Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra(blogs.windows.com) |
Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra(blogs.windows.com) |
(And let’s set aside the how they’d possibly be able to compete with the scale, market penetration, marketing spend, and mature app ecosystems of iOS/Android and Apple/Samsung.)
Privacy? Lack of advertising? Respect for the user’s choices? From the company that brought you Windows 11? Why does the world sorely need another closed-source operating system full of telemetry?
Hardware. I want a Surface Phone.
Would please you elaborate your argument?
Personally, I think having more choices would be better. The Apple vs. Google duopoly is limiting for consumers and developers.
Would you rather have an expensive device that you barely control or a cheaper device that spies on you?
More choices and competition, please.
We need something. I’ve lost all faith in the hardware direction of iPhone. The 14 Pro (let alone Pro Max) is an absurd monstrosity. And Google clearly has no interest in innovation beyond copying Apple.
I can use whatever hardware i want without worrying about drivers and compatibility and just about every other advantage windows have.
I have not yet found an alternative for HeidiSQL thats free to use that works on other platforms, every other alternative costs money and or is not as good. HeidiSQL on wine is horrible.
Lots of people have Macs already.
That's what decades are poor management gets you, you late to the party with expired food
Apple was smarter when they came up with their M1; with an aggressive pricing and excellent performance/watt
- Taskbar cannot be pinned to the side on my widescreen monitors
- Items on taskbar cannot be un-grouped
- Cannot show text on taskbar
- News/weather widget is awful, full of clickbait news and tiny Weather widget, which is vastly inferior to having a live tile that opens to a full screen weather app
- Reduced start menu customization (live tiles / grid are replaced with folders that add an extra click)
Other than that I haven't used it enough to comment much more. I have it on my laptop which is mostly just used for gaming, and I can tolerate the taskbar and start menu regressions. But for me, most of using Windows is... using the taskbar and start menu. To take away most of their functionality seems like complete insanity!
Maybe I'm biased because I'm on the Insider Program, and I get changes incrementally instead of as a big release in 2 years
For server usecase this is very unbalanced as far as connectivity goes. Say you want to use the modem or wifi for internet access. Modem gives you 5gbit/s and you'll get out to your network just 1gbit. Wasteful, and it needlessly limits the opportnities.
There is nothing for people to believe or not believe. MS cannot cannot discontinue x86 overnight because their OS is used by a much larger proportion of the world.
Apple managed a competent compatibility layer, albeit with some special sauce in the SOC to make it fast. Is that too much to ask from Microsoft?
Fundamentally, ARM Holdings is what Antitrust legislation was supposed to break down. They own the "ARM" name and control who can license the ARM IP and most importantly, how.
Ampere, the folks behind a lot of ARM servers, are by contract barred from getting into the market of making ARM chips for phones, desktops, or otherwise. That's the form of their license: Server-grade 96-core behemoths running at 3+Ghz and with the thermal output of a small space heater.
ARM holdings sets all sorts of weird restrictions and forces market segmentation to make sure that nobody "Accidentally" makes something that they don't immediately approve of. Qualcomm is basically locked into making phone SoCs for all eternity until they renegotiate their license with ARM holdings. They're in a shit situation because they have competition all over the place (Allwinner, Rockchip, a legacy Intel series, NXP, and Samsung to name a few), letting ARMHoldings bully them into not making something that rocks the boat too hard.
Apple pulled a massive show of force in making ARM license them desktop grade chips. You see, Apple has been a license holder for ARM for a bit now (with the Ax series chips) and makes up, ballpark, 15% of worldwide phones and now >50% of US phones. Apple had already idly said "we could... you know, not use an integrated solution" when they fiddled with Intel's radio baseband.
For ARM to try and sue Apple for breach of contract for developing the Mx series of desktop class ARM processors and get away with it, they'd be putting their market share dominance in four different major markets at risk. Qualcomm can't do that.
So that leaves Microsoft, who does not want to get into the processor fabrication business and who is still reeling over the antitrust lawsuit 20 years ago (which, I'll point out, was mostly over a shared text mangling library, for what it's worth) out in the dust looking for options, and the option they get is "Whatever Qualcomm will ship them."
> For ARM to try and sue Apple for breach of contract for developing the Mx series of desktop class ARM processors and get away with it, they'd be putting their market share dominance in four different major markets at risk.
As I understand, Apple has a special license with a lot more leeway than those held by other companies thanks to Apple having been one of ARM's founders[0], so they may not have had to do any negotiations at all since they had the rights from the get-go.
Afaik Apple has an Architecture License which means they can do anything they want. They were one of the companies who co-founded ARM.
Nah, this is just organizational incompetence. The same reason we got cortana, windows 8 or adds in the start bar.
apple was part of the original ARM joint venture and gave it its initial capital
it's been there since day 0
I mean, have you seen some of the latest desktop-grade hardware? I have had space heaters with less heat output than a 4090 at full tilt.
Is there any evidence that anyone has been refused a license to develop a desktop arm cpu?
People would have mostly wanted it anyway.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with this hardware.
Windows is a general purpose OS, which is why it dominates two enormous markets: business software and games software. Microsoft will usually err on the side of developers because of this. The two companies' philosophies will of course be different.
If MacOS had similar mindshare in those markets, Mac developers would probably ask Apple to avoid overnight changes like the discontinuation of x86 Macs.
MS still provides security updates for Windows 7 despite its EOL occurring nearly 3 years ago. This is because many organizations still run critical software that they cannot shift away from, for whatever reason. Apple doesn't have to do that because no hospital or airport is running their logistics on MacOS.
Even with all this baggage, Windows on ARM has been available in some form since 2012's Surface RT.
Explorer Patcher can fix it all but you shouldn’t be obliged to fight the OS to feel productive.
Oh my god, so much this one. It's driving me insane. I keep hoping that the next round of Start menu "improvements" bring it back, but I keep getting disappointed.
I disagree, I think both platforms have copied plenty from one another. I used to jailbreak my iOS devices to get similar functionality to Android. Hasn't been necessary for awhile, I feel like the platforms are near parity now, but claiming one is copying the other (with no reciprocity) seems farfetched.
They've lost any sense of maintaining a cohesive design, or keeping things sleek and convenient. Performance has plateaued to a level of diminishing returns, so the only way they can get people to buy a new phone every year since iPhone 7 is to say "hey we put a bigger camera on it".
Product ran free with that mandate, and now we have this abomination: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/trevor-raab-ipho...
I have this recurring fantasy of an alternate history timeline where Steve Jobs never died, and when an engineer brought him the first iPhone 7 prototype, he held it in his hand, flipped it over, felt the camera bump, and said "You're fired. Get rid of the bump". I just refuse to believe he would have allowed this to happen, and I refuse to believe that we can't have good cameras without bumps.
Also this SoC doesn't even seem to have proper publicly available datasheet, and whatever marketing stuff qcom has on their website doesn't list USB at all, lol. So for all I care it can have just one host controller. Not interested in SoC with no datasheets, when it's not possible to answer basic questions about the SoC, like how many USB host controllers it has...
Ideally, we'd have 3 or more fairly evenly matched and interoperable OS choices on mobile and desktop but that doesn't seem likely to happen. Trapping the monopoly inside it's own castle may be the best we can get.
I feel similarly about people calling for Apple to open iOS up to different browser engines. Idealistically that is what I believe should happen, but realistically I think it would just result in Chrome being even more dominate. For the same reason I lament the death of IE and even the original Edge. I don't personally use IE or Safari but I benefited from them existing and having decent market share.
> Would you rather have an expensive device that you barely control or a cheaper device that spies on you?
It is unclear to me if modern Windows actually still spies on you any less than Google at this point. My feeling is if still does, it isn't by much.
>> It is unclear to me if modern Windows actually still spies on you any less than Google at this point. My feeling is if still does, it isn't by much.
Microsoft is in a good position to be a strong third contender in the mobile space, but that does not mean that they would be better in all aspects.
>> Ideally, we'd have 3 or more fairly evenly matched and interoperable OS choices on mobile and desktop but that doesn't seem likely to happen. Trapping the monopoly inside it's own castle may be the best we can get.
Yes. That is why I would like to see more choices with hopefully better treatment of consumers and developers. Right now consumers have limited choices and the mobile development experience is agonizingly painful. It seems like an opportunity for disruption, but the entrenched players are dug in deep and probably nearly impossible to dislodge.
Until other choices are available, people tend to accept the default or keep on doing what was done in the past.
There is a segment of consumers that would like choices beyond Apple and Google mobile operating systems:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/jul/04/c...
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/smartphones-5-alternativ...
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/break-away-from-android-ios-7-fr...
Personally, I would like to see more "convergence" devices that let the little computer I carry around with me be anything I want it to be: a programmable general purpose computer, a streaming media server, or whatever else I want.
There are some projects that offer such functionality, but most require expert knowledge to setup or are not very widely-adopted or not very mature:
https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
Walled gardens are not where innovation happens because the gardeners uproot whatever does not meet their vision.
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/jul/04/c...
Yes because using an operating system from the other 1 trillion dollar market cap company is going to be a better alternative. Meet the new boss…
> https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/smartphones-5-alternativ...
And those alternatives are already out there and no one wants them in a first approximation to no one
> https://www.pcmag.com/picks/break-away-from-android-ios-7-fr...
Okay. So they are “out there to try”. Have the majority of users been clamoring for it?
> Personally, I would like to see more "convergence" devices that let the little computer I carry around with me be anything I want it to be: a programmable general purpose computer, a streaming media server, or whatever else I want.
And you are in the modernity and so much so that it wouldn’t be a profitable business. Do you think Microsoft is going to give you that?
> Walled gardens are not where innovation happens because the gardeners uproot whatever does not meet their vision.
Where are all of the “innovations” that the majority of people care about - or even enough to make a profitable business - on Android where you can sideload and have third party web browser engines?
I don't claim to speak for what most people want. I think having more options than iOS and Android could help promote more consumer-friendly choices.
>> Yes because using an operating system from the other 1 trillion dollar market cap company is going to be a better alternative. Meet the new boss...
It would be another choice. Yes, they have similar incentives, but more choices help to drive innovation and keep all players competitive.
>> And you are in the modernity and so much so that it wouldn’t be a profitable business. Do you think Microsoft is going to give you that?
No. Microsoft is a better position than many to be a third choice in smartphone platforms, but they have shown poor initiative in the mobile space. They could try again or it could be some other organization with sufficient know-how and daring. (Something disruptive like Tesla or Starlink perhaps?)
>> Have the majority of users been clamoring for it?
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse." --Henry Ford
"Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do." --Steve Jobs
>> Where are all of the “innovations” that the majority of people care about - or even enough to make a profitable business - on Android where you can sideload and have third party web browser engines?
Android is innovative because it is more open than iOS. Even more innovation is possible given the right circumstances.
Using Linux on the phone with the lack of integration, the poor interface etc is the opposite of “consumer friendly”.
Normal consumers are not asking for the ability to “program their phone and run media servers”.
> Android is innovative because it is more open than iOS. Even more innovation is possible given the right circumstances
“Open” is not an “innovation”.
Who said anything about using Linux on phones? I agree that a third smartphone platform would need to be user friendly. Whether based on Linux, OpenBSD, QNX, Symbian, or something is just a technical detail.
>> Normal consumers are not asking for the ability to “program their phone and run media servers”
No one asked for iPhone. They were quite happy with their Blackberry and Treo phones. My personal wants for a smartphone are not why having a third smartphone platform would help innovation and competition in the current stagnant duopoly.
>> “Open” is not an “innovation”.
Yes, but "Closed" sucks for everyone but the platform owners.
iOS developers have been suffering and Apple has little reason it fix the issues: https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...
Android developers face similar troubles: http://www.fosspatents.com/2022/07/developer-class-action-se...
The current smartphone duopoly is just two competing monopolies with consumers and developers caught in the middle.
Some organizations are trying to get "Open" smartphone marketplaces and more choice and competition in the markets:
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
Open standards and open markets encourage real competition and innovation.
If you ask 99%+ of phone users. They don’t care about a “closed” phone platform anymore than console owners care.
> iOS developers have been suffering and Apple has little reason it fix the issues: https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...
And what percentage of iOS users that collectively making billions are “suffering”?
> Some organizations are trying to get "Open" smartphone marketplaces and more choice and competition in the markets:
And failing miserable. The market has spoken.
> Open standards and open markets encourage real competition and innovation.
And yet, it wasn’t “open standards” that brought any of the “innovations” to the market that users care about.
How many decades have Linux advocates been promising the “year of the Linux desktop”?
No one cares until they are personally impacted.
>> And failing miserable. The market has spoken.
Markets shift with time and circumstances. Those on top will not be there forever.
>> And yet, it wasn’t “open standards” that brought any of the “innovations” to the market that users care about.
Most users are ignorant of the standards that they rely on. iOS and Android are built on POSIX standards and rely on numerous networking and telecommunication standards. The Internet and World Wide Web that people use their smartphones to access are built on standards. The "magical" experiences that Apple sells to users would not be possible without a veritable book of engineering standards:
https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/
https://www.ecma-international.org/
>> How many decades have Linux advocates been promising the “year of the Linux desktop”?
I am not sure why you keep pulling Linux into the discussion. Just because Android uses Linux does not mean that other smartphone platforms would use it.
FWIW the M1 is a little more than twice as fast on GeekBench, but also uses twice the power (TDP). So sort of similar speed score per watt, so possibly they can be within the same ballpark as Apple in the next couple years.
edit: I forgot about the A in ARM.
"...an advanced, low-power processor was needed for sophisticated graphics manipulation. He found Hermann Hauser, who had developed the Acorn RISC Machine that utilized what became known as the ARM architecture, and put together Advanced RISC Machines, now Arm Ltd."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
Around this time, DEC also chose to implement their StrongARM, so that pushed into embedded.
The M1 was November 2020. That’s two years ago, give or take a few weeks.
There is nothing close to the M1 available for a Windows ARM computer. There is nothing close from Intel/AMD if you just want an ultra-low power chip with very good performance.
From 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783924
> Oddly, what I'd really like to see is ARM enter the NUC space. Maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like be able to pay $200-400 for a small, low power usage, decently performant machine. The 8th generation Intel NUC are good, but 28W TDP and it'd be nice to get it much, much lower than that. I know these are a small fraction of the overall market but personally I think it'd be cool.
Once you want something more powerful than Raspberry Pi or a board based on a mobile SoC your options whittle down considerably. There are "mini/micro" PCs but they don't touch the lack of power consumption.
I'm sure this won't be M1-levels of performance, but I'm glad to see Microsoft move towards ARM. I can totally see in a few years more manufacturers building ARM-based SoCs to run on laptops, desktops, etc.
Makes me happy I TA'd a course on ARM programming 10 years ago.I'm extremely bullish on ARM's future.
Because Microsoft says it's the future? Microsoft is the worst at these promises. That's what they said about Windows 8, then Windows RT, the Windows Phone, the Windows Phone 8 platform, Windows 10 Mobile, UWP in General, the Windows Store, the relaunched Windows Store, Windows on ARM years ago, Project Reunion with XAML islands, Windows 10 S, Windows 10 X, Desktop Converter Bridge, the iOS Converter Bridge... I suppose they kept their promises with DirectX and that kind of thing. Right now, developer apathy for Windows is nearly insurmountable, and has been for the last decade, and Microsoft's constant changing of directions does not instill confidence.
https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-intel-...
Yes, they might have dropped the ball on more than one thing. You're especially right about Windows app ecosystem today, but it's not like Microsoft is constantly failing. They're doing phenomenal job on many fronts. They're certainly not that easy to write off.
Neither the Verge piccies nor the marketing movie are clear on this.
Has that changed? Otherwise it's nonviable at $DAYJOB,
Any business which might have made use of this to take advantage of things like ARM devices being cheaper/more available than x86 devices (you literally can’t find an x86 tablet worth using for less than $400) long since ported to Android. Microsoft sort of missed the boat with ARM. Every time I see those little android based terminals littered around small businesses I think “man this sure is a business Microsoft lost for no real reason”
I wish Microsoft would support the WoA use case people could actually take advantage of. Using windows in a Mac VM. That would be by far the most effective way to get people to develop for the platform, not this product.
With macOS on ARM, Apple said they'd stop making Intel machines and they launched a compelling new experience. If you were a developer, you knew you needed to get on board or be left behind. If you were a user, you probably wanted one of the shiny new M1 machines, but even if you didn't you were going to be moving to ARM the next time you upgraded a few years down the line. Users also knew that software would be ported to ARM because it was the only way forward for the Mac.
Microsoft isn't abandoning x86. So why should developers care about Windows on ARM? Why should users choose Windows on ARM when developer support is poor - Microsoft just got Visual Studio on ARM. Why should users choose Windows on ARM when the ARM processors being offered are way behind what Apple/Intel/AMD are offering for processors? With developers and users unenthusiastic about ARM, why should chip companies want to invest in laptop/desktop ARM chips? Why should a hardware company start making ARM machines that just incur losses for a few generations as they manufacture things users aren't interested in?
There are certainly reasons to care, but it's a lot harder to justify. Maybe Qualcomm thinks it can create a new laptop/desktop chip business to rival Intel/AMD. That's certainly a good incentive, but I'm sure they've had meetings where they've talked about Microsofts lukewarm support for ARM, how to get users to buy an inferior product in the meantime (eg. until they create better chip designs and until devs port things to ARM), how to get devs to port things to ARM despite little user demand, and how to get hardware companies to want their laptop/desktop chips despite all this.
I'm not saying that Windows on ARM won't happen. I think we're in a time when CPU-independence is a lot easier and there's a lot of money to be made. However, it won't happen nearly as quickly as Apple's transition - because people have a choice in the matter. Intel/AMD CPUs are likely to be significantly better (than non-Apple ARM CPUs) for years to come. If Intel is able to get back on track in terms of process, it'll be even harder for Qualcomm and others to match. And Microsoft is likely playing a harder game when it comes to translating x86 software. Apple mirrored Intel's memory guarantees in their ARM chips, but the ARM spec doesn't require that. That makes translating a lot easier/faster, but if Windows for ARM is going to work with weaker guarantees, that makes it a harder sell. With Intel and AMD doing decently well at the moment, there's less reason for users.
Again, I'm not saying it won't happen. Hardware manufacturers will like having additional suppliers (even if the new ARM machines are partly just to get some leverage with Intel/AMD). Microsoft will want to make sure that Windows doesn't suffer if Intel/AMD stumble in the future. It's just going to be a long slog convincing developers and users that it's worth their time and money. Over a long enough time frame, I think new apps will be ARM/x86 and users will be fine with them at the right price/performance point, but it's not going to be like Apple's transition where people were enthusiastic.
But probably crack
It doesn't have to be super fast, just work well enough.
It's probably nowhere near as good as Apple's emulation. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-on-arm-this-is-...
Yes, but not for drivers (so device manufacturers have to write drivers specifically for ARM)
It speaks volumes that Visual Studio wasn't even available as an ARM version until now.
As for the Desktop Converter, it's in the same boat. For the first few years, all it was, was a pile of PowerShell scripts. No GUI, mediocre documentation, run a pile of scripts to package your app for a Store almost nobody uses. Also the command to package the app requires Windows 10 Pro and, like, 30 command-line arguments that had to be perfect in order to work. Now it has a GUI, and more people use the Store than before, but the Store has abandoned the need to use it and now allows just directly downloading unpackaged Exes, rendering it mostly pointless.
The original launch of CE was on MIPS and Super-H, but ARM appears to have gained support with Windows CE version 2.2.0.
Whoops. Never mind; they have an AMD Ryzen model now: https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/DS1621_P...
On the other hand this particular device is meant as a dev kit for making ARM apps (either new ones or porting traditional programs to ARM) - it would be a little bit ironic if x86 compatibility were to be highlighted here.
Plus, if you read Microsoft documentation on Windows on ARM so far, Microsoft doesn't actually expect you to use an IDE on these machines - but rather run your code remotely on them. You'll be a lot happier with your IDE running on a more powerful machine. Of course, if you do that, the lack of a GPU on the M1 for a Windows on ARM VM becomes not really an issue.
When that happens it doesn't matter what CPU I have, things are nearly locked up.
I have little recent Windows development experience, but I wonder if Windows on native Arm gets the same sort of latency/lagginess reduction that going from Intel to Arm on macOS does? Even if the raw processing power is less, I would be happy with the tradeoff if Windows felt even snappier.
There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.)
Seems like a truly decent machine (ordered one) but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific development. After years and years of development platform missteps and PC usage pattern changes, I fear web (electron, etc.) has become good enough for Windows users.
[1] https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/windows-on-snapdrago...
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/ecs-liva-mini-box-qc710-de...
> There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.)
Azure cloud instances are also an option.
> but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific development
I think that there is. If there isn't, Windows has bigger problems...
Additionally they don’t have a system like Rosetta 2 to help with translation, a LOT of windows apps are x32/64 based, and there has to be an incentive for devs to make the switch, Apple faced this issue when moving from PPC, they used I believe Carbon to help, and over time took carbon off and forced devs to update to apples current architecture at the time.
Electron unfortunately does seem like the potential way forward for apps, not just because of Windows and their handling of ARM, but it’s also potentially cheaper to develop against as its multi platform, 1Password is a prime example of this, and outside of the hardcore audience like us, they won’t notice the increased resource use of electron.
Microsoft has proven however electron can be good, see Visual Studio Code, plus with the advent of chrome os gaining traction, it’s likely we may head into a web first world, outside a niche subset of users.
4 GB of RAM and eMMC would never be comfortable for Windows development. I have a very small laptop like that and I'd never think of using it to do .NET development on it. OTOH, for Python-backed web apps and API-based services, it's quite sufficient.
I couldn’t find ARM with windows, can you help?
Feel free to ask questions!
Anyone who is still interested can buy one on eBay straight from Microsoft's eBay Outlet (which surprisingly exists):
What about Surface Pro X? Not desktop enough?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-arm-ap...
I mean.....video games are still huge?
You seem to be talking without regard to the actual facts. Plenty of programming languages offer first class Windows support, including:
Go, Rust, Zig, D, Nim, Python, PHP, Ruby, and others.
“The Volterra devices are neat and powerful, ideal for us to test our market-leading anti-piracy and anti-cheat game security technologies. They’re also very quiet, and they just work out of the box.” – Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by IrdetoI just thought the same, but not WPF native on arm?, but an emulation layer?, still looks very promising.
* https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102341/0400/WPF-and-...
* https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/1817
* https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-july-2021/#windows...
> Windows Forms and WPF are now supported on Windows Arm64. We added support for Windows Arm64 with .NET 6 Preview 1 and have since backported it to .NET 5 (with 5.0.8). Windows Forms and WPF work the same on Arm64 as they do on x64. You could already use x86 emulation to run Windows Forms and WPF apps on Arm64, however, there was a performance cost to doing so. With this release, you can your apps natively with full performance.
New/extended platforms:
- Added support for Ampere Altra
- Added support for Apple M2
- Added support for Lenovo ThinkPad
x13s and other machines using
the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3
(SC8280XP) SoC.Then you wouldn't be stuck paying way more for much less capable hardware.
Or maybe, in some twisted logic they want to sabotage their own ARM products in favor of Intel
It's absurd to be selling a desktop PC that's weaker than a phone.
Anandtech about the cpu: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17127/qualcomms-8cx-gen-3-for...
Some info about the ARMv8.2-A Architecture (2017): https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...
If this gains traction then we should start seeing support for windows laptops on ARM. As a dev who prefers windows but has a m1 MacBook b/c of the battery life I really hope this works out.
Seems like this is a sign of things to come in Windows platforms too, since Microsoft are including an NPU in this devkit. The PC of the future may well end up being CPU+GPU+NPU as standard, much as it is CPU+GPU today.
Launch a 500$ category laptop, say 3 gens old. That would soon be M1. Won't be very profitable, but a direct competitor to the typical crappy Windows low-end laptop.
Yet it's so much better in performance, security, battery life, total lifespan, etc. Double down on making it idiot-proof. Optimize the onboarding experience for ex-Windows users, including prominent placement of alternatives for popular W32 software. Make sure Office works well, and so on.
I would admit that it would take many years to make a dent, but there's no rush to it. Windows seems a sitting duck. Nobody, including Microsoft, seems to care about it.
Edit: oh yes, forgot about gaming.
Microsoft are too busy making money on Azure and M365 subscriptions for the hundreds of thousands of companies heavily invested in Microsoft apps. Windows is just one platform to get users to those apps. Microsoft are pushing Intune/MEM so organisations can push Microsoft apps to all devices including Apple ones. They don't care about the OS because it's not important.
And benchmarks continue to show: https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/1584350796233117696
With most of the important Microsoft software already compiled to ARM, and with those kits available to developers to do compile theirs at a competitive price, I won't doubt that future could be possible.
Just wondering the performance when running it on the dev kit they sell now.
I can't remember their name for the life of me, but they demo'd it at VMWorld a few years back.
The economics versus boring pizzabox or compact blade systems probably never worked out in their favor, hence why I'm having so much trouble tracking them down again.
Edit: found them. I guess they're still alive. Hivecell: https://hivecell.com/
Probably because the device is not available in my country, but then at least show a page explaining I can't purchase the device based on my IP or whatever. This was a really bad experience.
Given it’s a dev kit companies won’t care about cost, but I can’t see many being sold to independent/small developers, the excitement just isn’t there.
If you want a "good" small computer and you already have a screen (or want to buy cheap ones) then these systems are fantastic.
Performance is completely fine for moderate-to-heavy workloads (assuming the heavy workloads are bursty) for the Mac mini, and hopefully this.
Both systems are what you would get if you didn't need a display or keyboard already, they're desktop replacements with a small footprint, and fantastic for the majority of computer workloads including a lot of development ones.
Support for the Qualcomm chip did land in v6.0 of the Kernel - https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b6a6535b339776d32fa...
I just had mine arrive today, which I wanted to enroll as an ARM64 build agent (with Firecracker) for self-actuated ( https://docs.actuated.dev ) - this does actually work with Asahi Linux and the Mac Mini M1, but that was double the price for half the RAM.
So far, it's not looking good, with Ubuntu Server 22.04 and 22.10 both crashing after the Grub menu. I'm sharing progress here:
https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1585562359254421504?s...
Microsoft has enough partners and regional offices because Office365 and Azure are the only worthy products for us in "shithole countries".
If Microsoft isn't intending on selling a lot of these devices, the cost of adding 1 or 2 African countries would be relatively small compared to the revenue they make from our regions.
I mean, expensive Macs came out, costing twice the shitty HP/Lenovo/Dell enterprise offerings with poor thermals and battery life. We bought them.
I would buy this device if it was for sale in my market, I see a benefit in testing my work on Windows ARM64.
All South American, most Asian and most European countries are excluded. That sucks, too.
On the surface, Microsoft should be making decent revenue. It won't compare with the revenue from the 8 markets they chose. However that's my point, if they include smaller markets strategically in some launches, it can benefit them in the future.
Right now, the biggest driver for Windows ARM adoption is, ironically, Apple's M1 and onwards because of people running it as a guest OS through Parallels.
Also, frankly, I'm okay with Microsoft failing at projects like this. We don't need another Apple-like presence on the market.
Personally I’m not ok with being locked out of potential computing power by platform so I can’t get excited as MS struggles to keep up.
It’s either MS keeps up or the future ahead is dark.
Don't we?
Consumer targeted arm chips power most phones and tablets. Many of them are more than a handful for i5 and i3 class Intel chips and draw a lot less power. When you are talking about a $599 price point, you aren't talking about top-shelf Intel, anyway.
> But there is some sense to trying to lay the groundwork for future ARM SoCs running Windows
Now that ARM has grown up to be a viable alternative to Intel, this makes a ton of sense.
They've been doing exactly that since Windows 8, if not earlier. Perhaps the Year of Windows on ARM is somewhere around the corner from the Year of the Linux Desktop
I think we are on the ... third? ... attention cycle for this? Because they were trying pretty hard when W10 dropped too
X-Box would beg to differ since 2002.
An ARM based Windows computer isn't a bad idea, I just question if Microsoft is able to deliver on it. Picking the same manufacturer, who repeatably failed to deliver usable ARM processors for desktop and laptops seem like a obvious mistake. This isn't their first attempt either, so why would I trust that this won't fail, like the last time? Apple had done this before an architecture transition before, Microsoft haven't, and I doubt they have the will to ensure that it will succeed. They are too tied up in the x86 world, too busy with Azure and they don't have the attention of the consumer market.
In terms of price, it's really close to the Mac mini. Factor in performance, then this thing is a bad deal.
The form factor is right for many uses, but I don't get who the potential buyers are.
Microsoft has already executed and brutally failed with ARM in the form of the disastrous Surface RT/Windows RT.
But, and more importantly.
Two people with unlimited resources are running a race car race.
One starts a year or two before the other. Even with unlimited resources; the other racer/team has unlimited resources, too.
So let’s say they can both reach a maximum of the speed of sound.
Apple’s already been going the speed of sound for a couple years now; they also have the advantage that their vehicle in the race has software and hardware that are married.
Microsoft is not only nowhere near the speed of sound, but even though they also have unlimited resources; they are severely hampered by separate hardware and software, with the exclusion of their surface tablets, whose previous incarnation of this race car model crashed and burned on the race track.
This isn’t a race where MS can or will catch up. They’re already years behind. Not that I encourage anyone to use an OS with built-in ads anyway. Just use Linux at that point.
By the way When the fuck did 32GB become an entry requirement, I am so saddened by the crappy software and stacks that treats memory like an infinite resource
I'd hope some one have already or will write thesis on correlation between Rise of Javascript stack and narcissism in software industry.
However, given that it took Microsoft more than a decade to decide to port their own Visual Studio to ARM Windows, I'm not sure why they think third parties are chomping at the bit.
If Microsoft wants to copy Apple, they need to copy the decision to immediately port all their first party software.
At 700€ price tag what a gift! It's 3-400€ too expensive for a very dispensable toy, especially given that the managed stack (.net) of Microsoft development tools can be tested on Raspberry Pi or M1, which are both very popular with developers.
I admit I'm disappointed in the showing, and I think that Microsoft not loosing out on this market is important to them. I'd be willing to be bet 2nd gen of this will likely be produced by a 3rd party vendor.
Since then the A15 came out with some efficiency and performance improvements, it's in the M2 IPad and M2 MBA and presumably several future apple products.
The A16 has some efficiency and perfomance tweaks and is what's in the recently released iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.
So sure, the M1 in the M1 mac mini might have more power, cooling, and cores than the iPhone 14 pro, but the cores are actually slower at the same clock. Sure a phone will hit thermal limits sooner than a SFF PC.
You don't need top shelf performance for browsing the web, checking your emails or writing some docs.
DIDN’T
Until electron
But most people only need a browser and maybe a few simple products anyway. A phone SoC is probably enough.
> To boost performance, we have added vendor-specific optimizations so your apps run well on a variety of Arm hardware. We have several runtime improvements to targeting server throughput (RPS) and latency.
Seems largely focused on .NET 7 though[2].
[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/10/24/availa...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33319535
[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/arm64-performance-impr...
I am beyond impressed at it. Windows 11 on it - while, yes, it's Windows 11 with its own concerns and issues - runs flawlessly. I've been able to run my traditional x86 and x64 workloads - even things like arm64 Tailscale without issues, and I get amazing battery life.
I am 100% for this thing. It's value for money in the high-performance ARM Windows rig market. It benches similarly to a ~11th gen i5 and runs the part.
This thing is basically the most performant ARM soc on the market with a lot of memory, fast storage and good connectivity. Not bad at all for the price. Not to mention there's a good chance this might be the first cost-effective ARM Linux workstation.
Can you comment about the battery life and the "traditional x86" workloads? Does it use a just-in-time compilation? (I haven't looked at the details yet)
Can you dual boot to a Linux arm64 distribution?
Having a decent devkit may help bring more native ARM software, which may make these underpowered machines struggle less with speed and compatibility.
I’d love Windows on ARM to work. I love my M1 and would like something comparable.
But Apple had the M1 and the ARM PCs seem to be based on iPhone 7 level chips (perceptually).
“You can have Intel or ARM. No one buys ARM so there is little software. Windows was ruined on ARM for a long time. Your ARM laptop will be way slower, but it will be cheap because the only ones you can buy are ultra-low spec with terrible components like eMMC storage.”
There is absolutely no compelling reason to buy one for any reason and they’re not fixing it.
The first MacBook Air was a horrible computer in many ways, but it really excelled in one that mattered to people.
These don’t have that one thing that matters. They’re just ‘meh’ computers that don’t run much. MS can’t fix it (without their own chip) and Qualcomm seemingly wont either.
It's not clear what you're quoting from. But it's out of date, now. The last generation (or two?) of windows ARM laptops certainly have NVMe storage. And they're not generally cheap (in cost nor components).
> MS can’t fix it (without their own chip) and Qualcomm seemingly wont either.
Well, launching these laptops without a native Chrome build was a bit of a blunder IMO. That was ~2-3 generations ago and while Google might not ship Chrome for windows-arm64 (last I checked), you can download native binaries of Chromium.
IIRC MS does somehow co-brand w/Qualcomm for the SoCs used on the ARM Surface. But I kinda doubt Microsoft will start designing their own.
Now for 12"/13"/14" laptops, yes I agree that extended dev work isn't the most practical, but then again I spend most of my day with IDEs and simulators — it's probably a different story for someone who lives in a terminal or spends most of their time writing prose.
MS released Windows on ARM with Windows 8. It them abandoned it and the users.
Chip design that's easier to put things like memory into an SOC.
Windows on ARM can only be good for computing.
Just looked over the energy report and it's averaging 0.18kWh daily (so the average power draw is 7.5W) - that's with a 3.5in SATA HDD. Better power use than my Raspberry Pi 4 with an external USB HDD!
If low power consumption is your main motivator, I'd say you can do a lot better with one of those instead.
I made off with a i3-8100T (about 3/4s as powerful, 35W TDP), with 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD in an ultra-small-form-factor case for less than $150. For $600, it makes absolutely no sense against anything used. Let's say it drew 50W vs 20W total use at 10 cents per KWh. It would take 5 years to save $130, if you ran it 24/7/365. A $450 used Intel small-form-factor system would run circles around it in performance (especially after any emulation / code conversion) and you'd break even.
Now let's say in Europe, just one of them was called "The United Kingdom", where after a recent (temporary) energy price cap, electricity prices rose to _only_ 36p/kWh (41 cents US at current rates), and further rise are expected, and the cap had an end, bringing us potentially to double the current uni rate, then do the maths again and see why it might be a "crucial" component for many.
Running old, cheap hardware with high power usage has been impractical here and many other parts of the world for quite some time and that was before recent disastrous rises.
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...
Anything power hungry gets really expensive quickly for home use, these days.
And you know they have faster processors too.
It’s so weird to me. The A series is kind of “that doesn’t count” because the competition can’t get close. The M series wowed people and then we all went back to normal AMD/Intel stuff like nothing happened.
If I want a new PC laptop, it just won’t compare because no reasonable part is available for the heat/battery life I could have gotten.
(I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)
The main advantage of the M-series if for laptops on battery. Desktops, gaming, and software development is still significantly better on Intel-compatible desktops. E.g.: I can run Windows 11 with WSL 2 and Docker. That lets me develop using multiple huge ecosystems of tools seamlessly. With Apple, you get immediately relegated to a tiny corner of "optimised for M1" software, and have to either emulate or use cloud-hosting for everything else.
This is probably closer to the Mac Mini with M1 that they shipped to kick-start the Apple Silicon transition for desktop apps.
Because if I was a windows programmer for today's customers, I can't really build things on a "Windows on Arm" device like this.
Like Apple before, I hope this is just the first salvo against the Windows+Intel, before we all switch to Arm chips (including Intel fabs).
AMD releases 32-core + ARM APUs
I disagree that "Most OEMs don't officially support Linux". Lenovo supports Linux on 17 laptops released in 2022 alone [1]. Dell also has a similar effort, with Linux supported on the 2022 XPS 13 Plus [2] among others. HP has its DevOne[3]
But at the moment, I don't know of an modern, high performance ARM laptop with official Linux support.
The closest thing I know of is the Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin Dev kit by NVIDIA[4].
[1] https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-fo... [2] https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops?q=&limit=20&release=22.... [3] https://hpdevone.com/ [4] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...
1. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/proj...
I have never seen an ARM windows machine in the wild.
In fact I barely even see any windows 11 machines.
But then they made a big mistake: putting Windows Home on it instead of Pro... so that it didn't have RDP...
Will be interesting to see the memory capacity on the next new Mac Mini expected in one or two month.
As I said in my comment, QCOMM's naming sucks. cx is their desktop/laptop line. They have no designation for their phone line, so the confusion isn't surprising.
[0] - https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2020/12/10/introdu...
It's not that it benches worse than an M1, but rather that it doesn't do well against comparable x86 laptops. The whole reason M-series sells as well as it does is because people don't feel like they're giving up generations of power increases by buying them.
Low power ARM laptops have been a thing for a long time in the form of Chromebooks, and adding Windows to the equation alone isn't enough to get most people to take notice. For Windows on ARM to work, the hardware it's running on has to be at least as powerful as mainstream x86 laptops.
It's not like you want to keep something this underwhelming forever at that price point.
Lack of Windows ARM devices for dev really has hamstrung Hololens 2 development — it’s also Windows ARM and there are very few libraries with Windows ARM compatibility. I altered many libraries myself, despite that the documentation was nearly nonexistent.
There were job postings a few months back which would indicate you’re wrong, but who knows if those positions were filled, or if the project is still alive internally. We’ll see, I guess.
It's a caching JIT that'll squirrel away the translations to use across program invocations, and even shared between different programs in the case of .dlls.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
My Dell XPS15 has an OLED, fwiw. It's a couple years old now but the latest models still have it (if you buy a 4K screen, anyway).
I'll stick to Lenovo for a while!
You say that as if Apple will become some sort of PC-market hegemon, driving consumers and professionals to use its proprietary ARM hardware and OS despite having traditional Windows- or Linux-based workflows, simply because Apple's ARM is just so much faster.
Here's the third option: nobody cares what Apple is doing over in its corner of the PC market; the PC market remains an x86 market; and it continues to be driven by the needs of corporate buyers buying 1000+-part orders of PCs to outfit entire (non-IT!) businesses with; where those businesses don't care about having the fastest computer, but simply need "a" computer, with support and parts their internal IT department can swap out when needed; where the biggest factor driving purchases is TCO; and where TCO is driven down by commoditization and competition, not by vertical integration.
Microsoft cannot keep doing what they are doing.
Even in Japan, where "nobody" owns a home PC, offices are still full of PCs; nobody is being handed a Macbook to do their work from, let alone a phone or tablet.
In my opinion, it's perfectly fine for Apple to win the "sealed appliance" space — since ~everybody else (your Samsungs, your Xiaomis, even Google) is just trying to do the same proprietary vertical-integration play that Apple is doing in that space; they're just worse at it than Apple is.
In contrast, Apple will never win the PC space, since their whole market strategy — "give people something different that forces them into our ecosystem" — is (and always has been) anathema to how boring, non-IT businesses want to use computers. Even companies whose workflows depend entirely on macOS "killer apps" (like desktop publishes back in the 1980s), who begrudgingly buy Macs to fulfill those needs, constantly lobby their app-developer ISVs to go multiplatform, so that they can toss out the Macs and revert to doing the same boring PC-centered IT that every other company around them is doing.
(And do note that Apple isn't trying to win the PC space. They were trying, historically — maybe up until the year 2001 or so. But ever since the iPod, and then the iPhone, Apple's strategy has moved to treating the Mac as a halo product category — a nice-to-have for those already in the Apple ecosystem for other reasons — rather than as something that's going to usurp the PC in its place one day. It's why, around that time, they killed XServe and Airport routers: they saw no further benefit in attempting to achieve corporate ubiquity, rather than complementarity.)
So no, I don't want Microsoft to become another Apple.
From my point of view, Microsoft failing to do what Apple does is a good thing because it means there's some semblance of a working, competitive (if imperfect) market. They can't force other companies to dance to their tune.
From Wikipedia: “One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten")”.
NT was always supposed to be multi architecture (MIPS, Alpha, IA-32). I’m not sure what happened to i860.
Outside m1/m2 there isn't any chip that can be compared to i5 intel 13 gen especially for PC space [that is in the same price bracket]. (maybe some arm chips can get close to i3 12100f but you can get it for 90 usd and get good single core performance so im not sure if in this price point is even any arm alternative)
Intel & AMD’s consumer and/or server market share.
I can’t imagine going back to an Intel after an M1. The battery life is better. It’s dead silent. It doesn’t get warm. It’s like a totally different kind of object.
I know PC people (those who want Windows) aren’t interested in an M1 Mac. That’s fine.
But I see PC laptop reviews with 4 or 6 or maybe 8 hours of battery life. They get hot but the fan isn’t “too loud”. And I know the performance isn’t the same.
And I just wish reviewers would call it out. They’re not on the same level. I’m sure fanboys would complain about the comparison in every review, but why shouldn’t Windows users have something much better? It’s been proven possible. Hold AMD/Intel/Qualcomm to the fire more.
If Qualcomm could get a chip with reasonable performance at a reasonable price that just doesn’t get hot and waste all its battery playing space heater, I bet they could really get a hold on the laptop market.
The vast majority of PCs are running 128 bit wide memory, with workstation CPUs like the threadripper (and pro) being the exception, but a VERY small fraction of the market.
The M1 has 128 bit wide 67GB/sec peak (that you'll never see) bandwidth, like most PCs. Upgrade to the Pro and you get 200GB/sec. Max will take you to 400GB/sec, and Ultra takes you to 800GB/sec.
On the Intel (i3, i5, i7, i9) or AMD (ryzen r3, r5, r7, r9) you get ... the same memory bandwidth. Check the 8 core vs 16 core scaling numbers and for most benchmarks you'll see poor scaling. Sure you can increase GPU performance by adding GPUs, which reduces (but not removes) the need for extra memory bandwidth. Sadly iGPUs (outside the XboxX and PS5) largely stink and are only good enough for non-GPU intensive workloads. Apple on the other hand does scale GPU performance, granted not to the levels that AMD and Nvidia do.
So why can't anyone in the PC space do more memory bandwidth and a decent iGPU, especially when for years the GPUs were in short supply and had exorbitant prices. I think it does come down to OS support, volume (which could be problematic if current GPU customers avoid you), and potentially reducing profits for AMD (who would have sold an expensive external GPU). Not to mention that fast/wide ram requires soldering chips on board or increasing size/cost with large banks of ram. Even servers with 8 memory channels (minimum 8 dimms) only get you to the M1 pro level (1/2 of the m1 max and 1/4th of the m1 ultra).
Apple can say we have X% of the market today, and all new customers will be on our new platform with 2 years, so the driver, OS, iGPU, memory bandwidth, etc will be amortized over substantial volumes. Additionally Apple gets a larger fraction of the revenue, since they aren't paying Nvidia or AMD for a GPU. Who is going to push a MBP or Apple studio competitor that could ship the same volumes?
The best of market ARM designs don't really compete head-to-head with Xeon right now, but there are still a ton of server applications where they make already make sense. As a simple example companies like Google and Facebook have hundreds of thousands of servers that are doing things like running memcached or running some application like D/GFS where the server is mostly just doing a lot of I/O and doesn't necessarily need really beefy single-threaded CPU performance.
Longer term obviously if there are ARM or RISC-V CPUs that can compete head-to-head with Xeon in terms of features and single threaded performance then that opens up pretty much the entire enterprise/server market.
Why make the devs switch? It would be much more in the spirit of Microsoft (opposed to the common spirit of Apple and GNU/Linux) to encourage to develop parallelly for ARM, too.
The switch from 16 to 32 bit Windows was "support running 16 bit applications still for a long time". Similarly for 32 to 64 bit Windows (32 bit applications are still perfectly supported). This is in contrast to how how it is typically done on GNU/Linux (distributions typically make it hard to support 32 and 64 bit at the same time) or what Apple typically does (only support the old architecture only for a short time and nudge developers heavily to do the switch).
They do. I'm not sure it covers x86-64 yet, but it does x86.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/121384/last-one-at-the-tab...
Don Mattrick almost tanked that entire product and it survives today because Phil Spencer miraculously managed to turn it around after all of the previous leadership was forced out of the company.
Guess what, so was the first NES, and the first Play Station, the first Game Boy, etc. for their respective companies.
Breaking into a new market, with a new product, in uncharted waters, with no prior experience, with no support from clueless executives who don't believe in the new product looking for any reason to stop you from burning cash, endless turf wars such large and expensive projects create, makes it is hard, brutally hard, for any company to succed on the first try.
>and went through a very rocky path
The Xbox 360 sold 85 million units, one of the best selling consoles of all time.
Here's an article about how massive of a success the original NES and Gameboy were and how it revived Nintendo as a company:
https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/19/18295061/game-boy-history-...
I have no idea where you got the idea that any of those products were mismanaged or cost those companies enormous amounts of cash and in fact those specific examples are among the most successful product launches in video game history.
>The Xbox 360 sold 85 million units, one of the best selling consoles of all time.
The XBox 360 is the best selling console from Microsoft and ranks 9th among all consoles behind the Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Switch, Gameboy, and Wii.
Read into that what you will.
Define the best? It is 10th in a list of consoles that sold at least one million units. It sold less than console release later and went through even rockier path - PlayStation 3.
2 - Arm also implements weak ordering which is type of memory model. It allows instructions to be separated into groups based on whether they affect other instructions. This allows these groups to skip some waiting lines. (Magic). X86 has strong ordering, which can make it slower in specific scenarios.
TBH there are various mostly-Apple/TSMC-"exclusive" tricks too, for why their chips are better than the others:
A - On Apple Silicon, pages are larger, but not too large
B - there are various accelerators leveraged by libraries provided in the OS (or the provided toolchains, etc.)
C - Apple got to use the best TSMC process years before the competition.
D - TSMC is ahead (I'm curious of what Zen4 will give on laptop, btw)
So it's mixed. The ARM ISA probably plays a small role in the perf of Apple Silicon vs. x86 chips, but is probably not the main cause of the perf gap.
If the company is selling the whole device, including the chip, they can afford to throw more transistors and die area at performance with a much more minimal impact on their bottom line.
OTOH Qualcomm is constantly lagging behind Apple, promising that next year they will be almost as fast as a previous-gen Apple chip. The most generous explanation I've heard is that Qualcomm is specializing in quantity over quality, and focuses on making CPUs cheap, rather than fast.
If my new zCPU chip is 60% as fast as a Xeon at your task, that’s a problem.
If it can do it at 40% of the Xeon’s power, things get interesting.
I could use twice as many zCPUs, be 20% faster, and use 20% less power. That also means less cooling capacity in my DC.
Some tasks will always need the absolute best single threaded performance. But a lot don’t. And the Xeon’s power requirements leave a large opening we’re starting to see other companies poke at with things like Graviton.
Compare this to Apple's $499 ARM Dev test kit that you could return for a $200 credit.
If Microsoft is serious about ARM, they need a very low barrier of entry for those willing to port their software.
There is a good chance they get on the verge of shipping and find they can't actually sell any of their new chips...
https://www.axios.com/2022/09/06/arm-qualcomm-nuvia-chip-gia...
Ah yes, "just spend more money" has solved so many problems over the years. Can anyone even name a single time a lot of money was spent and the product failed? Victory is practically guaranteed!
The main reason so many Android devices are throwaway junk is Qualcomm. Don't rely on them for anything that you still want to keep running for more than a couple of years.
Would like to see perf numbers. Could be an interesting box, maybe a nice home server.
I can understand from the lockdown perspective (i.e. just give me a Vulkan driver on macOS) but as a polished DTE with a unix terminal I find it pretty decent.
Package manager that controls the entire system, not just add ons.
Choice of desktop environments, no silly $3 apps to enable simple things like edge snapping. Options for tile based window manager, etc.
Decent cut/paste (no control-v and control-c instead of sweep and click to paste).
SystemTap for performance analysis.
Seamless use of containers with the same environment as the host OS.
Ability to create binaries that don't require the approval of some Apple run web service to run.
Linux package manager (not brew)
Linux kernel with cgroups
It looks like they want to address this. But I wonder if they will succeed this time.
Because at the end of the day, Windows RT was a creature born of greed. They saw dollar signs- Apple's 30% App Store cut- and as such wanted a machine that forced you to buy software only from them. There was no technical reason that normal software couldn't run on Windows RT, given that MS themselves did it with Office.
So confident were they that this would work that they threw the tablet features onto Windows 8 proper, relegating the reason people buy computers to a secondary function- after all, paying MS for the privilege of developing software was going to be the New Way forward. Besides, don't you want security?
For an "acceptable" laptop, the price point is already pretty close to $1000, and before I would have a tentative recommendation of MacBooks/Macbook Airs because of the learning curve of MacOS. With M1/M2 and how much better it is than anything else on the consumer market, I openly recommend it to anyone in the market for a new consumer machine. Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine.
I was discussing this with a colleague last night, but the M1/M2 chips and complimentary hardware let Apple do some amazing stuff out of the box without adjustment that Windows simply has no answer for. The integration of the complimentary hardware with the M1/M2 chips is so strong that I stumbled onto features I completely missed announcements on, and it legitimately "wow'd" me.
- Live Text caught me off-guard while drag/drop-ing an image to a chat app. I couldn't stop testing its limits and reading the dev docs
- I took surprise calls from really crowded + noisy places and was in disbelief that my call partners couldn't hear anything but my voice in crystal clear quality
- I ran games and software that just weren't possible on Intel Macs through Rosetta at pretty fine FPS/quality without incident
- I didn't need to change a single program from my workflow
Microsoft can likely do the same but they need to put the legwork in to make it happen. Personally I understand they have no interest in this and it makes sense -- they want you on Azure with your server workloads and this keeps the lights on at Microsoft, and as best I know the consumer market (not considering gaming) still favors Windows. But I guess that's why projects like this confuse me a lot since it must be a pretty substantial RND and manufacturing cost, neverminding advertising, but Microsoft doesn't seem to have their heart in it.
It's not about backwards compatibility - consumers don't need to keep Windows 3.0 apps running, not a statistically significant portion anyways, they just need modern apps to run fast and well, long battery life on portable devices, quiet machines, and that's it, but seems that this just isn't something Microsoft is interested in taking over.
I really can't think of Windows features in decades that "wow" so much as you just know what you get with Windows regardless of the version in terms of basic features; what worked on Windows XP probably works on Windows 11, but even that is starting to erode in a slow and painful way. There are quite a few programs on Windows I get the impression that Microsoft just doesn't want me to be running, but things like the Windows Store, Windows' implementation of security for unsigned apps, etc, these all feel like Microsoft isn't confident enough to fully invest into these new features or to drop them in order to advance.
Microsoft definitely has the talent and cash reserves to pursue a strong consumer laptop to compete with Apple; for whatever reason, they don't seem to have the interest though for consumer devices. Probably the simplest reason is the server market is theirs and this is plenty of money, but I just can't get why they continue with such forays then.
Edit: just elaborated on price point for consumer laptops and recommending machines.
I don't expect "casual" gamers setup Wine+Proton+MoltenVK. It's better to say that let's play game on PlayStation. If you mean really "casual", they play on iPhone.
MacOS desktop by itself is pretty limited, but once you had these two softwares, the desktop experience become pretty nice, far above anything you find in any completed linux desktop.
But it is it. It's only a 'desktop experience'... Coupled with deep integration with ipad and iphone.
If you want more of a *nix integration, Brew is pretty nice and do more of less the job. As for container, dockers work seamlessly on the command line and integrate well with the file system, even if containers still run atop of a virtual machine.
edit: Was off on pricing of the Mac mini by $100.
But as a consumer you’re stuck. You should have a machine with the performance of any normal/good laptop with way better thermals and battery life.
I’m not sure what the Uber-high end laptop would look like but surely it would do better than today.
The scale needs adjusting. What counts as “too hot”, “too short battery life”, “minimum performance.”
It all should have changed. But it didn’t. The industry acts like Macs are magic and therefor incomparable. “Of course that Boeing goes faster, it’s a jet engine plane. You can’t compare that to our cars.”
They’re both computers. It can be done. So why are Intel/AMD/Qualcomm getting off the hook to such a degree?
I just don’t understand it. It’s almost like Stockholm Syndrome or something. “Intel is nice to us, who are we to complain?”
The cheapest M1 is $1300 in Canada. MacBook Pros are well over $2000. These prices are far beyond the budget of the majority of computer users. They are also beyond the requirements.
>Of course that Boeing goes faster, it’s a jet engine plane. You can’t compare that to our cars.
No, it's like comparing a BMW to a Honda. You spend a lot less money and then are surprised it doesn't perform as well?
I never said they weren't successful, I said they were also mismanaged during development like you said about the xbox, because management at Nintendo did not believe in the product.
>I have no idea where you got the idea that any of those products were mismanaged
Documentaries and war stories on youtube rabit holes.
>in fact those specific examples are among the most successful product launches in video game history
Today it's easy to say that with hindsight, but before they were launched, during their development, many in the company did not believe in those projects would succeed at all, leading to many internal fights and turf wars.
Also, Nintendo has a number of fuckups that bombed as well. Anyone remember the Virtualboy? Or the Wii-U? Gamecube also didn't sell too good.
The only thing that moves Nintendo merch is their exclusive IP (Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, etc), as their HW products are mediocre at best both in technical capabilities and in quality.
I am looking at some quick sources that I can find, and it looks like the complete opposite, that the management at Nintendo was very eager to develop a home video game console based on the success of their arcade games. They believed in the NES so much that when Atari bailed on its partnership agreement with them (due in no small part to the video game crash of 83), they went ahead and decided to do it alone.
Here is an article that was posted to HN awhile back that does a very deep dive into the development of the NES. It's an excerpt from the book "Console Wars" and it does not paint a picture at all like the one you're suggesting:
http://grantland.com/features/the-rise-of-nintendo-video-gam...
A relevant quote is:
"Yamauchi wanted Nintendo to aggressively get into the videogame business, which was really two separate businesses: home consoles and coin-operated arcade games. He saw the potential in these industries and took the necessary steps for Nintendo to enter both."
As an FYI, Yamauchi was the President of Nintendo.
The Xbox 360/One outsold the NES/SNES. That's amazing.
Yes, the MBA is more expensive than most people would want to pay.
But it’s also not comparable to those laptops. It has a very high quality Retina display, the all-metal unibody construction, and Apple’s infamous profit margins.
There is no reason to think putting a similarly efficient processor in an otherwise standard PC laptop would raise the price much. Heck, Intel loves there margins too.
I don’t think the chip is too expensive. It’s all the other choices Apple makes that push the price up so much.
https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1585562359254421504?s...
Things do seem to be improving. Releasing the Thinkpad x13s has brought attention to the 8cx gen 3 from the Linux community.
Regardless, the internal SOC is the same as the new ARM Thinkpad which also shipped with an unlocked bootloader. Pretty much everything suggests that this will ship unlocked.
My 2 most important shortcuts: Ctrl+Alt+T for Terminal and Ctrl+Alt+C for VSCode are extremely difficult to achieve on MacOS.
This is why I prefer Linux, it has keyboard shortcuts that are more consistent and freedom that's important to me.
If it’s customizable, global, keyboard shortcuts you’re after, skhd should do the job.
My "anecdote" is actually the majority of MS's history so far. You just can't claim it's scaremongering when they have released so many locked down ARM devices it's hard to remember all of them, and definitely easier to just remember the few "unlocked" devices they have ever released (just the X?).
And also "obviously" we should mention that even in the so-called unlocked Surfaces you are still forced to entirely disable Secure Boot in order to run Linux or _anything else_, with the consequences that implies. For example, it is dubious you will be able to load future versions of Windows, since those will require SB to be on (W11 already officially does, even if it doesn't seem to enforce it -- yet). A properly unlocked device would allow you to load your own signatures while keeping SB enabled.
Two Surface Pro X and one Surface Pro 9. I intentionally said "all ARM64 Windows devices", without restricting it to Microsoft ones, no matter how many there have been: it remains the current platform-wide policy, regardless of the FUD.
The rest of your comment is either strawmanning or shifting the discussion further away from where it started and I don't find it worth responding to.
Two devices compared to dozens of locked ones including the original Surface as well as the 2nd RT.
> I intentionally said "all ARM64 Windows devices", without restricting it to Microsoft ones
And how are non Microsoft devices relevant to a discussion of a Microsoft device? You made the same point before...
> The rest of your comment is either strawmanning or shifting the discussion further away
In case you didn't notice, all your 3 replies so far have been filled to the brim with _accusations_ of FUDing, irrelevance, strawmanning and whatever without even mentioning what is irrelevant or why. Everything I say is apparently an irrelevant anecdote, even thought it is actually the historical trend of MS ARM released devices, and the anecdote if anything is the last device only. Why are your arguments any better exactly?
That doesn't quite seem accurate.
For one example: https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/15/windows_fix_closes_rt...
Current generation Intel / AMD desktop CPUs have similar performance to apple's M1/M2 chips. They just consume a lot more power. (Though apparently applying a slight underclock makes a huge difference.)
I'm not sure how recent intel / AMD laptop performance compares, but a PC with an x86 chip is still a great choice.
This is the thing I’m stuck on. Computers are all roughly the same speed, for the point of this discussion.
But there is no contest in power. If you’re in the Windows world you have no good choices. Fast and hot to very slow and cool.
Where is the “pretty fast and nicely cool” choice? Someone proved it can exist.
But it’s not there and people don’t seem to be very upset about that. And I’m surprised.
Could Windows have better battery life? Probably only by dropping backward compatibility and moving to a Linux kernel or something radical.
When they tried in the 90s they went broke and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.
But when will any of that show up? Hardware takes time but I just don’t see reviewers demanding it. They’ll be happy if it shows up but they’re not calling out “this isn’t good enough” and I just don’t get it. How can they use an M1 and go back to a hot low battery life Intel laptop in the same price class and say “this is fine?”
To me, the performance per watt is increasingly important not only as we start approaching branch circuit limits (1200-1500W max in the US), but also as (in many places) energy prices continue to rise.
Both idle power consumption (e-state, core sleeping, etc.) and max power consumption (with a few measures of work per watt) should be highlighted in any serious review, probably on par with whatever other benchmarks (like Cinebench, Blender, etc.).
As long people don’t do that everything will continue as normal. It needs to be very clear you’re not doing good enough.
As long as reviewers keep ignoring the elephant in the room in their text and scores, how are you ever going to get what I’m guessing just about everyone wants? They may not know it (us Mac users were getting annoyed at heat and noise but didn’t know how much).
But I’m convinced if someone built it, users would come out of the woodwork. So many people doing “office” work that doesn’t require high power machines would benefit. Qualcomm just doesn’t seem to be trying very hard in the computer segment.
>As the OP said, you took some anecdata about the Xbox's issues and speak about it like it was a disaster.
What anecdata are you talking about? I linked to a source on the subject and not just any source, it's an interview with the head of XBox, Phil Spencer. I have also followed up every single one of my posts with a reputable source.
OP claims that they also have sources that suggest that Sony and Nintendo did mismanage the launch of their respective consoles in a manner that cost them significant amounts of money, so I'd like to review those sources.
The fact that he was actively replying to me until I requested some evidence to back his claims is a strong indication that those sources never existed.
I stopped replying to you because I saw you have a bone to pick and I have a life to live rather than trying to win an online argument with you.
The sources are on youtube, feel free to use the search function and watch them at your own convenience and make your own opinion. Good day sir.
Just have the decency to admit you have no source, maybe you misheard something, instead of doubling down on your ignorance. It's unbelievably pathetic otherwise.
Firstly I am mostly plugged in, so battery life is secondary.
Secondly I am a heavy Excel user, and it just isn't as good on Apple
Thirdly I use PowerBI which isn't available for Apple
Lastly I have hybrid Active Directory, and can deploy SSO trivially to my remote Windows users, which I can't on Mac. During Covid I could mail someone a PC and get them signed on to AD resources in minutes. My Windows users are first class citizens, easier to support, and happier with their IT.
I’m advocating Windows/Linux users should have the choice of a machine roughly as good. Doesn’t have to 1:1, but clearly there is a lot of space for “better” past what everyone is selling today.
And I don’t see that improving much after 2 years and I find it kind of sad.
Why should you have to switch OSes and everything to have a fast computer with good battery life that’s quiet and cool?
You shouldn’t.
Apple:- “Mere paas M1/M2/MAX,A16, Hain “ and looks at MSFT and asks “Tere paas kya Hain”?
MSFT:- Shoulder shrugs and says “Mere Paas Excel Hain”.
Apple has nothing on Excel. And Numbers languishes Excel by a few generations. Esp after the boatload of updates that Excel APIs got last year. I guess it’s all about priorities and what’s important for that business at that time.
I know there is Windows only software. I know there is software that’s better on Windows.
I don’t care if people switch to Mac.
They should all have the choice of a chip as good (or reasonably close) to the M1.
But they don’t. And it doesn’t look like that’s changing. And I find that sad.
For $1000 one can buy a Windows laptop with 32GB RAM and 1TB SDD, that can cheaply be upgraded to 64GB memory and 10+TB SSD (2x SO-DIMM slots + 2x M2 PCIe slots).
I’m trying to say I think people should have the option of something like it on Windows, not just the hot/power hungry stuff out there today.
Can the M1 MBA run Windows?
EDIT: Or can it run GNU/Linux natively (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320765)?
We’re far far from the dual booting days, running a mac VM on a Windows machine is probably the holy grail of running every OS on a single machine at this point in time.
My (largely useless in this context) personal anecdote is that I spent $1029 for a gaming laptop. AMD Ryzen 7 4800H (8-cores, 16 threads), 16GB, 1TB, RTX 2060 6GB. Gets about 4-5 hours of battery doing normal stuff. Plugged in for gaming. (Yes, it runs all of my Steam collection!) It's very fast for everything I use it for. (I mostly work on my desktop, but I've used it for various development, etc. - Visual Studio Community, SQL Server Management Studio, VS Code, WSL/WSL2 and all Linux-based development I've done, photo editing, etc., of course it can run web browsers and be used to check email!)
Why wouldn't I buy a laptop that costs this much and can do so many things well? Because it doesn't work away from plugs for a day? But I live and work at home. Near lots of plugs!
But I've tried a lot of laptops over the pandemic and nothing has come close to the Apple silicon ones in terms of responsiveness, power efficiency, and just plain reliability. And in terms of sheer battery life and weight, the MBA is king of the hill. Sure, I'm not gaming on it - but then again, I can't stand gaming on a laptop to begin with, as the heat and fan noise really bother me. A typical consumer picking out a laptop for college or for use around the house would be better solved with an M1 MBA than almost any Windows laptop unless they have an absolutely mission critical software need.
The MBA isn't for everyone - heck, it can only support 1 external monitor - but it 's the right fit for that middle part of the bell curve.
Honestly it’s kind of one of the worst. The 2010 was pretty great. If you ignore they keyboard issues (a BIG DEAL) they got better for a few years.
In the last few years it became very clear Apple just couldn’t do what they wanted as the Intel chips kept getting hotter and more power hungry.
I’m sorry you got that experience. It was and now is so much better. You kind of lucked into a low point.
https://store.steampowered.com/macos
Had they not pushed Metal so hard over Vulkan - then things would be different. There's time yet for Apple to change course. (Seems Valve open sourced MoltenVK, so that's one barrier removed at least!)
I don’t have actual experience on a windows machine right now, but if the linux subsystem is getting good enough, switching there could be worth the hardware and price penalty.
It would surprise me if my mother, grandparents, sister, etc. have ever sent more than $800 on a computer.
For something not highly performance sensitive like office suite or line of business stuff you’d probably be fine with a half-decent ARM chip.
So much of what we do these days is a web browser (ported) or a secret web browser (Electron/etc). I work in Java, that can be ported if it’s not already. I bet C#/CLR already are.
It’s not perfect. It’s probably not ready for 3D rendering or 4k video editing.
But a HUGE percentage of people could probably go ARM tomorrow if good chips were out there. MS has their own “Rosetta” already for running x86(-64?) on ARM. Is it slow?
From my (very weak) understanding I have the impression the ARM stuff available is really cheap/slow. Not unlike the performance of the first netbooks compared to real laptops. Things that just aren’t powerful enough.
Good for MS for making a dev machine. But a few good general purpose laptops with great battery life would probably move the needle a ton, even if only in the business market.
Apparently there's nothing stopping M1 macs from dual-booting other operating systems. As strange as it sounds, Apple laptops might make the best windows laptops you can buy today, so long as you don't need a powerful GPU. It would be like a reverse hackintosh.
No we’re not. I thought it was a reply to my comment higher above in the hierarchy.
Sorry about that.