Windows on ARM Is Here to Stay
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It's really not a bad direction, the question is more is it the most interesting direction for most consumers when you include competition like Chromebooks on the low end and MacBooks on the high end.
I would posit in both cases the problem is extreme financialization. Both companies had such a large market share (and even a monopoly in certain segments) that the much-quoted but apropos Steve Jobs quote [1] applies. All these modern CEOs seem capable of doing is stock buybacks, cutting costs and raising prices where they can.
In the 2000s, Intel faced a serious challenge from AMD with the Athlon/Opteron architecture. Intel's failures were a continuation of their Pentium 4 architecture and the company was only saved by the Pentium 3, which became the Pentium-M and the Centrino platform then the Core Duo and the modern CPUs we have now. They're all Pentium 3 descendants.
What we've seen over the last decade is most people have enough CPU power so the move has been towards smaller, cheaper and more energy-efficient CPUs. We've seen this in phones and then tablets and now CPUs. Apple's move to ARM was really the nail in the coffin for Intel as it culminated a decade of not being able to respond to the market.
Intel is seemingly unable to respond to this trend. All Intel CPUs still have super-high TDPs and haven't adopted any silicon to boost AI performance, which is increasingly going to matter. I fully expect this to be further integrated into the M4 and later CPUs.
I, too, expect Windows on ARM to be here to stay because there are simpnly too many advantages to the platform and it's going to eat away at the consumer market in a big way because ARM laptops and tablets will give people what they want: smaller, cheaper and more energy-efficient computers.
Meanwhile Intel just goes from disaster to disaster. The move to 10nm became a running joke almost to the level of Duke Nukem Forever. Intel's once-legendary fab ability is seemingly being eclipsed by TSMC and ARM chips seem to be the primary beneficiary of that.
Lunar Lake claims 17W TDP with 48 TOPS NPU, https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-meteor-lake-npu-meet-intels-d...
After 10+ years of Windows ARM, I find these basic toolchain gaps inexcusable.
For what it’s worth, WSL on Windows ARM64 is pretty much great.
[0] I mean, they're not Google
> Snapdragon chips really shine in multicore benchmarks, overtaking all the other CPUs aside from Apple’s M2 Max and M3 Max.. Snapdragon laptops are generally cheaper than their Intel or AMD counterparts.. Qualcomm Dell XPS 13 is $200 cheaper and the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is $150 cheaper.. [upcoming Intel] Lunar Lake will be closer in design to Apple Silicon, with RAM incorporated into the chip itself, and Intel claims that getting rid of hyperthreading will decrease power consumption, so laptops with these chips will supposedly get better battery life
https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/qualcomm-spends-million...
> on-device AI features will eventually receive widespread adoption, but it will take several years for that to happen. However, the simple fact that we have another CPU option over Intel and AMD is already a big win among consumers.. the improved battery life with comparable performance that Snapdragon laptops bring will force x86 chip manufacturers to innovate on power efficiency or be left in the dust.
> Snapdragon-powered laptops have still precipitated some good sales numbers, with Copilot+ AI PCs raking in 20% of global PC sales during launch week. However, industry analyst Avi Greengart said that most users purchased these AI laptops for their better battery life, rather than their AI capabilities.
edit: the downvotes are kinda proving my point.
Even non-Apple stores that sell Apple devices like BestBuy or Walmart tend to have display devices you can try out.
doing heavy compiling work on any device will eat away your battery faster then when you do general use..
but even then, with that workflow while macbook might not give you the many hours of battery that apple brag about, it will still give you more time on battery then then most devices..
You could develop de code locally in your macbook in a nice interface, when you are ready to compile then you push the code to a remote git repo in your workstation that also would trigger the compile job, tests, etc..
Do the CPU light work locally and the CPU intense jobs remotely in a system that can have more powerful CPU proper to the task while also freeing your laptop from the burden this CPU intensive job that will make it hot and burn trough the battery..
but yeah, this workflow could work in whatever laptop\os you want, from a chromebook to a macbook..
edit: c'mon, don't complain about downvotes. You're getting downvoted because you're not offering a useful contribution, not because everyone in the world is an Apple fanboy.
(you can certainly debate value for money, though)
I don't doubt that it is subjectively for you personally the best device available.
As I said, I haven't tried the new ones. But clearly I can't trust people like you who claim objectivity where there is none.
Macbook is objectively one of the best general purpose devices out there.. and there is a lot of data and reviews out there to confirm..
But if you have specific needs, and that seems to be your case, then you need to test if your workflow will work fine on MacOS\Macbook, but then that will also be true for any OS or device..
Mac can be great for many specific use cases, video editing, photo editing are some examples..
For development it can go both ways, it could be great or terrible depending on many factors..
There's no excuse other than greed.
Apple is so aggressive about deprecation that it wouldn't be surprising if they remove Rosetta 2 within in a few years and kill any software which didn't get updated to ARM, just like they killed 32bit Intel software, and PPC software before that. Microsoft is never going to be able to do that.
Great, so let me access the hardware I paid for and throw the App Store out the window. They should be paying me for using that crap.
Take the Mac, for instance.
- 68k -> PPC: terribly painful, lots of ASM, emulation.
- PPC -> x86: hard, but mostly done in 2/3 years.
- PPC -> ARM: what transition?
On another note: Windows have (by default) tons of legacy to support a lot of different hardware Am I wrong to assume that that most drivers on ARM cpu running through virtualization? Does Microsoft actually build them or get them from partners to install on the system
Asahi works because open source devs working for free made it work by reverse engineering stuff.
But why should Microsoft spend the effort to make Windows work on Apple Silicon, when by far the biggest benficiary of that would be Apple who would sell more hardware? Apple should be the one to invest resources to do it. Not to mention that if Microsoft did it, Apple could throw a wrench in it at any time, leaving Microsoft with users that expect support that it can't support because Apple won't let it (or makes it more difficult than it needs to be).
This time around I'm not sure they have the incentive.
They have the resources to do all kinds of things they don't do for the same reason: why would they? What would they get out of it? Apple is nothing next to the smallest Windows OEM.
Asahi is also more a maker community reverse engineering Apple laptops, because they can.
A rounding error on the amount laptops Apple sells.
I’ve got zero tolerance for crashes and weird behavior and edge cases and whenever I tried ARM servers that’s exactly what I got.
Computing is unreliable enough without throwing arm into the windows world… it’ll be painful for sure. I can’t see any benefit in arm so compelling that I’d want it over the standard cpu architecture.
Compatibility is everything. It was different for Apple because they control the entire ecosystem and frankly their software engineering on cross compatibility was startlingly good. Microsoft doesn’t have that level of control plus it’s got windows cruft plus drivers and third party hardware and software and it’s hard to imagine a seamless experience. Why would I buy that…. what’s the benefit?
There will be problems, there absolutely has to be.
Users only start to care about these things when they start to get in their way. If a new ARM PC fails to run some legacy app that's critical to the workflow, then they'll discover that it's because their shiny new laptop has some weird new technology inside it. And then they'll hate it because the computer is no longer fit for purpose. On the other hand, if everything works, then they'll carry on with their lives as if nothing happened.
Meanwhile Microsoft ships apps that don't work on ARM, like Flight Simulator.
At work, there are some SAP development functions that required Windows, so people with MACs would beg, borrow and steal to get Windows on their MAC inside a VM. Apple's 'M*' chips ended that.
That was R/3, I do not know about the new version of SAP. I would think they would fully support Apple with that. But you never know.
Same for Windows on x86. The end.
Not in my experience. Maybe things are better now, but as of a year or two ago you still couldn't use a generic kernel on there. You had to have special patches. There's also a fair amount of packages that won't build on ARM. Raspbian is a pretty good experience and it shows they have put serious effort into it, but venture away from that and you're rolling some dice.
It's why ARM support is such a vendor-sensitive roller coaster. MacOS on Apple is easy, since they know their hardware, the RasPi foundation puts serious effort into making Linux etc. work on RasPis, but just look at how much Linux struggles on Macbooks, or how hard it is to run a current kernel on a 3 year old mystery Raspi clone that had no documentation and shipped with a custom Linux kernel binary.
The situation is slooowly improving, but we're far from there yet.
i think this will go a bit like secure boot.. it existed for ages, it only became a real available in every computer when MS got behind it and made it happen..
now you can install even most linux distros without a problem and it just work..
arm will be a pain in the beginning but having microsoft backing it might the best way to make it happen..
i am curious to see how microsoft, that historically aim to keep backward compatibility as much as possible, will handle such a braking change like this move to arm..
but one could argue that this breaking change might be what they need to just get rid of some legacy stuff..
> Qualcomm has most of the critical functions working inside.. Linux 6.9.. critical functions include UEFI-based boot support along with all the standard bootloaders like Grub and systemd.. Functions that are being worked on for future iterations of Linux include additions to battery support, on-board display connectivity, external DisplayPort connectivity, sleep and wake-up functions on the GPU, camera support, video support, better CPU frequency support, and speaker/mic/headset enablement. These functions are expected to arrive in Linux 6.10 and 6.11.