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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am missing the point, but why wouldn't you rather buy a NUC instead of this slow box? I get it MS wants to be like Apple, meticulously copying anything that pops up there, but their brand is associated with different "experiences" and their main value lies in backwards compatibility and open hardware ecosystem.

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The point of this is that it's an Windows-on-ARM devkit; you can't buy a ARM NUC that'll run Windows AFAIK (Intel doesn't make ARM machines), and you can't test ARM software natively on an x86-64 NUC.

I doubt this is going to feel slow in actual use. You've got 8 big arm cores with a lot of memory, fast storage, and active cooling.

I learned this lesson the hard way during the AMD Phenom era. Core count are not a good representation of performance because the 8 "big" cores could be blazing fast or be secretly powered by a hamster on a wheel. What is the actual benchmark performance on real applications you might use? Thats what matters at the end of the day.

There are already other machines with 8cx Gen3 CPUs on Geekbench if you want to compare: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=8cx+ge... it's like a third slower than an M1 Max in single-core.

Having worked with Windows on ARM in the past, I _hope_ you're right. But my experience has been that a ton of code is still going through the x86 emulation layer, which IMO is woefully lacking in performance, particularly compared to Apple's Rosetta 2 (which is a magical marvel of engineering).

Rosetta feels fast because apple m cpus are about twice as fast as qualcom ones

Because Intel performance per watt sucks compared to the competition, mostly.

Because nucs are not arm-based.

meticulously? What is it that Microsoft has really copied in the last five years?

Like the UI changes in Windows 11? Surface hardware? Windows Store?

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