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Comment by quitspamming | Hacker News Reader

> (Or is supposed to be?)

I would be happy to eat my words "later this year" (per their timeline) but past Surface interactions lead me to believe it will be more of the same as in the past. Bad performance, bad battery life, bad build quality, bad compatibility.

For the sake of competition and options, I really hope to be proven wrong... I just wouldn't bet on it.

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> bad compatibility

I’m curious what this means. Bad compatibility with Windows software? Or bad compatibility with Linux?

This is an ARM device, so presumably compatibility with third-party software.

I was referring mainly to Windows software, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign were major pain points on the Windows side. Sure though, add Linux compatibility to the list of things that were an issue too.

In some ways.. since Microsoft is known for maintaining backwards compatibility whereas Apple is not, I think 3rd party devs are just not incentivized to care about Windows ARM compatibility.

Further, it doesn't seem like Microsoft made x86 emulation as seamless or performant as Apple did during the various MacOS CPU architecture changes.

Every use case I've looked at has been a minefield of app incompatibility and poor performance under x86 emulation.

For music production for example - https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/windows-on-arm...

Sounds like you aren't familiar with Nvidia's dedication to low-power ARM SOCs. Ever heard of the Nintendo Switch before? The Tegra inside that is a 15w TDP gaming SOC. And it supports CUDA (somehow).

> Sounds like you aren't familiar with Nvidia's dedication to low-power ARM SOCs. Ever heard of the Nintendo Switch before? The Tegra inside that is a 15w TDP gaming SOC. And it supports CUDA (somehow).

I think that GP comment is not intending to throw shade at ARM SOCs (many of which are quite nice, including those from Apple an Qualcomm), but specifically the Microsoft products built on them.

I'm mostly surprised by the insinuation of bad performance or battery life. That's what will be ostensibly solved by putting an Nvidia SOC where a Ryzen or Intel one used to be.

Haha, if only it were so easy. Hardware is… eh… hard.

Has this chip actually been used in any real product yet? Nvidia has, er, a bit of a historical problem with overpromising and underdelivering with their mobile chips (in particular see the Tegra 2 and Denver); I would be cautious until there are real benchmarks. It's hard to describe any previous Nvidia general-purpose mobile chip as anything other than a failure.

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