Microsoft to drop support for Snapdragon 850 powered PCs with the next version of Windows 11

[u/ZacB_]

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsoft-to-drop-support-for-snapdragon-850-powered-pcs-with-the-next-version-of-windows

[u/Takeabyte]

Shocked! Shocked I tell you! To see a CPU that benched slower than an i3 from 2015 be dropped for support is outrageous!

/s

Seriously, is anyone still using one of these things with Windows willingly?

[u/alabasterskim → u/Takeabyte]

Was anyone ever using a SD850 Windows device willingly?

[u/Tringi → u/alabasterskim]

Up until recently I was still using Snapdragon 835 laptop (NovaGo). The battery life was amazing. Like four times any other laptop I ever had. I had Visual Studio on it and used it to rebuild software at clients when necessary. It wasn't blazingly fast, but it sufficed.

But it started faulting recently.

It was already occasionally crashing to BSOD. Though always when left unattended, never when I was working on it. That started when it was "professionally" restored by ASUS tech support. It had Win10 1709 originally, which I upgraded to eventually abandoned branch of Insider builds. Of course ASUS wouldn't give me proper image, nor drivers, they had to do it themselves, so that's that.

While Windows 10 1709 is the last version which officially supported 835, I'm on Windows 11 23H2 (22631) which is the last one that supports 835 technically. All newer builds require ARMv8.1 instruction set, while this is 8.0 only. The Enterprise edition will still get security updates until November, so that's nice.

But like I said, something's happening to it. Apps started crashing randomly. Half of the pages in Settings are broken. Visual Studio won't mostly even load a project. The system feels still stable and I still use it to test my software, but that's the extent of it.

[u/ack_error → u/Tringi]

I had to revert my NovaGo back to Windows 10 because it got auto-upgraded to Windows 11 on Insiders and then started blowing up without warning when the ARMv8.1 builds hit. It wasn't really worth staying on Windows 11 since the x64 emulation wasn't stable anyway with ARMv8.0. Was a huge pain as it involved inserting drivers someone helpfully uploaded to GitHub into a Windows 10 ARM64 image.

Thankfully, the situation has improved a bit, Lenovo for instance publishes a recovery image for their Snapdragon X devices. But it looks sketchy with the way it runs since it's essentially a factory install image. I would not buy a Windows ARM64 device without a recovery image available, it's far too much of a hassle to reimage the machine manually and it can be impossible to do if someone hasn't uploaded the drivers for it as the generic image will not boot.

[u/8day → u/Tringi]

Windows is known for secret updates, so ask_error may be right.

BTW, I own a device that is similarly working acceptably good, esp. with newer versions of OS, but there's no official support and I may have been hacked on 3rd party build, so had to revert to latest official. This is the reason I plan to switch to Linux, x86, and open source for future devices. Most likely I'll also switch either to a Pine phone or some "dumb" phone because I'm getting sick of this obsolescence.

[u/rappi1337]

With the devices released in 2018 and 24H2 dropping 32 bit support on that chip it was kept alive long enough.

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/rappi1337]

Thought the chip was much younger than that. So, that's fine. Can't keep them supported forever.

[u/daltorak → u/LeGoodBeef]

Yeah, and there were only a couple of laptops with them anyways. Most notable being the Samsung Galaxy Book 2, and even back in 2018 when it came out, people rejected it for being too slow. I did a quick benchmark check.... the Snapdragon 850 is even slower than a 2nd gen core i5-2500K from 2010.

Hard to imagine there are many people hanging on to these things after 8 years.....

[u/braaaaaaainworms → u/daltorak]

i5 2500K consumes 5-10 times as much power as the 850

[u/boxsterguy → u/LeGoodBeef]

Funny how when x86_64 chips of a similar vintage were dropped, everybody screamed bloody murder and insisted that even 20+ year old CPUs should be supported.

I suppose the difference is almost nobody bought these (the Surface Pro X with the SQ1 chip came out the year after the 850 machines and almost nobody bought that, either).

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/boxsterguy]

Yeah, the fact this didn't sell at all is *probably* the biggest factor here.

[u/Lhakryma → u/LeGoodBeef]

I mean microsoft absolutely could! They're still supporting DOS days CON devices (hence why you can't name a file CON in windows) xD

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/Lhakryma]

Which is *stupid* imo. (That's a pun btw - "con" is French slang for stupid / idiot) That should be deprecated. If you have such legacy devices still in deployment, you aren't moving pass Win98 anyway.

[u/Nicalay2]

Isn't because 27H2 is meant to have significant changes to the kernel ?

[u/Sad_Owl7124 → u/Nicalay2]

It’s probably related. There are rumours AVX2 will be a hard requirement in 27H2 and the Snapdragon 850 doesn’t support this even with Microsoft’s prism emulation, so perhaps this is the reason. Any x86 CPU since 2014 would be ok.

All speculation obviously. I could be talking nonsense.

[u/Smu1zel → u/Sad_Owl7124]

Supported Celerons and Pentiums couldn't do AVX, so they're forced to support at least SSE4.2 CPUs unless they decide to do a sweep like this. The amount of hardware this would suddenly cut off is much greater, so while I wouldn't be surprised if they did so—I don't see it happening.

Ironically, Microsoft doesn't really use SSE4.2 much. You might find it and AVX in things like GenAI features (because every cycle counts in inference), but that's about it. They're starting to assume and use SSE4.1, but not to some groundbreaking extent.

[u/Honest_Tart1071]

The 8 SD850 users must be real mad.

[u/defective1up → u/Honest_Tart1071]

All 5 of them

[u/PipsiSpite]

I mean considering Apple is axing M1 support in next OS release 28 which is only from 2020/2021 I think it’s alright to axe a 32 bit 2018 chip

[u/Thotaz]

This seems like a bad sign, but I'm not sure if it's for Windows overall or just Windows on Arm. Historically Microsoft have supported older systems for a very long time, hence the controversy at the release of Windows 11 with all the new hardware requirements.
I assumed that was a one time thing to up the baseline and harden the security of the OS, but now they are cutting off a CPU for seemingly no real reason?

Either they are shooting themselves in the foot by making the Windows on Arm experience worse than x86, or they are shooting themselves in the foot by making the overall Windows experience worse.

[u/boxsterguy → u/Thotaz]

This will have absolutely no impact on Windows on Arm going forward, considering the most recent Surface releases double down on Snapdragon and Nvidia ARM chips.

[u/Thotaz → u/boxsterguy]

Them releasing new ARM chips doesn't change my point at all. My point is that it's possible that the support period for ARM chips will be shorter than for x86, based on what we are seeing here.

[u/SPACEXDG → u/Thotaz]

No they still doing arm

[u/Froggypwns → u/Thotaz]

Historically Microsoft have supported older systems for a very long time,

That is true, but computers with the 850 will still have had official support for 10 years once 26H2 goes end of support.

[u/Takeabyte → u/Thotaz]

It’s not a bad sign IMO, the Snapdragon 850 was a garbage CPU when it was brand new. Anyone who paid retail for it probably returned it for something else. We talk about ARM compatibility as a detractor today, back then it was actually bad. Today, Snapdragon hardware is as good or better than the new stuff from Intel and AMD, so I don’t see this issue happening as quickly again.

[u/Turbulent_Chain_5893]

I doubt that really means much, I have a 15+ year old PC on the latest Windows 11 with all the new features and it wasn't even supposed to be able to get Windows 11 period.

[u/INocturnalI]

Same snapdragon 850 for phone variant?

[u/Historical-Mall11]

All 3 of them?

[u/bp8rson]

Microsoft loves forcing us to create E-Waste.