2024 could be the year the PC dumps x86 for Arm, thanks to Windows 12
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
My gut says that Microsoft, at an institution level, can not coordinate and build software at scale because they have two opposing requirements:
1. Legacy software must continue to work
2. Rewriting large swathes of the OS is not in scope
MS will continue to add new paint jobs to the UI, more confusing layers for settings, and other "killer features" like ads in your OS, AI, and search that searches everything but your files until the world moves on to some upstart alternative with less baggage.
Keep in mind that the problem isn't having Windows build and run on an Arm chip - they already have that - but having all existing programs keep working as they did on the new chip without any perceived loss of functionality and performance.
And aside from Microsoft, i do not see Intel and AMD to stay still and go "oh well, it was nice while it lasted".
IMO of everything mentioned in the article, the most realistic option is for Microsoft to have the next Xbox use ARM chips instead of x86 as they'll have little existing backwards compatibility concerns (and can always benefit by selling existing games again for a new console :-P).
It's worth remembering that Dave Cutler was in charge of that transition. He's widely viewed as one of their best.
If Microsoft had a high profile project, until he retired, Dave was the go to guy to lead it.
Surely not relevant to the vast majority of consumers.
Developers and businesses may have old executables they still use. But those users can buy Intel based PCs.
But the music stops when the isa is completely different
If the same people who are now responsible for the Windows desktop are also responsible for the actual tech stuff, then god help us all though ;)
Edit: From the article: “Microsoft obviously already does Arm-compatible builds of Windows.”
B) Microsoft's x86 emulation on ARM is surprisingly good (based on my personal experience of running Windows 11 on Parallels on an M1 Mac)
Is this impossible for AI to do the majority of the work, then let specialists make it work?
1. they write a performant translator to run old apps on the new chips
2. they move to a faster processor
On the non-apple front, Qualcomm isn’t making faster chips than Intel or AMD; even the best translators are going to be very slow running legacy apps
When Apple transitioned to Intel the PowerPC platform was way behind on a performance basis. In this case it wasn’t deliberate. But when it transitioned from Intel to ARM, Apple was again way behind on performance compared to contemporary competitors, making the transition look better than if it was up to date.
If Apple had been at the forefront of Intel CPUs, the transition would have looked like a slight loss in performance for tremendous increases in battery life which most would have been happy with. But they weren’t so it looked like an increase in performance along with an increase in battery life, which made the transition a no brainer for Apple.
And they were able to do this because they tightly couple their OS with the hardware, so they can control the transition without having, say Acer stick macOS on a laptop that makes the M1 not look as great as the previous Apple Intel Mac.
The M1 launched two months after the first Intel Tiger Lake processors, so Apple was pretty much on-time for moving the 13" MacBook Pro off of Intel's Ice Lake, and it wasn't behind on performance: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1185g7-v...
The larger MacBook Pro was later moving off Intel and was using a very old (2.5 years) Intel CPU at the time the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched, but even comparing against the CPUs Intel had at the time for machines of that class, the M1 Pro's performance looks fine: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-11900h-v... And it's important to note that Intel themselves were largely to blame for the fact that the larger MacBook Pro was still using a 2.5 year old CPU: Intel never shipped Ice Lake processors for desktop or high-power mobile, so the Coffee Lake Refresh processors didn't have a successor from Intel until five months before the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched.
Apple transitioned after it became obvious that consumers were starting to prefer laptops over desktops, and Power PC (as well as Pentium IV) chips had problems with both power draw and heat.
As soon as Intel transitioned to Core, Apple transitioned to Intel.
Apple transitioned to ARM after Intel ran into the same issues with power draw and heat again,
Since printing and graphics were one of Apple's largest markets, they were better positioned in that market with good floating point performance.
It's also the reason that Apple showed off Mac vs. PC Photoshop performance so frequently in that time period.
But for real applications the 7940Hs, beats the Qualcomm even on Cinnebench Single core and multicore
They're going to need Rosetta-like translation performance to beat Intel. Which also begs the question: do modern Qualcoms even come with native 32 bit support? Unlike amd64, aarch64 has no 32 bit compatibility guarantees.
On Linux the situation will be very different. That's why I hope they release these devices for relatively cheap (because most applications and games will be quite slow) so Linux users can get good perf out of them for almost all native tools while Windows userspace catches up.
Microsoft's compatibility layers are pretty competitive. You get about 60% of the performance whereas Rosetta 2 is closer to 70%, which is impressive when you consider MS has no hardware bits to do that unlike Apple.
What has been more of an issue is the slow CPUs themselves. The upcoming Orion chips should perform similarly to M1 on x86 programs.
I'd add a point three to the above: Apple's own in-house software was ready to go when they launched the new chip.
3. They also ported the only apps who ran on Macs.
When Adobe, Autodesk, PTC, Cadence and so on, will have their programs ported to ARM, then yes, Windows will run on ARM.
I am not an expert but this claim sounds way to high.
> What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
They also ran the clocks slower for power efficiency.
also somewhere I saw that amd64 is better performance per watt than m2 or m3
It’s absolutely possible to get x86_64 to the same power/performance envelope as apple’s M series chips :)
And already very close to possibly passing ARM. We will see.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m3_max_16_cp...
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m3_max_16_cp...
So I’m not sure this matters because the statement in question is per core.
Have a throw-back to 1997:
https://www.josephpalmer.com/view/box.shtml
It is still dark inside that box. And the big boxes that count? Still locked in a dark room.
This thing far exceeds my expectations. I tought it would only be a "light travel" laptop, but I use it almost all the time. I'm using it right now.
It does not feel slow, almost everything just works (the exception is things that have device drivers that aren’t shipped with Windows 11) and I really can get 20 hours of battery. I used to be an Intel fanboy—never even had an AMD machine—-but I don’t think I’ll ever get an Intel laptop again.
Windows 11, web browsing, remote desktop work fine, and I even do some coding in Visual Studio C#/C# on it.
I've also used it to play World of Warcraft on the go again with no annoying fan noise. WoW actually has a native arm64 support on Windows, so that works very well.
We’ll see.
And I do heavily play boomer shooters so it’s likely I was impressed by performance of less demanding games.
Doom Eternal is one AAA game I definitely would want to play in Parallels but can’t because the Vulkan version is not new enough. I’m confident though that Microsoft could bring these APIs up-to-date on an “ARM PC” though, if it has capable 3D hardware.
The processor (mostly) is. The architecture, not so.
> A personal computer is a computer that is used by one person at a time in a business, a school, or at home. The abbreviation PC is also used.
[1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/persona...
To produce value you need to get away from bloat, not embrace it.
Linux has it's problems too, but it's open; so we can fix them.
Microsoft can't be fixed.
There's a lot of production software that maybe runs under wine/proton/etc with a lot of work. How does that prove your point? This stuff doesn't have really viable alternatives, that people who use it as a day job really would consider an alternative.
Also, here’s an experiment for you, pull some random 50 something from an Hr or accounting department, sit them in front of a laptop and have them do their job on Linux.
For values of "most" between 15% to 25% for an EE.
It’s not 2006 anymore unless you’re using one of those dumb linux distros. Anything Ubuntu- or Fedora- based will most likely work out of the box.