Testing Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Testing Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023

jeffgeerling.com

173 pointsingve154 comments

"I'm hopeful for Microsoft's future on ARM, but either Qualcomm needs to get their act together, or Microsoft needs to pour money into some other chipmaker to optimize for Windows. Otherwise, the vast gulf between ARM SBCs on the low end and Apple's custom Silicon on the high end will persist."

Part of it is... what on earth is Qualcomm thinking with their pricing? Every PC that has had a Windows on ARM processor is priced like a premium machine, while running slower than the competition from Apple, Intel, and AMD (though Project Volterra is the best value by far, so far).

It's like Qualcomm has decided that high-end Snapdragon parts may only appear in $1000+ devices, perhaps to prevent people from asking questions about the cost of their chips in phones. (If a Snapdragon Gen 8 appeared in a $500 laptop, why couldn't it be in a $500 smartphone? Especially important, because of legal filings, Qualcomm uses the total sale price of the device for some royalty calculations IIRC.)

To your last comment - the royalty on ASP is capped. Apple had argued in court over this with claims that shoving more storage into a phone led to more licensing fees which was not the case. I can't speak to whether the pricing on this dev kit would be below the cap or not, I forget the rough range of the caps (in the mid $100's if my memory serves me right)

Agree on the weird pricing strategy though. My take is that they're trying to milk the relationship because Windows is a relatively premium brand. Competing interests for sure that Windows is looking for a wider audience on the low end while Qualcomm wants the $$ from high end.

Yeah, Qualcomm is behind the M1, but the funny thing is that Qualcomm is already ahead of a lot of the Intel product lines, if they were willing to compete at the lower end of the PC market.

For example, why does the Surface Go 3 still sell with a "Core i3" or "Pentium Gold 6500Y" in it, when it could have this Qualcomm chip in it. Qualcomm's Gen 8 is approximately 3x faster while also being lower cost and having lower power draw! Why does a $500 Go 3 ship with "4GB Ram" and "64GB eMMC" when this Qualcomm devkit can ship with 32GB ram and 512 nVME SSD for just $100 more? These are the products that should be Qualcomm-ified, it would be an immediate improvement to people buying this, over any other current PC comparable.

Instead, the consumer version of this Windows devkit is a "Surface Pro 9", which when equivalently spec'd to the devkit, comes out to $1900 USD. At that price, nearly any Intel / AMD / Mac comparable is a way better pick.

> Instead, the consumer version of this Windows devkit is a "Surface Pro 9", which when equivalently spec'd to the devkit, comes out to $1900 USD.

It seems likely that this machine is being sold at a loss. That's why things aren't being Qualcommified.

They seem to believe that the extra battery life of the Snapdragon when running ARM software justifies the price premium, when most consumers would be mostly running x86/x64 software in emulation. The reviewers pick up on that point, consumers continue to buy x64 devices, and the Windows ARM ecosystem remains largely undeveloped.

Qualcomm and Microsoft's unwillingness to invest in growing the ecosystem is very troubling. What was the point of the timed-exclusivity agreement to begin with, if not to invest in the ecosystem?

Qualcomm is also trying too hard to encourage cellular in laptops. It makes no sense to pay extra upfront and $20/month for 5G on a laptop.

I don't get the push for cellular modem in Laptop either. Who is actually asking for this, since most of us have could just tether off our existing phone or use a wifi hotspot, and wouldn't, like you mention, need to pay an extra $20/month.

plus you could blow past your monthly cap in a heartbeat at the data rates these days

>The big question is—will this $599 desktop be enough to push more developers towards cross-compiling for native ARM64 software on Windows?

No, more consumer hardware like the Surface series will push devs. Who will eventually want to get out of the x86 emulation layer and run their programs native.

Comparing this to an M1 Mini is a bit odd since they're not competing with each other at all, and Microsoft is limited by what Qualcomm et al can put out.

Nope, it won't, as you say. How many people have Surface Pro X, or another Windows on ARM machine?

Less than 1% do. Let's say, though this is a high estimate, 0.5% of Windows users are ARM. Now let's say my app has 1 million installs at $1 each (pretty successful). That means my total value for optimizing for those ARM users is... $5,000. And they can already run my app with translation, so it's actually worth less than that. So... when you factor in costs of Project Volterra + Developer Time + Fixing Code Time + Lost Opportunities on More Productive Things... there's basically no way, even with 1 million users at $1 each, to justify the effort.

This device is great for developers who already care and love their users. Anyone who doesn't care won't care.

Edit: Also, at those numbers, it would be better if I didn't offer an ARM-native version. If even a tiny percentage of my userbase downloads the ARM-native version by accident on their x86 machine, the support costs will eat away at that too.

Edit @bartlettD: We're not - sorry if it reads that way. I'm just providing an additional argument, but I've reworded slightly to make that a bit clearer.

I don't think we're disagreeing. Devs have no incentive to develop for ARM if there is no market share like you said, so they're not going to buy a $599 kit and its existence won't sway them either.

I think there will come a time when the number of ARM Windows machines increases though.

This kit is useful for the devs who care about the performance of their programs on ARM kit but they'll only optimise for it if the market is there.

> How many people have Surface Pro X

It takes 1 CEO of Windows ARM device for dogfooding own software to ARM :)

Anyways, what I noticed is that CxOs started to carry Apple MacBooks around and sysadmins just had to deal with it.

> Less than 1% do. Let's say, though this is a high estimate, 0.5% of Windows users are ARM. Now let's say my app has 1 million installs at $1 each (pretty successful). That means my total value for optimizing for those ARM users is... $5,000. And they can already run my app with translation, so it's actually worth less than that.

Not disputing your numbers, but for devs writing web services or cloud workloads, compiling for arm can mean spending a lot less on VMs. If I were writing software that had to run on Windows Server on ARM, I would probably want one of these devices for local development.

why would you use windows nowadays?

why would you use windows with ARM?

m1 mini let's you build apps for the biggest OS on the market (iOS)

macOS is the industry standard when it comes to audio/photo/video production

office? everyone uses a web interface, even slack has a web interface

and it makes even more sense to compare both, specially considering we are headed towards a giant recession due to rising cost of energy and the anti-carbon policies that will come will affect the companies that are wasting energy with inefficient machines

it's mindbloging that people put this much energy defending qualcomm contract, it literally is putting the west at a disadvantage against China

it makes perfect sense to compare it with the apple chip, you are blind if you think otherwise, to stay polite

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

Android 42%

Windows 30%

iOS 18%

> everyone uses a web interface

Can you provide some global statistics for this claim? I don't believe it's accurate, but I don't have a good way to measure or disprove it.

windows has 0 market value, most of the usage comes from zombie machines

it even dropped in revenue in their latest report

https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-msft-q1-earnings-repo...

> windows has 0 market value, most of the usage comes from zombie machines

Have you ever worked in an enterprise environment ?

It's clear in that graph

Look around you, look what tech companies uses to make their products (hint: electron)

Microsoft moving their Office suite to the web should give you an indication where they want to take Windows, due to new usages

Global market share is a fake metric, what grandma's PC from 2006 has to do with todays usages?

It's true for everything, gaming, music, video, even art [1]

"Photoshop's journey to the web"

[1] - https://web.dev/ps-on-the-web/

> what grandma's PC from 2006 has to do with todays usages?

I mean, grandma clearly uses her PC for it to be included in a global market share, so why do you think her use should be discounted?

Even if her usage is considered "niche" (debatable as that is), it doesn't mean it shouldn't be included.

OP debunks your claims with solid statistics and the best way you can respond is "Look around you"?

You fandom for all things Apple make you a bit blind to reality, I suggest you look at things with more nuance and actually document yourself with actual numbers. You might be surprised by what you find.

debunk what? number of people visiting that weird website that includes `gs.statcounter` javascript tracker?

can we stop with macOS vs windows, it's clearly not the point

that was in response to:

> Comparing this to an M1 Mini is a bit odd since they're not competing with each other at all

to that it started with the evolution of the usages and why the OS/Machine no longer matter since the products target them all

so again, comparing both makes perfect sense

the people who add value, are using certain kind of devices

why did microsoft invest into Teams web interface first, and more than their native counterpart?

why was zoom the most popular product (it's a webapp), for visio conference, despite skype existing for years during the pandemic?

why is adobe investing into porting photoshop to the web?

why is microsoft investing into cloud gaming?

you have to filter out the noise if you want to have a proper analysis, and to properly project

when one say look around, it's not looking at your neighborhood, it's about looking at other stats/metrics

And where are the most affluent users? Do you think Google would be paying Apple 18B+ a year to be the default search engine if the 18% of mobile users weren’t valuable?

> m1 mini let's you build apps for the biggest OS on the market (iOS)

Mobile OS it's Android,Desktop is Windows.

> office? everyone uses a web interface, even slack has a web interface

Huh? Microsoft Word on Windows native?

> companies that are wasting energy with inefficient machines

I bet your usage of cloud office burns more energy than an native app.

> Huh? Microsoft Word on Windows native?

I think the commenter is trying to say that it's not something you need a Windows device for anymore.

I agree with that sentiment, but disagree about web-based Word, web-based Word is terrible, we often joke in my team that we need to start over if someone accidentally opens a SharePoint document in web-based Word.

> Mobile OS it's Android,Desktop is Windows

Money is not in Android development compared to iOS.

And M1 Macs are faster for Android development than Windows

https://habr.com/ru/company/surfstudio/blog/646677/

> why would you use windows nowadays?

PC games, plain and simple.

> Why would you use windows nowadays.

1) PC Gaming is a big market mover.

2) (Underrated) As a systems developer, Visual Studio is one of the best development environments I have ever used. VS for windows is the real one, VS for mac is a totally different software.

1. PC gaming is tiny in the grand scheme of things.

https://kevurugames.com/blog/mobile-gaming-vs-pc-gaming-over...

In revenue kind of, but not on the AAA titles it shares with XBox.

> why would you use windows nowadays?

- Gaming

- Cheaper hardware options than Macs

- Commercial software support (e.g., Adobe, Autodesk, Affinity, Office, etc.)

- Better hardware support (e.g., Nvidia graphics cards)

- Easier Linux VM setup with WSL and x86(_64) support than Mac (i.e., requires ARM iso or the hassle of setting up Rosetta)

- Piecemeal hardware upgradability

- Less hassle than Linux, depending on hardware configuration and needs

- Smoother experience for some things like (HiDPI) multi-monitor setups and video playback than Linux with the current state of Wayland and the recent drop of third-party codecs by multiple distros

Some of these apply to Mac and some of these apply to Linux, but only Windows has all of these characteristics. Windows is far from perfect, but it is the best tool for some jobs. People also simply have different preferences and trade-off priorities, whether it be in regards to usability, affordability, privacy, or anything else.

> - Gaming

Mobile/Console gaming got a bigger market share

> - Cheaper hardware options than Macs

That's a valid point, although Chromebooks are better in that regard

> - Commercial software support (e.g., Adobe, Autodesk, Affinity, Office, etc.)

They support macOS too, and since they are moving to web interfaces the OS not longer matter (support Chromium / Safari / Firefox)

> - Better hardware support (e.g., Nvidia graphics cards)

Both NVIDIA / AMD offered their PRO products for a very long time on macOS

macOS also has better audio hardware support out of the box, and that includes manipulating RAW photos too ;)

> - Easier Linux VM setup with WSL and x86(_64) support than Mac (i.e., requires ARM iso or the hassle of setting up Rosetta)

That's not true, macOS doesn't need a linux VM when most of the core unix tools are available out of the box

And in that case, WSL doesn't work with the ARM windows ;)

> - Piecemeal hardware upgradability

Professionals don't care about this, they replace their machines every few years (ebay is flooded with cheap thinkpad laptops)

> - Less hassle than Linux, depending on hardware configuration and needs

Nobody waste their time constantly "configuring" their machines, it's setup once then they use it, it's valid for Windows/macOS/linux and mobile OSs, most of the settings are blocked by the sys admin anyways

> - Smoother experience for some things like (HiDPI) multi-monitor setups and video playback than Linux with the current state of Wayland and the recent drop of third-party codecs by multiple distros

Linux? linux is not meant to be a "univernal ready2go plug'n'play" OS, it's meant to scale from embedded to datacenters, you have to configure it to work the way you want, it's by design and the reason why people use it to begin with

People use it because it is a free beer UNIX clone, they wouldn't otherwise if there was a price tag on it.

We would have kept using Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Tru64,...

This is a good list, although for me I find it less and less compelling as more of my development tools become either fully cross-platform or web based completely and distributions like Pop! make hardware support easier.

- Gaming - no question windows is still better.

- Less hassle? - I find that questionable these days. Windows 11 has broken this somewhat.

I like WSL2 but for the last couple of years I've found it easier to reboot into Linux for dev work and just switch back to Windows for gaming.

All valid and true points on x86_64.

Windows on ARM ruins everything Windows offers.

- No gaming due to poor emulation

- Usually pricy Surface devices

- macOS on ARM has waaaaay better commercial support

- Do any WoA devices even have USB4?

- WSL still exists, and is better than anything on the Mac

- No hardware upgradability

- More hassle than Linux, since everything is compiled natively for aarch64

>why would you use windows nowadays?

One thing people have not mentioned is Enterprise.

Just because its all webapps does not mean everyone can move to a Chromebook.

The ecosystem of HP/DELL/Lenovo Thinkpad hardware + Windows 10/11 OS + management over Azure AD or on-prem AD that hooks into Office 365 and most other apps. Plus all ERP and HR software that run on Windows Servers.

Yes the USERS are mostly on the Office 365 suite and webapps for things. But their PCs have to be managed and apps have to be served.

I know of a very large company - the second largest employer in the US has no problem managing Macs at scale.

Jamf is a thing, yes I know :)

I can user 2 or more monitors without actually losing my sanity.

macOS is very clearly optimised towards laptops in this regard, which makes sense since they sell waaaay more of those than they do stationary.

It's been a while since I used Windows on a laptop, about 2 years (so Windows 10 20H2 was likely the last I used on a laptop). Back then un-docking and re-docking my laptop was a pain because it would smoosh all app windows to the primary monitor, and I'd have to move everything around on my 3 monitors when re-docking. Every. Single. Time.

Those had different DPIs as well, with all the issues that brought.

I can't actually recall a time when macOS was that bad at managing my app windows when changing monitor configurations, but I'll give you that Windows is better at window management if all displays stay connected and have the same DPI.

Has Windows gotten better at these things?

If you have icons on 2 monitors and then you disconnect 1, yes icons are everywhere. When you will reconnect the second one, it will restore as it was. I do not know how it is working (or not) on laptops and monitors combinations as I have desktop PC with 2 monitors.

I'm not so worried about icons, I don't really use the desktop, in fact I actually disable desktop icons on my macOS laptop.

I'm more interested in what happens to app windows when you remove and reconnect displays.

macOS is the standard for prosumer audio/photo/video production - not for the actual pro market. VFX mainly uses Linux or Windows desktops and the top compositing applications arent even made for macOS.

Not to mention all of the stuff that requires CUDA to run and the fact that Apple made their bed with AMD a long time ago and you can no longer use Nvidia GPUs.

I work for MSFT and have been using an SPX as my primary device for a little over a year. I haven’t had an issue with user space applications, but I do have an audio interface that doesn’t work because the vendor (MOTU) doesn’t ship ARM64 drivers :(

It's sad. I'm using a USB-C to 4.5mm TRRS audio dongle, and if you can't get audio drivers, I fear my "exotic" setup is even less likely to be supported.

I've been wanting to try Windows 11 on ARM64 with a Microsoft or a Lenovo device, but nothing seems to have the basics I'm looking for like OLED for a laptop, or ECC (for both a laptop or a server)

If there were ARM64 options with ECC RAM, I'd buy that today and start deploying tomorrow.

The only ARM64 option with ECC that I know of is Ampere's rather expensive development workstation [0].

[0] - https://solutions.amperecomputing.com/systems/altra/kraken-c...

Does windows not provide a generic "class compliant" audio driver? I'm amazed it works so well everywhere else if Microsoft doesn't support it.

I went down this path. Yes, Windows includes an inbox USB audio class driver, but it lacks support for implicit feedback. The MOTU interface does not have a feedback endpoint, and relies on implicit feedback, so the inbox driver doesn't work. I think the inbox driver does work for Focusrite's interfaces - I guess they include the feedback endpoint, and both Linux and macOS support implicit feedback so MOTU's devices work there. Apple actually recommend implicit feedback only [0].

[0] - https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2274...

Thanks for the information! My Motu (M2) does live on a linux machine and it's been relatively painless, worked on MacOs as well, but required a driver download on Windows. I never dug into why. Audio interfaces tend to be finicky things on their own, I also have an Arturia Audio Fuse Studio that needs to be "rebooted" from time to time, no matter what OS its connected to.

MOTU 828mk3 supports firewire, if you want to try that approach.

Speaking for myself, it’s not an ARM desktop PC what I need, but an ARM server. Make those highly available and then I’ll start developing/porting my code on ARM.

Foxconn, Gigabyte and Supermicro make Ampere Altra-based servers: https://amperecomputing.com/reference-platforms/ampere-altra...

It's hard to get from usual companies like Lenovo, Dell, HP etc.

I just want ARM64 with ECC and the ability to put quite few NVMe inside (U2 or M2, doesn't matter that much)

I've seen those, but they cost a fortune. Even the smallest 32core CPU with 128GB RAM and a couple of nvme ssds costs more than 10k.

AWS has them: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/, and you can run Lambdas with ARM.

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon (not in AWS).

Microsoft had preview for ARM64 Azure VMs earlier this year. Not sure if they've gone beyond that.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/now-in-preview-azure-...

Pretty much all the cloud providers have ARM options these days, even the smaller ones.

> Comparing this to an M1 Mini is a bit odd since they're not competing with each other at all, and Microsoft is limited by what Qualcomm et al can put out.

Microsoft is a multi billion dollar company, they are not limited, they made a bad business decision to depend on a 3rd party to build chips for them

Their products are meant to be competitive against the competition, they should be compared for what they are, computers

Venturing into a product category just because your competitor is doing the same is not great motivation, and is a distraction at best. Microsoft has no interest in selling computers[1] in large volumes: it's long-term OEM partners may not appreciate Microsoft cranking out computers in anger. The Surface line seems to be a Halo product for Windows, or examplar to OEMs (and I'm guessing Microsoft mostly works as an integrator of existing parts made by other manufacturers).

1. Renting them out via Azure definitely interests them.

I don't have much faith in Qualcomm putting out a decent ARM processor any time soon. They have coasted for a while on pricey contracts and patents and their recent processors for the last few years are nowhere close to the M1 in performance, let alone the M2.

They bought Nuvia last year, an ARM chip startup with a bunch of ex-Apple ARM folks. We'll see how it turns out, but the acquisition suggests they are serious about improving performance.

Why exactly isn’t the Mac Mini competing with this? No one cares that Microsoft is “limited to what Qualcomm can ship” anymore than anyone cared that Apple was limited to what IBM/Motorola could ship back in the PPC era.

The fact remains that the fastest way to run Windows ARM is on an Mx Mac in a VM.

The recently released OpenBSD 7.2 boots and installs on it, support for the same Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC used in the ThinkPad x13s was added during last release cycle, so support for the Microsoft Dev Kit 2023 came for the most part for free.

https://www.openbsd.org/72.html

OpenBSD developer Patrick Wildt shared boot messages (dmesg) here: https://twitter.com/bluerise/status/1585584481854816256

Another UK tech reviewer Alex Ellis showed it booting OpenBSD into X11: https://blog.alexellis.io/linux-on-microsoft-dev-kit-2023/

Wonder if that means alternative OS's will eventually reach the Galaxy Book Go. Its rock bottom price intrigues me but it seems to lack dev support in that regard. Maybe these attempts to support similar specs of machine will trickle down to it.

Thankfully from the kernel perspective the Galaxy Book Go SoC is pretty well supported because Chromebooks did ship with the same SoC.

However, that specific device doesn’t have good support. Would take some developer time to do so… (and not sure if that will happen)

One singular guy seems to be working on it but who knows really how far they'll get? https://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyBook/comments/yfefif/finally_...

I believe the Samsung Galaxy Book Go was tested with OpenBSD during the initial development for the ThinkPad x13s, keyboard support was added in this commit.

https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/74edc71ccae4051eda11fa...

Many of these older generation "Windows on Snapdragon" laptops unfortunately did not use fast NVMe storage however, only slow eMMC and eUFS (Universal Flash Storage), the latter currently being unsupported by OpenBSD.

As best I can tell, there are exactly two comments in that file (I don't count the licensing and ahem CVS metadata), and neither of them add any enlightenment at all. Kernel development must be a very special culture. I tried finding the equivalent file in the Linux kernel, but while looking I saw there is at least one example of commentary to go along with a struct: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/torvalds/linux/-/blob/dri...

Apologies, I was pointing out the commit message itself rather than the contents of the commit, it's indeed full of magic numbers. It's reverse engineered, there are no docs from Qualcomm.

This is commit is plumbing work fixing GPIO support, which indirectly makes the keyboard work. I don't have any boot logs for the machine, but as I understand they have standard Microsoft-compatible HID keyboards/touchpads that work with OpenBSD's existing drivers.

https://man.openbsd.org/qcgpio

https://man.openbsd.org/qciic

Yes, sorry, I wasn't directing the vile at you, that was just the first time I had seen a file from the OpenBSD kernel and was shocked at how aggressively opaque it was

And, to your point, if it was reverse engineered, that's more reason to comment, not less, because (a) memory is fleeting (b) if I wanted to contribute, I could read along about how Zen Master OpenBSD Reverser found those so I could go find more

Yeah I don't get how Linux is running on the Thinkpad and openbsd was able to boot but a device trees is the blocker for Linux? Are they just on some distro that doesn't have the new kernel packaged?

Oh, it's because of "APCI" mode working with openbsd apparently...

The upstreamed Qualcomm drivers in the Linux kernel require a device tree from the vendor which doesn't exist yet for this machine, I believe the Linux community has something cobbled together for the ThinkPad x13s, or got something from Lenovo.

> Oh, it's because of "APCI" mode working with openbsd apparently...

Indeed, OpenBSD attempts to support these machines to some extent in ACPI mode, but from what I read the ACPI tables are in bad shape/incomplete. "Good enough for Windows, ship it.".

> but from what I read the ACPI tables are in bad shape/incomplete. "Good enough for Windows, ship it.".

It is a bit more nuanced than this. Qualcomm ships a giant custom (mandatory, most the platform will not even work without it!) driver stack on Windows and uses ACPI definitions more than most x86 platform vendors, to the extent that it even exposed a bug in the Windows ACPI implementation when an ACPI method return buffer would exceed 64 kB so since this generation of SoC a lot of the Windows drivers instead bundle their own 'subset' of certain ACPI buffers and the main DSDT is empty as a result.

Linux on ARM still doesn't really use ACPI except where forces more influential than Qualcomm managed (e.g. SBSA?) so even downstream Linux kernels for Qualcomm still use DT.

Appreciate the additional context. It does seem like though a lot of magic is contained in the Qualcomm Windows drivers, with large parts of the ACPI tables being stubs or broken (requiring hardcoded driver quirks/workarounds).

I see a lot of negative comments and while some of them are definitely valid for the Qualcomm choices, but I have to say the box still feels like far better value for money over Apples offering.

I agree, especially once somebody gets Linux running on it, it would be a good value for CI/CD Arm build jobs.

It's a bit slower, but does have more memory than any available M1 option.

I had a ryzen 3 2200g with 32 gigs of ram and it felt way faster than my mac mini. That extra space makes everything faster.

Like I wrote on a similar thread a few days ago, some of these expectations seem a tad misplaced, but I would buy one in a flash if it was available in my country, as a _personal_ ultra-quiet desktop with a good Linux userland and the ability to drive a 5K2K display or matching pixel acreage.

For my terminal-centric lifestyle WSL2 is fine, and all of my personal machines run either Linux or macOS even though I happen to work for MS. And getting a fully working aarch64 Linux userland with Windows 11 window management and PowerToys is, well… tempting.

I am, however, increasingly leaning towards just getting a Khadas Edge 2 Pro (which has an RK3588S and a comparable amount of RAM and storage). I don’t think Jeff has tested that one yet (and it should come in below the SQ2), but if you want _fast_ aarch64 readily available, it seems to be the thing to beat (I can see it now on my regional Amazon store, a click away… must… resist…)

It's not quiet tho. It has a cheap-ass fan and also bad enough coil whine to get a mention in the video.

The fan is pretty quiet, at least—I couldn't hear it unless I put my ear up to the box.

The coil whine was excessive though. I wouldn't normally mention it if it were here and there and quiet, but it was noticeable from a few feet away any time I went above 100 mbps down over Ethernet.

That is interesting - I noticed that in your video, and I suspect a little shielding around the Ethernet electronics might help (but I have no real idea how the Ethernet was integrated into the Surface motherboard variant).

> with Windows 11 window management and PowerToys is, well… tempting.

Can I ask why? In all of my experiences, both "windows window management" and "power toys" seem to be lackluster to Linux equivalents.

You likely haven’t tried FancyZones or the baseline window snapping with mouse dragging. I use a set of GNOME extensions that mimic them, but they are simply not as… snappy.

It boggles my mind Microsoft didn't get into the custom ARM chip design game years ago like Google, Amazon, etc. I imagine it's far too late now especially with the state of the semiconductor and supply chain world. Good luck betting your future on Qualcomm, hope it works out.

Qualcomm, meanwhile, has announced today that they think 2024 will be their year.

Great, an entire 8 years after the first Windows on ARM Qualcomm devices... but they think they've got it this time. For sure.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/03/qualcomm_q4_2022/

Edit: This is so incomprehensibly late it's just embarrassing. It's been 2 presidencies. Qualcomm had an exclusivity contract for Windows on ARM for literally half a decade (2016-2021) which they did absolutely nothing of significance with. And if 2024 is their year, it will be 4 years after M1. Yikes. Not to mention the lawsuit between themselves and ARM Holdings over whether Nuvia's designs are legitimate, which could delay things further. Nuvia had better be like pulling a rabbit out of a hat when it arrives.

Edit 2: @beembeem Right... shutters. 8 years in the sense of modern Windows with some 32-bit Intel app compatibility. But as for ARM as a whole... Windows RT and Windows CE before it...

8 years? Try more like a decade.

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2012/06/impressions-window...

keep going... (source: old wince sdk survivor)

I don't blame Qualcomm as much as I blame Microsoft. They tried to use the transition to ARM to lockdown and smartphonize PCs. There were at least two attempts to bring out a restricted, store only version of Windows (Windows RT and Windows 10 S). But what's the point of Windows when you can't use the majority of existing Windows software? ARM and x86 differences are bad enough, but they had to artificially add more barriers.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane...I had a Surface RT in 2012 and it was a turd. Terrible performance and way too locked down to be useful.

I still use my Surface RT for videos on car trips. It has a USB port, a 16:9 screen and can run (a very old version of) VLC. I wouldn't have paid money for it, but I got it for free.

A rumor I heard somewhere - MS supposedly built x86 emulation for ARM a few years back, and created a demo on top of some vendor's ARM servers for transparent Azure x86 on ARM (in addition to regular ARM VM SKUs of course). But rather than move forward with this as a public offering on Azure, they used it to put the squeeze on Intel/AMD, and they got rock-bottom price on hardware in return for holding-off on ARM adoption.

Sounds like someone may have gotten a massive bonus that year, but may have significantly delayed any ARM efforts on Azure...

What rumor, x86 emulation is shipping

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/arm64ec?source...

It’s possible they’re worried about antitrust litigation if they take over the entire stack. At this point in time I don’t think it would be warranted given all their competitors are doing similarly, but given MS’ experience of the 90/00s I can see they may be cautious.

> The rest of the innards are a bit of a mess. It seems obvious the guts were basically a Surface Pro X-style main board rearranged to fit inside a desktop case. And Microsoft missed out on a few golden opportunities, like adding in a 2.5 Gbps network port instead of a stodgy old 1 Gbps port. But the box does have WiFi 6E and triple display support built in (one via mini DisplayPort, two via USB-C).

Is 2.5Gbps networking at all common?

It's common enough most mid-range and better motherboards (and many SBCs and cheap Intel/AMD/ARM desktops) include it by default. The chips for 2.5G NICs are about the same price as 1G parts now, and driver support is excellent across Windows, Linux and macOS.

It's basically a free 2.5x faster networking upgrade with the same cabling, so many are adopting it. And since it's backwards compatible with 1 Gbps networks, it's not a big issue to include it.

2.5G switches are typically a little more than 1G switches, but the prices have come down substantially in the past few years, making it a worthwhile upgrade instead of going to 10G, especially if you don't need all that speed (and heat) and the hassle of cabling/transceiver issues that inevitably crop up.

I did a casual look around and I'm not seeing much vendor support.

Like its there, but not super there.

I'd its gradually changing. For example all available AM5 mainboards and about 80% of all availabe Socket1700 have it build in. Laptops are a different story die to the physical size of the port but also get more common (of the laptop has a Ethernet port) I bought my first USB Adapters (for a direct connection between my NAS and my Desktop) in 2020 for ~30€.

> Is 2.5Gbps networking at all common?

Yes. Problem is that it isn't _that_ much faster than 1G.

It’s 2.5x as fast! That’s pretty significant, people will spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a CPU or GPU that’s 2.5x as fast as their old one, but when it’s a network speedup it’s not that significant?

I think they're saying that in the context of realistic workloads that would saturate the existing 1 Gbps connection, how often they would occur, what the net benefit in time would be...

2.5 Gbps would be nice to have though.

It's become the norm on desktop boards over the last couple years or so, though switches and other kit are a bit slower catching up

Yes, it is pretty common these days. Most decent to high-end desktop PC motherboards seem to include it these days, and it can also be added easily now via USB 3 dongle or newer USB/thunderbolt docks (e.g. on laptops, where it seems to not be that common to be built-in).

I've got one already.

Here are real-life / practical numbers so you will know what to expect.

Compiling Sciter (https://sciter.com) full rebuild (C++):

i7/32GB - just 64 seconds.

That ARM (WDK)/32GB machine - 2 minutes 6 seconds.

And for the comparison, same Sciter sources, full rebuild

Mac (Mini) M1 machine - 8 minutes 33 seconds (XCode/LLVM, but it builds universal binaries).

And yet, the same Sciter, Linux on MacMini/Intel, GCC

i7/32GB - 9 minutes 45 seconds.

So, when we speak about hardware it is not enough to compare pure synthetic benchmarks but real life scenarios.

Really, Microsoft Windows is the most developer friendly platform. De facto.

>it builds universal binaries

Are these workloads comparable? It could very well be that macOS is doing more compilation. If you wanted a fair comparison, you could run Linux on both and compile in that.

Even if building for macOS requires more overall work, I wouldn't say this constitutes a "real-life" comparison because the output product is different.

Building on the M1 Mac is probably starved for memory, linkers have an appetite for it especially on larger projects

Memory could be an issue as I have 8 Gb on that machine.

95% of code is the same on all platforms.

ARM on Windows will never take off if they keep relying on these silly inefficient mobile SOC's from qualcom. Really they need to be getting in bed with a company like Ampere who seem to be one of a select few developing high power ARM SOCs.

I'm probably wrong about this because I've only cobbled it together from reading various ARM-related submissions, but I think that their license probably doesn't allow it. You need a special license to design your own state-of-the-art workstation/gaming desktop-class ARM CPU. And on top of that, Microsoft and Qualcomm had or have an agreement with some degree of exclusivity.

> Microsoft and Qualcomm had or have an agreement with some degree of exclusivity

People keep referencing an agreement between Microsoft and Qualcomm without either company ever acknowledging that such an agreement exists.

According to Ian Cutriss (formerly of Anandtech), his contact at Qualcomm told him that there is no such exclusivity agreement.

>I spoke with Qualcomm about this exclusivity deal - they said there isn't one. Simply put, they put engineers, $$$, and time with Microsoft to optimizing Windows on Arm for Qualcomm. Anyone else would have to do their own specific optimizations and work with Microsoft to do that, but no-one has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WgG2sGEhzo&lc=Ugy6-vcYxzP1B...

Inefficient? Underperforming sure but they're probably among the best in terms of "efficiency".

> select few developing high power ARM SOCs.

"high power" is a bad thing in this market.

> Inefficient? Underperforming sure but they're probably among the best in terms of "efficiency"

TFA extensively demonstrates that they’re a far, far behind Apple’s 2 year old M1 silicon in efficiency.

I was referring to performance, not power consuption. Although as has been pointed out the M1 is vastly more power efficient than anything qualcom produces and they still don't come close to the performance levels.

For those wanting to jump into Windows on ARM for a lower price, who do not mind running an IDE on a separate machine, Microsoft's original Windows ARM Devkit is still available from Microsoft, on eBay, for $219. It has a Qualcomm 7c which is not powerful at all (as shown in his graph as roughly similar to the "Dot 1"). But... if you don't want to spend $599, it's a fun few weekends.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/255784903190?

Good to know but my takeaway from the reviews was that it is slow as molasses. Just over 1k in Geekbench multicore is extremely low.

Thanks!

Since I decided to base my startup on Microsoft, that is, write the software using .NET to run on Windows, a few days ago I noticed the Microsoft "Dev Kit" and wondered what it was.

I clicked for a few HOURS at the corresponding Microsoft Web pages and finally gave up -- I could make no sense at all out of what the "Dev Kit" was. Wasted a few thousand mouse clicks and a few HOURS or time. Got frustrated.

In particular, in those Microsoft Web pages, there was an HTML single line text box were could ask questions, and the question I asked, the simplest, most elementary, first question, was

"What is in the Dev Kit?"

In the hours of clicking some thousands of times on those Web pages, I asked that question some dozens of times and got back nothing meaningful. Right, from all I could tell, for the simplest, most elementary, first question, no information.

By the time I gave up, I still had no idea what the heck "Dev Kit" was, what was in it, what it was for, etc. Was it hardware and software or just software? Couldn't tell. Most elementary question, no answer.

So, here with this thread finally I can see the first, simple answers to the first, simple questions. Good.

For me the answer is, no, I don't want a "Dev Kit", not for money, marbles, chalk, or for free. Good to get that question answered!

The very first search result for "windows dev kit": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-dev-kit-2023/94k0p...

"Everything you need to develop Windows apps for Arm. Powerful AI. All on one device."

"Introducing a developer-class desktop device to build, debug, and test native Windows apps for Arm."

A tech specs tab shows you exactly what the hardware is.

How did you spend hours on this?

Apparently via Google you found a good explanation of the Dev Kit.

Gee, maybe the Microsoft Web pages should have given the links you found!

Yes, eventually I did do a Google search. I found a little information, better than the Microsoft Web pages.

But a "device"? What was meant by a "device"? My life, my work in computing, my work for my startup, are all awash in various devices. Heck, my kitchen has a lot of "devices". So does my car. I have a sack of gorgeous Nikon camera equipment, all "devices".

Somewhere some description needs to get simpler, down to the level of the Common Man in the Street, to the 6th grade, with an introductory explanation: I've done a LOT in computing and still am doing so, but a "device" is just too vague to be meaningful. People for whom that jargon is meaningful have a background I am missing. For my current work, I have no need for that background.

The Microsoft Web pages kept promising to tell me what was in the kit, product, offering, box, unit, device, whatever. Sooo, I kept clicking, thinking that maybe I just missed the Web page that actually explained what the Dev Kit was.

So, the "Dev Kit", the thing Microsoft was talking about, is a COMPUTER, complete with a DC power supply, central processor, main memory, solid state memory for a file system, ports, maybe some version of USB (Intel's universal serial bus) for connecting a keyboard, a mouse, and one or more video displays, an operating system, and some software tools from Microsoft, and for most of this still I have no actual source and am just guessing. NONE of that was at all clear.

My interest was as a founder of a startup, a Web site, and the programmer of that Web site. I've done the programming using Microsoft's .NET software and their SQL Server. And I wrote the code on Windows XL and then Windows 7.

That was a long time ago -- I got delayed by some unpredictable, independent, unfortunate outside events. But now I'm returning and trying to rush to going on-line as a Web site available to everyone on the Internet.

Early in the work, I got from Microsoft a version of SQL Server for free. What I wanted to know a few days ago from the "Dev Kit" was, is a free (developer) version of SQL Server still available? What other versions of SQL Server are available? Should I consider converting to PostgreSQL? What other Microsoft software is available? Eventually it became clear that somehow whatever the Dev Kit was, it was not really for people developing a Web site.

Soooo, maybe somewhere there is a little company developing and selling software to help, say, a pizza shop. The little company writes the software using .NET. Some of the pizza shop customers are using computers with ARM processors instead of x86 processors and some version of Unix instead of Windows. So, the Dev Kit is aimed at software developers in such companies. Okay. Microsoft never made any of this at all clear, but eventually, okay, now it's clear.

This Dev Kit is not for me. Now I understand this.

Then I did another Google search and got a good, clear, surprisingly nice explanation for my question about SQL Server:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo...

I saw

SQL Server 2019 Express is a free edition of SQL Server, ideal for development and production for desktop, web, and small server applications.

Sure, I'd still like to know what $ I'm in for if my startup is successful and I need a non toy version of SQL Server? Ah, getting information like that is asking for too much!

But some such information is available sometimes!!! Last month I finally found a path to some serious people at my ISP, Comcast, about what they could do for me when I bring my Web site live! Most of their answers were good, clear, and more favorable than I had guessed.

So, sometimes in business it's actually IS possible to get some clear information!!!!

It appears to me that in the last year or so Microsoft has made good progress in the main, foundational challenge -- describing their work. Before, long it appeared that getting such information was not like pulling teeth from lions but pulling tusks from elephants.

"Device": Whoever at Microsoft described the Dev Kit as a "device" needs some serious counseling.

In my first use of SQL Server, I had no problems designing the database, understanding "normal forms", but spent a solid week trying to get a "connection string" to work. Finally I sent to Microsoft so much in email and phone calls that I got to apparently some mid-level executive in the SQL Server organization who told me right away how to get a connection string. WOW, only a week wasted!!!!

> Apparently via Google you found a good explanation of the Dev Kit. Gee, maybe the Microsoft Web pages should have given the links you found!

It's literally the same link as the very first one in the body of article this comment thread is about.

> The Microsoft Web pages kept promising to tell me what was in the kit, product, offering, box, unit, device, whatever. Sooo, I kept clicking, thinking that maybe I just missed the Web page that actually explained what the Dev Kit was.

As ripley12 says, there's a 'Tech Specs' tab (I realize that 'tab' might be a new concept for you, but if you'll go to that page and scroll down a little bit you'll see a section that looks like |Overview | Tech Specs | FAQ| and each of those is a 'tab')

> for most of this still I have no actual source and am just guessing. NONE of that was at all clear

In addition to the 'Tech Specs' tab there is a 'FAQ' tab. As you might know, this stands for 'Frequently Asked Questions' ('frequently' means 'often'). In there you will see a list of questions with ">" symbols next to them (this ">" does not mean that they are less than some value, it's just a typographical symbol).

The first of those (when read from top to bottom) is "What are some of the specific challenges Windows Dev Kit 2023 will help solve for developers? "

If you 'click', with your 'mouse', on that it will reveal (which means 'to show which was hidden'), and the revealed text reads:

Today, if a developer wants to build an app that targets Arm, they generally write their code and build the app binaries on a x64 Windows PC, and then copy the built binaries over to an Arm device upon which to run or test the app. If they need to debug the app, they have to hookup a remote debugging session from their x64 PC.

Windows Dev Kit 2023, as an Arm-powered device powered by the Snapdragon® 8cx Gen 3 compute platform, will enable Windows developers to build, test and debug Arm-native apps alongside all their favorite productivity tools, including Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, WSL, VSCode, Microsoft Office and Teams.

I realize there are a lot of words there, but sometimes in this industry we have to read them.

Thanks for the overview.

At the end, your many "words" describe a situation that to me is amazing,

"build the app binaries on a x64 Windows PC, and then copy the built binaries over to an Arm device upon which to run or test the app."

Amazing!

That has no promise of any direct value for me, but it's still amazing and, I guess, maybe still worth my hearing about it.

I'm staying with Windows and 64 bit versions of x86. For me and my work, I see no reason to invest time, energy, or money in changing.

I just checked: I just followed the URL to a Microsoft site you gave -- somehow that is not the URL I followed in the hour I wasted.

I checked my notes, and I did not bother to keep the URLs I did follow. I take a LOT of notes, but I'm in a hurry and do not take notes on everything, especially things that don't work.

Okay, I'll try to get my standard Web browser Firefox to tell me what URLs I did visit. From that Firefox data I see that I visited:

https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/membership/compare-progr...

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/mpn-create-...

So, each of those URLs led to many Web pages.

Then on page

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/dev-kit/#devic...

maybe I saw:

"Device specifics

32GB LPDDR4x RAM and 512GB fast NVMe storage

Snapdragon® 8cx Gen 3 compute platform

Ports: 3x USB-A, 2x USB-C, Mini-Display (HBR2 support), Ethernet (RJ45)

Made with 20% recycled ocean plastic

Available in the Microsoft Store"

If I did see this, then I wondered what the heck

Snapdragon® 8cx Gen 3 compute platform

was. I still wonder what the heck they are talking about.

A "platform"? A "device"? Even with a lot more work, Microsoft would have a tough time being more obscure.

> The very first search result for "windows dev kit"

Somewhere I saw a link, URL, to a Microsoft Web page describing the Dev Kit and followed that link. The link was not the one you gave. And I didn't get the link from a Google search or from this Hacker News thread. In another post to this thread, I gave the URLs I tried, and none of them was the URL you gave.

How did I waste some hours on this? For the URLs I tried, it was tough to make any sense out of what they were talking about -- the writing assumed too much background for the reader and used too much poorly defined jargon.

E.g., I didn't know what a

Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform

was! That is from QUALCOMM. One of the founders was Andrew Viterbi, and he was a good mathematician who worked in coding theory. I had a graduate course in coding theory that mentioned Viterbi. So, on QUALCOMM, I have a background in some of the technical work of one of the founders. Alas, the course didn't mention a

Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform

I've taught computer science ugrad at Georgetown U and grad level at Ohio State U but never mentioned the

Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform

I suspect that could find a lot of graduate computer science courses at MIT, CMU, ..., Stanford that never mention the

Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform

Net, there is an epidemic problem in the practical computer industry -- too much poorly defined jargon.

The sheer volume of text you have written about this is very strange. You may want to seek guidance on how to interact with other people. Have a good weekend.

Right: Some people here at Hacker News like to attack others that don't fit in with some of the norms. Mere technical discussions are not always welcome.

My background is quite different, is with people who can engage in technical communications with objectivity.

Yup, you are right: Some people at Hacker News have trouble being objective. To interact with them, be like a politician who is careful never to say much of anything except they like motherhood and apple pie.

In part my goal was to let Microsoft and much of the tech community know that they very much need to improve their technical writing. Microsoft has made a lot of improvements, but for their Dev Kit they fell back into poor writing again. One rule that would help a lot would be to avoid undefined or poorly defined jargon, terminology, or acronyms.

Your arguments about URLs fails to make a valid point: There are a lot of URLs about the Dev Kit, and the ones you mentioned and their sources are not necessarily where I got the URLs I followed. So, your claim that I ignored good URLs that were right in front of me was wrong: The sources you mentioned were not the ones I happened to use.

I'm 100% correct: Some of the Microsoft publicity, promotion, and documentation of their Dev Kit has some really obscure technical writing that can waste a lot of time for people without a quite narrow background. For making this point, you have attacked ME. Hmm ....

Try typing "Windows Dev Kit 2023" into your preferred search engine; it took a while for the news to spread. It's not a hotrod, but if you think Windows on ARM has a future, $599 for a small form factor PC with 32G of RAM is pretty good.

>Since I decided to base my startup on Microsoft, that is, write the software using .NET to run on Windows

If you have any interest in Linux or cross-platform development, Microsoft and Canonical announced first-class support for .NET for Ubuntu:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-6-is-now-in-ubu...

https://ubuntu.com/blog/install-dotnet-on-ubuntu

Thanks. So far I'm developing software to run only on my hardware, 64 bit x86, and only on Windows, Windows 7 Professional or some version of Windows Server. The main purpose is just for my Web site. In time I will write more software to process, some of it could be called statistics, some relevant data essentially independent of the Web site itself.

I can understand that maybe for a server farm on a few million square feet of rack space, and some millions of processors, one way and another they could save significant $ (a) powering the computers and (b) removing the resulting heat from the building. My startup is not there yet. Also I can understand that my AMD FX-8350 processor can use a few more Watts per computation than some recent processors with simpler instruction sets and smaller line widths, but I'm not worrying about that now either.

I am pleased that Microsoft is working hard to get .NET to run on a variety of processor instruction sets and operating systems -- for me it means that Microsoft will continue to support the .NET I am depending on.

Millennials couldn’t care less about Mac, Windows and desktop operating systems in general. Everyone does their computing needs on their phone.

Apple put the M1 and M2, which are literally the two most advanced CPU’s on planet earth, and it has only slightly pushed the Mac ahead. Putting Windows on ARM is a waste of time.

Wouldn't mind replacing my dell latitude with a Windows laptop that has no fan doesn't get hot performs the same and runs 20 hours on battery though

>Everyone does their computing needs on their phone

Its so awful. Am I millenial? Im 30.

But my ideal work/play desk is big, 3 monitors, 1 144hz for games, desktop PC (bigger fans = less noise + real CPU and GPU, no throttling at all) + mech keyboard + mx master/gaming mouse.

A phone is for logging into my bank or to order food.

Phone games are so trash and TikTok rots brains.

Yes I read real actual books, should do more of that.

I assume you are a dev (or at least dev-adjacent), so this isn't about you. You will, most likely, always prefer multiple monitors, beefy desktop, etc., regardless of your generation.

We are talking about gen pop here. I am a late millenial, and back in my teens, if you wanted to access internet, do social media, listen to non-physical format music, etc., you pretty much had to own a PC/laptop. Almost everyone back then had access to it at their home.

In present day, most people have no need for that. Social media, music, internet, etc., is all done on smartphones. I see less and less gen pop interest and need in PCs as the time goes.

My grandparents learned to use PC just so they could check out news and talk to me on skype (we live in different countries now). Over time, they switched to smartphones, as they found the ease of use and pretty much a complete lack of the need for troubleshooting very appealing. Years later, they are happy with that decision.

That doesnt mean that PCs are gonna die or dwindle, quite the opposite. For work, smartphones are suboptimal, and thus PCs will stay around for work, for the enthusiast crowd (which would include gaming), and for a bunch of other hobbies/niche used (like music production, etc.). I don't foresee PCs and multimonitor setups ever going out of my life either, aside from the form factors of some of them slightly changing (e.g., a virtual multimonitor AR setup instead of a physical multimonitor setup).

For me, one underrated aspect of a desktop PC is the ergonomics of setting up the space how you want it.

Want a gaming chair? Bean bag? Or to swap between the two? Sure, whatever. Want a big screen? 3 screens? Great speaker setup?

It isn't mobile, but "desktop computing" doesn't need to have greatest everything - it can be what you want for once.

I guess millenials don't code, they only use low-code/no-code apps on their phone.

I bought Samsung Galaxy Book with snapdragon ARM for 200USD from eBay (somehow come brand new) to get experience with cross-compilation for Win 11 ARM emitted on my Win 11 x86 or the laptop itself. On the ARM laptop most of x86 application are running just fine, some has issues (Dropbox), but I was able to get ARM64 executable for basically all important applications (VSCode, Python 3, Notepad++, NET6 SDK).

What I do not understand on Win ARM64 is why x86 processes have blurred GUI. It works fine, but it is very distracting. However at least I know on first look that I am running application in an emulator.

I was hoping Microsoft would port Windows to Raspberry Pi, looks like that's too underpowered.

There's no porting to be done. You can run Windows 10 / 11 on a Raspberry Pi 400 today.

Windows 11 only up to one of the betas—the production version has some ARMv8.1 extensions that aren't compatible with the Pi's SoC.

The Pi is also woefully underpowered, even when overclocked—the cheaper ARM SoCs from Qualcomm are still 2-4x faster than a Pi 4, and they even feel a bit slow at times running Windows on ARM.

They ported Windows 10 IoT to run on the pi (it's not a desktop Windows experience though, don't get your hopes up). I'm not sure they maintain or care about it anymore though, I think they moved to Azure IoT that's Linux-based.

The pi's still a pretty weak machine hardware wise. I imagine full fat Windows would be pretty rough to use which may be why it's not been done.

Dammit, Jeff!

Stop buying up all the Raspberry PIs!

</jk>

I have negative interest in Windows, so can anyone in the know tell me if they have some sort of x86/x64 emulation layer in there like Apple does?

If so, how effective is it? If not, this is as DOA as Surface RT.

They do, it's called WOW64, and it covers emulation of 32-bit and 64-bit x86 on ARM. More details on Microsoft's website: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...

It's not as fast as Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon (not by a long shot), but especially for lighter apps like productivity software, it isn't bad at all.

I think it's important to call out that Rosetta 2 on Apple silicon uses a special mode that changes how the memory model works to support x86 style memory ordering. That massively reduces the amount of work needed to emulate x86 and x86-64. Pretty sure apple both has a patent on it and a special dispensation from ARM to use it. Where qualcomm and MS don't have either. Which means emulation on Qualcomm CPUs is going to be painfully slow in comparison because it has to use a lot more locks and fences than is actually necessary with that mode available.

> I think it's important to call out that Rosetta 2 on Apple silicon uses a special mode that changes how the memory model works to support x86 style memory ordering. That massively reduces the amount of work needed to emulate x86 and x86-64. Pretty sure apple both has a patent on it and a special dispensation from ARM to use it.

>Myth: Apple chips are the only ones to implement the x86 TSO memory model.

Nvidia Denver/Carmel and Fujitsu A64fx do too.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1534053625110351872

Interesting, this is news to me. More curious that A64fx has it since that's an HPC chip. They must have a very valid reason for it (I've definitely run into HPC code that is absolutely garbage and would need it to be stable).

From the article:

> And in an embarrassing turn of events, right now at least, you can eke out more performance running x86 code inside Apple's Rosetta 2 in a Linux VM under Windows than you can using Windows' native emulation layer!

So clearly there's more going on than just leveraging TSO support on Apple's chips.

Isn't that an unfair comparison? I would think that Rosetta 2 relies on TSO being enabled, so if you use it on a processor that doesn't actually implement TSO it's probably wildly unsafe while a more correct/safe emulator has to incur extra overhead to work around the lack of TSO.

Looking at some other related commentary (not verified), apparently the Windows version might simply ignore TSO and hope for the best.

The Verge review of the Surface Pro 9 did mention that x86 software is not just laggy, but also crashes.

>My frustration with this computer wasn’t a workload thing. It didn’t start out fast and gradually slow down as I opened more things and started more processes. It was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to finish.

I’d have only Slack open, and switching between channels would still take almost three seconds (yes, I timed it on my phone). Spotify, also with nothing in the background, would take 11 seconds to open, then be frozen for another four seconds before I could finally press play. When I typed in Chrome, I often saw significant lag, which led to all kinds of typos (because my words weren’t coming out until well after I’d written them). I’d try to watch YouTube videos, and the video would freeze while the audio continued. I’d use the Surface Pen to annotate a PDF, and my strokes would either be frustratingly late or not show up at all. I’d try to open Lightroom, and it would freeze multiple times and then crash.

https://www.theverge.com/23421326/microsoft-surface-pro-9-ar...

If the allegation that MS is locked to Qualcomm is true and the support of TSO as mentioned in other comments does not include any offering from the same my guess is MS hasn't bothered. They may yet if Qualcomm implements it.

I really wish Apple wasn't so secretive, this sort of thing makes an excellent tech talk at conferences.

Ooh; that's not good, not good at all.

The biggest reason for Windows' dominance for the better part of almost two decades was its insane backwards compatibility. Of course, this also created a myriad of problems for bloat and security, but it was pretty much one of their biggest selling points.

It's gotta be just as good as Apple's, or nobody's going to care, point-blank. They'll just buy a Mac and put Windows in a VM. You might even get better performance.

Is there anyway to get it from the outside of the US?

Half the speed of a chip released close to 3 years ago

Qualcomm is bad

> ECS (Elitegroup) LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop

The squircle design aesthetic looks nicer than the latest 32GB memory new dev kit. Extrude up the shape to a squcube or stack three cubes as modular compute units with a unified memory plane. The Microsoft Windows Dev Kit 2023 exterior has no design effort on the exterior. Wish industry would give dev-consumers the choice of microkernel, user space, window manager kind of like how vehicles come in varieties, avoiding Windows avoids the heartache of the security hamster wheel by being different

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