water cooled" is very specialist. I think they mean "what you can order direct from Dell or Lenovo" (and they probably mean at the £/$/€ 500-700 end of the scale).
I see no reason that premium mobile solutions shouldn't be able to compete with commodity desktop ones on peak performance.
If we consider that probably 90%+ of the desktops are used to browse, email, erp, productivity applications, I don't see a big gap on the performance arm is giving to the performance those use cases need.
You can drive a Ferrari and a smart. They are both road-level performance cars...
You know that you can put these chips/SoC in a non-phone envelope right?
This should read as ARM (at least mobile derivation of it) being more powerful than x86
And it's already the case with Apple's A13 that has performance comparable with Intel's Core i5/7 CPUs and has been gaining 10-20% YoY, vs. like 3-5% for Intel's x86 CPUs gimped by legacy architecture way past it's life time.
I have a 10 year old Dell Optiplex desktop which is capable of running Windows 10 and Linux mint as an acceptable speed after having the memory upgraded from original spec.
So i expect a new ARM SOC would easily perform as well probably better if running native ARM code as a basic desktop replacement.
I had an idea, probably some 20 odd years ago when i was barely out of short trousers and not long after i had just started using computers at school. This idea, seemed very sensible and inevitable and it was that in the future, you would be able to carry an item with you, about the size of a deck of cards, that you could plug into any 'computer' to make it 'your' computer (files, applications settings etc..)
Now, we have phones that are easily as powerful as computers were ' a few years ago' with more than enough storage, and inputs/outputs like USBC that would happily allow you to connect it to a KVM, but despite it being done (what ever the windows phone and android efforts were called), it hasn't really taken off.
Is there even an agreed upon 5G standard yet?
According to Wikipedia, some elements have been finalized:
The standard is expected to be completed in 2020[2], but parts of it have been finalized earlier. For example the requirements for radio access technologies listed below were adopted in November 2017[3]. Following the publication of the requirements the developers of radio access technologies such as 3GPP were expected to develop 5G technologies meeting these requirements. 3GPP is developing radio access technologies NR, LTE-M and NB-IoT that together are expected to meet all requirements.[4]
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
