Year of the (Snap)dragon ’24

The most significant change in CPU architecture in almost 4 decades of computing for me comes in the form of the Qualcomm (remember Eudora Pro?) made SoC, Snapdragon X Elite.

I had always wondered about RISC, having read about DEC Alpha, MIPS, Sun Sparc and Intel iA64.  None of those, if at all attainable, ran consumer operating systems.  My first non-x86 experience was with the Apple M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro in 2021, which by 2024 had software support to virtualize Windows on arm OS.  I was amazed at the smooth x86 Windows OS apps compatibility and decided to go bare metal with the Samsung Book4 Edge.

I am quite certain after 6 weeks that this is a great choice for right now since it has WiFi7 and, as a Copilot+ PC, early access to Windows 11 24H2 features; else the Samsung Book4 Ultra with Intel Meteor Lake and WiFi 6E [or upcoming Book5 360 with Intel Lunar Lake and WiFi7] would have served me better for native software availability.

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