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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
Having a decent devkit may help bring more native ARM software, which may make these underpowered machines struggle less with speed and compatibility.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.