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Comment by alexkundera | Hacker News Reader

It is good for industry in the long term. With all the rumors, obviously I can't wait for Microsoft to release a Surface of their own with fanless design and custom chips.

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It's not easy to beat Intel, AMD and Qualcomm at their own game. I would estimate at least 5 year timeline if any company wants to come close to them. Apple had an advantage that they were able to use iPhone which were built first for low power usage as a good testing ground for the chip(iPhone chip were around 60-70% faster in single core than any Android phones).

They already have an ARM Surface model I think it is called X.

The one I played with for a while was first gen using Microsofts ARM chip. SQ1.

A much slower design than the M1 for sure, but I wonder if they can do better in the next generation. I am not sure if SQ2 is out yet.

I know they got really busy once the M1 came out.

The SQ2 has been out about a year. It was only about 12% faster than the SQ1. Neither is a particularly fast chip. To make matters worse, most popular Windows applications still don't have ARM builds and run under emulation.

I haven't looked into the details of Rosetta 2 enough to understand how big of an undertaking it is, but it is so impressive, especially given that of the dozens of pieces of software running on my system right now, only a handful are still relying on it.

I'm curious if anyone has any insight on how difficult it would be to pull off something similar on the windows platform, because it feels like tablestakes. Iirc they didn't have anything like Rosetta 1 when they released their first Windows RT systems a decade ago.

You are going to be waiting a long while

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