New Arm-Powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Aim Directly at Apple Silicon Mac | Hacker News Reader

New Arm-Powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Aim Directly at Apple Silicon Mac

arstechnica.com

33 pointsOptionOfT22 comments

This is major news, but not because of a new laptop is being released or because Microsoft is competing with Apple. From the news article:

> But today's new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are the first Arm devices to be the primary Surface offerings rather than a side offering, and they're the first to credibly claim that they can both outperform comparable Intel- and AMD-designed chips while offering better battery life, a la Apple's M1 chip in 2020.

Microsoft's ARM-powered Surface Pro sounds like the first credible step to move the whole consumer market away from the x86 family, and thus kill Intel's stranglehold on how people use computers as their daily driver. This is a historical change, and one which might as well spell the death of behemoths such as Intel. People are no longer bounded by an anti-competitive stranglehold on their choices to pick Intel products over any conceivable competitor, and this happens at a point in time when Intel is already struggling.

> outperform comparable Intel- and AMD-designed chips

sure, in some tasks

im sure the gamers will have a thing or two to say

what made the transition easier for apple was their rosetta translationlayer

i wonder if windows have similar.

If i recall, the video i saw on an arm-chip powered windows laptop from a while ago, the performance was terrible and a some software just wouldnt run

It does have a translation layer. Microsoft calls it Prism, which immediately made me think of the NSA's PRISM program, in which Microsoft was an enthusiastic collaborator. I guess this is a nice way to shadow search engine results for "Microsoft PRISM".

Dotnet managed code wouldn't need any translation layer, right?

I do wonder about this.

Is there something about ARM that prevents having a PCIe slot with an AMD / NVIDIA card?

And I suppose the game can be recompiled to ARM, for as long as you're not using any architecture specific code?

Genuinely interested in this. I had a MacBook Air M2 and the battery life was amazing, even when using VS Code w/ Docker.

I am wondering though what kind of contract MS has with Qualcomm wrt binary drivers. I'd hate for there to be a situation where you cannot upgrade your Windows version because Qualcomm hasn't released updated binaries, like what happens on Android. But then again, I don't know if this applies to Windows.

Windows has a mostly stable driver ABI, in all its history the ABI has only changed a couple of times, major milestones being during the 16 -> 32 -> 64 bit transitions, Windows Vista and Windows 8.

Man wtf is with macbook chips their nuts, my Macbook Pro M3, i was on like a 3 hour flight and i don't think it moved from 99% the entire flight, and i was watching a movie and some tv shows lol

Hopefully this will incentivize Microsoft to fix the current WSL virtualization on ARM chips.

Something's that's been broken for years now: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274

(also see this as a warning if you are considering a Microsoft ARM device)

> 16gb ram

Basically dead on arrival.

I still can't understand why the industry is stuck in such low amounts of ram. I had 16gb ram in my ThinkPad X220 from 2012 in like ~2015 (when 8gb modules were available).

Now it's 2024 and we're seeing brand new laptop models with 16gb models of *soldered* on board memory ?

Apples start at 8gb…

that's not an excuse.

Not intended as one. Merely something to indicate there is a market for it

Especially coming from electron happy msft

> Especially coming from electron happy msft

I don't understand what the problem is. Teams runs perfectly with 16 GB of RAM. Now, if you also want to run something else ... /s

I don't get why the electron Office apps are so much worse than the browser-based ones. Shit's mind boggling.

Soldered is the issue, not 16GB.

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