You misunderstand, I don’t have any allegiance to Intel/AMD or ARM or Apple.

I am interested in factual reality though. This is not about Qualcomm versus AMD or whatever. It’s common sense. If you have a use case (e.g. x265 encode or god forbid an AV1 encode) that takes many hours, you laptop is going to suffer due to cooling issue. This is even true for an ARM laptop versus an ARM desktop.

I think the results you mention back up what I said?

So you’re saying that throttling after 5 min is not an issue with MT (or even ST) workloads?

I would be happy to be proven wrong (I am not kidding), but I would need solid proof from a 3rd party.

No offence, but random claims online is not how it works.

Mind you, I am not saying you or your friend are lying. There are likely other factors at play.

I thought you said your friend used applications not benchmarks. You know something like x265 encoding, AI video upscaling, mining XMR (CPU based crypto) or complex single-thread dependent strategy games; I say this as someone involved in computers for hobbies and leisure, not in a professional manner.

No offence, but what you are saying does not sound convincing in the least.

A high level X Elite GB6 ST/MT score is around 2,800 ST and 14,300 MT.

A high level 5950X GB6 ST/MT score is around 2,400 ST and 14,300 MT.

And this is a short GB benchmark (i.e. not sustained for hours on end).

You’re saying if I give you a complex (lots of water, storms, seas) 2+ hour BD source to encode into x265, your friend’s X Elite laptops won’t start to throttle in ~5 min and it will complete it in the same time as your 5950X? You’ll have to provide proof.

But he’s been using it for a while now and says everything works just fine. Replacing a big box workstation with a thin and light notebook and have it perform better is pretty wild.

Some specifics would be interesting. What applications were being used on the big box workstation?

But I do have a result screenshotted of 27.9 in Speedometer 3.0

Not aware of Speedometer 3.0, this does seem like a very solid result, but what does it show? Do you have any context on it? This is the first time I’ve encountered this particular benchmarks, would be interesting to hear about what it means.

I am not saying x86 apps don’t work (well some don’t work at all), but emulated apps usually have a bunch of strange bugs or issues like the provider refusing to honour commercial support when using the application on WoA. Here is one example:

Adobe Acrobat and Reader work on Windows on ARM (Windows 10/11) primarily via 32-bit (x86) emulation, with native ARM64 support actively in development. While usable, it may exhibit slower performance, lack PDF thumbnail previews, and have limitations with Outlook integration

I have other examples of applications that I use. For whatever reason, this piece often gets ignored when discussions about WoA come up.

And I am ignoring thing like line-of-business apps, regional commercial applications (local enterprise accounting software is not going support WoA) and consumer applications (less common than enterprise).

Not to mention issues like lower re-sale value, higher cost of repair and generally a pricier and much less developed support ecosystem. This is a big deal if you live in a developing country (or you have below median income in a place like the US).

you often see them on discount for $600 as opposed to the $1200+

The discount reflects the low level of demand.

The fact of the matter is that the current crop of X Elite devices are worse in every way relative to comparable x86 devices. This might change with Nvidia backed WoA devices, but I have a feeling they’ll be more focused on selling ML enterprise GPU than being fully committed to fighting it out in the relatively low margin consumer sector.

Valve’s compatibility layer for ARM making games work

I thought this was for Linux not WoA?

Sure, but Qualcomm is not Apple and they sell to multiple OEMs.

What’s the application and what are the benchmarks? ST? MT? What is the high level profile of the use case/application?

X Elite is generally very weak in most benchmark. The originally released Geekbench 6 results were never achieved by any devices available to consumers (because they were run on a custom cooled setup with a version of Linux optimized for running that benchmark on X Elite).

garbage marketing, overpriced laptops, and bad compatibility layer

I don’t believe any of this has been fixed, but we’ll see what happens.

I somehow doubt this will be the case.

If you don’t care about gaming (or heavy duty desktop applications), you might as well get a Chromebook or a Mac (depending on your budget).

I am not a fan of American attitudes to what is marketed as free speech, but this does seem extreme.

Although I can see the point of this outside of corporate type stuff. For an individual, one could argue it makes sense. For a corporate entity (or even a private business), no way.

You definitely need a little bit craziness and unpredictability to make a truly landmark game.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think truly good games (the ones that go down in history) need a certain amount of jank. Not jank for jank’s sake, but because something new, that makes you go “wow”, cannot have the same true and tried game design/gameplay approaches that have been done before.

Just look at the classics, they are considered milestones, but they have a lot of issues:

• F01 / F02 - It is very easy to mess up your build, but the flip side of this is you have a living world where you can play as a slaver, play as a character with development disabilities and discover a whole new approach. Even if you’ve played the game many times and are comfortable with older CRPGs, the early game can be a slog. I find I constantly have to kite and use cheese tactics in the first ~20% of the game.
• VTMB - Combat was generally subpar, especially if you went with weapons. Many abilities/skills were unbalanced. Late game was subpar.
• Deus Ex - Early to mid-game combat is a bit of a slog and considered unpolished by modern standards (but the flip side is that you feel the progression). Some of the stealth gameplay can feel a bit cheesy. I would argue weaponry is unbalanced. Arcanum - Picking the industrial direction resulted in much more tedious and difficult gameplay than going with magic. Both real-time and turn-based combat was shit.
• Morrowind - For some of the quests, I literally had to almost try a “point and click adventure” approach to figure out how to complete it. I was never a fan of the combat in Morrowind.

And yet I strongly prefer this approach (and modern versions such Space Wreck, Age of Decadence, Colony Ship, Consortium, New Vegas, UnderRail) to Obsidian’s recent output (let alone Bethesda with Starfield and Fallout 3).

I don’t know about that. If Valve made Left 4 Dead 3 with some minor iterative improvements (better graphics, same gameplay, maybe a new mode) and no trash monetisation (B2P like the first two games), I think it would be very successful.

Back 4 Live Service Game Failure

Haven’t bought an EA game since the SimCity 2013 reboot. They straight up lied about the nature of the game.

The funniest thing is that 13 years and $900 M later, they still don’t have a working economy or even a basic balance concept. They have 200+ ships (many in JPEG form for over a decade) in their cash shop they’ve thought about beyond flashes sales videos and 3D assets.

This is a very naive and ignorant take. In the major cities, quality of life is on part with EU for many.

Furthermore, even with demographic splits (e.g. russians aged 18-24, urban russians), all major demographic groups show at least strong majority support for chauvinism, authoritarianism and genocidal imperialism.

There are some variations of course. But it’s more along the lines of overwhelming/near absolute majority support (e.g 50+) or strong majority support (18-34). You also find interesting variantions where “middle age” segments tend to be less supportive (on a relative basis, the segment as whole still shows strong majority support) of genocidal imperialism than young adults/early middle age (18-34); likely because they have more to lose.

Russians have the capability to build a better future for themselves (without invasions), they just don’t want to because they haven’t gotten a taste of their own medicine (where they are treated like they treat others).

EU is massive in enabling this attitude. Consider the fact that Merkel, even from retirement, is promoting russian genocidal imperialism by claiming that Poland and the Baltic nation are responsible for the full scale invasion:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/10/06/angela-merkel-poland-baltics-blame-ukraine-war/

When it’s the russians and putin (a symptom, with the cause being russians) who are to blame for their own invasion.

When you use steam, do you mail Newell the cash?

How does that contradict what I said?

You think living in Ukraine, I would be aware of the exact scope of sanctions against russia (and the massive loopholes)?

From the article:

For context, Steam currently doesn’t allow direct purchases by Russian players, in accordance with western sanctions, so Russian buyers have to make use of workarounds such as third-party key resellers.

Btw, I knew this before reading the article. Do a web search around how these workarounds operate (the example cited by RPS isn’t the only one).

I respect your reasoning and I agree that it would massively increase piracy in russia, but remember, russia is sanctioned; Valve isn’t supposed to be selling to russians in the first place.

Disagree on impact on global piracy rates. Pirated games were widely available via public russia sources such as rutracker.org.

You don’t even need to know russian as all titles have english headings.

Here is a link to Vampire Bloodlines 2, originally release on October 21st, with consistent updates since then, last one being on November 18th:

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6761118

You don’t need to speak russian to figure out what “magnet-ссылке” with a magnet icon refers to.

I strongly disagree, the Workers & Resource DLC link can provide some insights on this; russian language reviews talk about “getting salo for the Ukrainians” and whataboutism about Palestine (like they care about Palestine, if anything most russians tend to support Israel). There is lots of anti-Ukrainian, pro-invasion russian language commentary on Steam.

We’ve lived in russia as an expat family for many years, we left as soon as our finances allowed us to (this was was before the russians invaded Georgia in 2008).

Then there is broader research on russian support for the full scale invasion; even using demographic splits (e.g. people aged 18 to 24, highly educated russians, high income russians), all demographic segments show at least majority support for the full scale invasion (with almost all segment groups showing at strong majority support and very commonly overwhelming majority support).

With respect to arguments that “people are afraid to show their true views”; there are multiple research pieces that specifically account for preference falsification. Some russians do hide their preferences, but this group is so small that even with preference falsification adjustments you have a strong majority support (65%+) for the full scale invasion. That’s specifically the full scale invasion (i.e. 2022), with respect to the annexation of Crimea, preference falsification was found to be not statistically significant with the respect to the baseline ~85% support for the annexation of Crimea.

What’s wrong with Steam getting blocked in Russia? It’s not like Valve allows direct purchases by russian users.

Russian users losing access to their libraries without VPN is their own problem. They are responsible for their government, no one else.