It's absurd to be selling a desktop PC that's weaker than a phone.
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.
Don't we?
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.
X-Box would beg to differ since 2002.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's not like you want to keep something this underwhelming forever at that price point.
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...
[0] - https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2020/12/10/introdu...