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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Technically, yes. If you look at the benchmarks, a VM of Windows on an M1 (base model) is significantly faster than both the SQ1 / 8cx Gen 1 and SQ2 / 8cx Gen 2 processors Microsoft included with the Surface Pro X (by like, 30%, it's not even close), though how it compares to 8cx Gen 3 / SQ3 is unknown. However, considering we're on M2 by now, and that we now have M1 Pro and M1 Ultra models as well... egh...

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Having a functioning GPU with this box is likely to make a bigger difference than the benchmarks in general use.

32gb on an m2 is probably going to cost you around $3000. I don't think 32gb on m1 is even possible.

Sure - if you need all 32GB for development work, it is a great deal. But, with a processor slower than a midrange modern Intel laptop, good luck using it to its full extent without feeling quite slow. So slow you might almost prefer a 16GB M1 Mac mini with swap for the rest despite the VM.

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.

16gb is the near the cutoff that I need to run all the app/containers/etc I need. If I don't have enough memory everything comes to an abrupt crawl.

When that happens it doesn't matter what CPU I have, things are nearly locked up.

VS .NET workload is advertised to be working already.

But, with a processor slower than a midrange modern Intel laptop, good luck using it to its full extent without feeling quite slow

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.

My mac studio with an Apple M1 Ultra has 64GB of unified memory.

Which probably cost you a bit more than $600.

M1 != M1 Ultra

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