Windows Copilot Runtime
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
This is quite an incredible achievement from Qualcomm. I'm very excited to get one of these and install Linux on it. And, stoked to see if future iterations of the Steam Deck eventually make the jump to ARM.
Maybe this wouldn’t affect ARM that much, that CPU is more obscure and with low volumes is a less of a target of interest (in the context of PC systems). But with more obscurity you wouldn’t even know where basic and most likely exploits can be based.
If there ever was a time for Linux to really compete with Windows, that time would be now when Windows will break software compatibility to a large degree.
That really was Windows' big killer feature.
But from what I can read, the compatibility layer is not perfect, and for instance games cannot be expected to just run or run well enough to be playable.
If you are at the point where Windows apps cannot be expected to just work, then why not use wine (and proton for games) instead, on an ad-free system?
Because they don't have to learn a new OS. I love Linux but inertia is a powerful force. I don't think swapping one compatibility layer for another is enough to entice the average person.
The ads, maybe, but I don't think most people care that much. Linux is a hard sell to people that don't want to care about compatibility layers, don't mind advertising that much, and grew up on Windows.
Exactly everyone's immediate thought on this, lol. That the thing runs Windows is mostly a distraction.
In general, Linux runs worse on laptops than Windows does. Many laptops have HiDPI displays, which Linux's graphics stack simply can't deal with properly. Track pads, fingerprint sensors, hybrid GPU set-ups, even external monitor arrangements are amongst the many issues Linux struggles with to this day. Linux has issues with pinning CPUs to a higher frequency than idle, and hence exhausting laptop batteries real quick.
I am loathe to see what having an entirely new hardware stack vis à vis Qualcomm will do to Linux installs on these.
Yep someone is literally standing next to a river with a net catching chip bag wrappers and drink bottles and sending them back to the computer factory.
- 20% of the plastic in the entire device was recycled?
- 20% of the plastic in the box (as the context implies) was recycled?
- 20% of the recycled plastic was ocean-bound and the device is all or mostly recycled plastic?
- Is it some sort of 20% plastic-grade and the plastic was all ocean-bound?
- Did they capture ocean-bound plastic somewhere, used 20% for these boxes, and released the other 80% back into the ocean?
- Did they mean specifically "Ocean Bound Plastic" as a specific term (OBP) and not "ocean-bound-plastic" as a generic term? In that case, this website explains [0] that it would be 80% of all plastic that would end up in the ocean and that certifiable OBP is not commercially recyclable [1]. So... it's not OBP by definition then as OBP excludes all plastic that can be recycled commercially and this was?
- ???
When I clicked the 'Learn more' link next to it, the figure wasn't in the source page. There doesn't seem to be any source page for this, although a lot of news outlets are quoting it (in different interpretations). It seems like they were trying to greenwash something, though that article is wishy washy anyways.
[0] https://www.obpcert.org/what-is-ocean-bound-plastic-obp/ [1] https://www.obpcert.org/what-are-obp-credits/
And yet they make Home instead of My PC the default when opening Explorer, which then causes reads over the network if you happen to have network shares mapped and the whole thing to take several seconds to load. Microsoft has rather schizophrenic decision-making and zero will to fix things, they just keep building on top of the existing pile of garbage.
> But I'm almost certain this has been a thing since like, Windows 7
Well, that only underscores my point on the zero will to fix things.
If you’d rather have File Explorer open to This PC, on the ribbon, select See more > Options > Open File Explorer to:. Then select This PC > Apply.
If anything, it’s infused in every layer of this press release.
> We look forward to continuing to bullshit with you, our developer and Bullshit community, to bring bullshit to our bullshit and tools, and bullshitting each of you to create future Bullshit bullshits that will bullshit every person on the planet
Is this a South Park episode script?
Okay… What does that even mean? And why does the company think we want that?
I love me some AI, but right now it’s getting put on everything like Nutella at a hipster eatery.
For example, some of the latest Intel Xeon CPUs have 8x 1KB registers that can perform only one operation: matrix multiply (and accumulate results). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Matrix_Extensions
Generally this is very similar to the Vista-era Microsoft requirements for PC manufacturers, where it was a logo requirement to include a GPU that could be used to accelerate composition in the desktop window manager, such as transparency effects and blur. (Prior to that, low-end PCs had "graphics cards" that were fixed pipeline and not programmable /general purpose.)
Now Microsoft is forcing PC manufacturers to do the same kind of thing, but instead of a GPU it's now an "NPU" that they have to include. This can be a CPU instruction set, a co-processor, or a GPU baseline capability. The requirement is 40 teraoperations per second.
IMHO, 40 TOPS is way too low, and doesn't focus enough on memory bandwidth. Also, that 40 is total across CPU+GPU+NPU, which means in practice it'll require fiddly optimisation to get anywhere near that level of performance.
Windows Vista had the same issue, where many low-end laptops especially would struggle and spin up their GPU fans just from desktop workloads, let alone gaming...
For an ultra-mobile tablet or laptop, this is... reasonable, I suppose.
For a desktop, it's quite a bit behind the current-gen tech, let alone "the future".
Like I was saying, this is aiming for where the puck was, not where the puck will be.
It's the same thing as Vista GPU requirements. Vendors will do the bare minimum that ticks the checkbox, but in practice it'll be useless garbage.
Modern AIs require > 1 TB/s memory bandwidth, > 128 GB memory capacity, and > 1,000 TOPS of compute to be really usable locally, not just technically capable of "running".
"AI infused at every layer" is like saying "we build our software with the best Agile(tm) practices". The customer doesn't care how you built the software, the customer cares what your software will do for them, and all "AI" means is "we probably have a deep learning inference engine somewhere under the hood, but no promises".
Companies were selling "Media PC's", and Windows ME stood for Millennium Edition or Media Edition depending on who you asked.
And people think the word "content" is overused now...
This "AI" bullshit is just another nail in the already nailed shut coffin.
LPSTR do_thing(LPSTR prompt);
if (do_thing("get a mutex or whatever it's called") == do_thing("What's the happy return code for getting a mutex?") { ... }