Technically, yes. If you look at the benchmarks, a VM of Windows on an M1 (base model) is significantly faster than both the SQ1 / 8cx Gen 1 and SQ2 / 8cx Gen 2 processors Microsoft included with the Surface Pro X (by like, 30%, it's not even close), though how it compares to 8cx Gen 3 / SQ3 is unknown. However, considering we're on M2 by now, and that we now have M1 Pro and M1 Ultra models as well... egh...
Sure - if you need all 32GB for development work, it is a great deal. But, with a processor slower than a midrange modern Intel laptop, good luck using it to its full extent without feeling quite slow. So slow you might almost prefer a 16GB M1 Mac mini with swap for the rest despite the VM.
Plus, if you read Microsoft documentation on Windows on ARM so far, Microsoft doesn't actually expect you to use an IDE on these machines - but rather run your code remotely on them. You'll be a lot happier with your IDE running on a more powerful machine. Of course, if you do that, the lack of a GPU on the M1 for a Windows on ARM VM becomes not really an issue.
But, with a processor slower than a midrange modern Intel laptop, good luck using it to its full extent without feeling quite slow
I have little recent Windows development experience, but I wonder if Windows on native Arm gets the same sort of latency/lagginess reduction that going from Intel to Arm on macOS does? Even if the raw processing power is less, I would be happy with the tradeoff if Windows felt even snappier.
I’ve developed on WoA plenty and it’s my primary Windows dev platform, but targeting it? Lol. I spin up an Azure VM for testing.
Any business which might have made use of this to take advantage of things like ARM devices being cheaper/more available than x86 devices (you literally can’t find an x86 tablet worth using for less than $400) long since ported to Android. Microsoft sort of missed the boat with ARM. Every time I see those little android based terminals littered around small businesses I think “man this sure is a business Microsoft lost for no real reason”
I wish Microsoft would support the WoA use case people could actually take advantage of. Using windows in a Mac VM. That would be by far the most effective way to get people to develop for the platform, not this product.
How is Snapdragon 8cx support on Linux? I recall seeing some basic dotfiles for the ARM Thinkpad when it hit shelves, but I haven't seen anything else. Is there a good chance it would run OOB on a recent kernel with this devkit?
I have mixed feelings about how successful this will be. The 32GB of RAM is really cool for the price - but 8cx Gen 3 is still no M1. It's still significantly slower than an 11th Gen laptop Core i5. Probably not super fun to develop on, even if serviceable - but considering nobody has cared about Windows on ARM to this point, why would you spend $599 to suddenly care about it, when WoA has far less than 1% of Windows PC marketshare?
Because Microsoft says it's the future? Microsoft is the worst at these promises. That's what they said about Windows 8, then Windows RT, the Windows Phone, the Windows Phone 8 platform, Windows 10 Mobile, UWP in General, the Windows Store, the relaunched Windows Store, Windows on ARM years ago, Project Reunion with XAML islands, Windows 10 S, Windows 10 X, Desktop Converter Bridge, the iOS Converter Bridge... I suppose they kept their promises with DirectX and that kind of thing. Right now, developer apathy for Windows is nearly insurmountable, and has been for the last decade, and Microsoft's constant changing of directions does not instill confidence.
Yes... and no. The Windows Store works way better now than it used to, back in 2015. Now it's finally serviceable, but it's still loaded with junk that makes the iOS App Store look well-maintained. Discoverability is still poor (better than it used to be), and the number of people actually using it also remains low. So... it works, but it was hardly the future of app distribution on Windows.
As for the Desktop Converter, it's in the same boat. For the first few years, all it was, was a pile of PowerShell scripts. No GUI, mediocre documentation, run a pile of scripts to package your app for a Store almost nobody uses. Also the command to package the app requires Windows 10 Pro and, like, 30 command-line arguments that had to be perfect in order to work. Now it has a GUI, and more people use the Store than before, but the Store has abandoned the need to use it and now allows just directly downloading unpackaged Exes, rendering it mostly pointless.
On the other hand, Microsoft had spot on bets on operating systems, Internet, 64-bit, cloud, gaming consoles, managed runtimes, programming languages, high-end consumer PCs, Linux integration, and open source (albeit late).
Yes, they might have dropped the ball on more than one thing. You're especially right about Windows app ecosystem today, but it's not like Microsoft is constantly failing. They're doing phenomenal job on many fronts. They're certainly not that easy to write off.
Same here - with 32GB of RAM I could easily replace my main home server (which runs NixOS, so I can easily just rebuild the system for aarch64). I wonder how quickly people will get Linux running on these...
You'll need to wait a bit until a new device tree comes for these devices. Given that support for the ThinkPad X13s with the same SoC is coming along... going to happen pretty soon.
For others similarly interested, it turns out "X13s" is not "multiple X13 models" but rather "X13s" is the model number: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/th... and is currently listed at USD$995 for "Gen 1" and all the way up to USD$1570 for the high end
Snapdragon chips have pretty good Linux support. And the GPU driver is in a good state with Freedreno for desktop use. So probably a decent chance of it being functional shortly.
I don't know why you would buy one, even if it were available, unless power-efficiency was a crucial component for a server. Can you imagine what you could get, on eBay, in a small form factor, for $600?
I made off with a i3-8100T (about 3/4s as powerful, 35W TDP), with 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD in an ultra-small-form-factor case for less than $150. For $600, it makes absolutely no sense against anything used. Let's say it drew 50W vs 20W total use at 10 cents per KWh. It would take 5 years to save $130, if you ran it 24/7/365. A $450 used Intel small-form-factor system would run circles around it in performance (especially after any emulation / code conversion) and you'd break even.
Imagine for a second there are other countries in the world.
Now let's say in Europe, just one of them was called "The United Kingdom", where after a recent (temporary) energy price cap, electricity prices rose to _only_ 36p/kWh (41 cents US at current rates), and further rise are expected, and the cap had an end, bringing us potentially to double the current uni rate, then do the maths again and see why it might be a "crucial" component for many.
Running old, cheap hardware with high power usage has been impractical here and many other parts of the world for quite some time and that was before recent disastrous rises.
Problem is, we are not talking about 10 year old hardware. I find it sadly more likely that hardware from 5 years ago will consume less than hardware from a couple months ago. I myself have an x86 atom where the entire system can idle at <2W, which is no easy feat unless you start reusing phone hardware...
In case it was not immediately obvious, this discussion is not about the Surface RT, but about the Windows Dev Kit 2023. It ships with a different Windows version, on a different Arm architecture, with different policies regarding locking down.
And? "In case it was not immediately obvious" by me specifically pointing an MS ARM device, MS's "policies" when shipping ARM devices have been much more locked down than x86. Around 50% of ARM devices released by MS so far have been completely locked down, incapable of running anything except for some version of Windows. Not just "FUD by nerd circles".
All ARM64 Windows devices have been "bootloader-unlocked". That has been the case for the last 5 years. Windows RT and Windows Phone devices are literally irrelevant to this discussion regardless of your anecdote.
In the past 5 years, how many ARM devices has MS released, other than the Surface Pro X ?
My "anecdote" is actually the majority of MS's history so far. You just can't claim it's scaremongering when they have released so many locked down ARM devices it's hard to remember all of them, and definitely easier to just remember the few "unlocked" devices they have ever released (just the X?).
And also "obviously" we should mention that even in the so-called unlocked Surfaces you are still forced to entirely disable Secure Boot in order to run Linux or _anything else_, with the consequences that implies. For example, it is dubious you will be able to load future versions of Windows, since those will require SB to be on (W11 already officially does, even if it doesn't seem to enforce it -- yet). A properly unlocked device would allow you to load your own signatures while keeping SB enabled.
> In the past 5 years, how many ARM devices has MS released, other than the Surface Pro X ?
Two Surface Pro X and one Surface Pro 9. I intentionally said "all ARM64 Windows devices", without restricting it to Microsoft ones, no matter how many there have been: it remains the current platform-wide policy, regardless of the FUD.
The rest of your comment is either strawmanning or shifting the discussion further away from where it started and I don't find it worth responding to.
Two devices compared to dozens of locked ones including the original Surface as well as the 2nd RT.
> I intentionally said "all ARM64 Windows devices", without restricting it to Microsoft ones
And how are non Microsoft devices relevant to a discussion of a Microsoft device? You made the same point before...
> The rest of your comment is either strawmanning or shifting the discussion further away
In case you didn't notice, all your 3 replies so far have been filled to the brim with _accusations_ of FUDing, irrelevance, strawmanning and whatever without even mentioning what is irrelevant or why. Everything I say is apparently an irrelevant anecdote, even thought it is actually the historical trend of MS ARM released devices, and the anecdote if anything is the last device only. Why are your arguments any better exactly?
I have a N6005 box from AliExpress ($180 bare, about $300 with 32Gb RAM and a nice 512Gb M.2 nvme) that runs a bunch of workloads (Proxmox VE on the metal, opnSense in a VM doing all my routing, plus 4 LXCs with 20+ Dockers for various services).
Just looked over the energy report and it's averaging 0.18kWh daily (so the average power draw is 7.5W) - that's with a 3.5in SATA HDD. Better power use than my Raspberry Pi 4 with an external USB HDD!
If low power consumption is your main motivator, I'd say you can do a lot better with one of those instead.
"Microsoft tells Windows Central that the Windows Dev Kit 2023 is exclusive to Windows 11, with no official support for running other operating systems such as Linux or even Windows 10 on ARM. The product is designed for developers looking to optimize their apps for ARM on top of Windows 11."
That doesn't really mean anything. No laptop released by Microsoft or most of its OEMs officially supports Linux. I'd wager this one will be running some ARM distro within 5 minutes of the first developer getting their hands on it.
> No laptop released by Microsoft or most of its OEMs officially supports Linux.
I disagree that "Most OEMs don't officially support Linux". Lenovo supports Linux on 17 laptops released in 2022 alone [1]. Dell also has a similar effort, with Linux supported on the 2022 XPS 13 Plus [2] among others. HP has its DevOne[3]
But at the moment, I don't know of an modern, high performance ARM laptop with official Linux support.
The closest thing I know of is the Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin Dev kit by NVIDIA[4].
>I'd argue that Microsoft entering the mobile OS market is worse than having a duopoly
We need something. I’ve lost all faith in the hardware direction of iPhone. The 14 Pro (let alone Pro Max) is an absurd monstrosity. And Google clearly has no interest in innovation beyond copying Apple.
They've lost any sense of maintaining a cohesive design, or keeping things sleek and convenient. Performance has plateaued to a level of diminishing returns, so the only way they can get people to buy a new phone every year since iPhone 7 is to say "hey we put a bigger camera on it".
I have this recurring fantasy of an alternate history timeline where Steve Jobs never died, and when an engineer brought him the first iPhone 7 prototype, he held it in his hand, flipped it over, felt the camera bump, and said "You're fired. Get rid of the bump". I just refuse to believe he would have allowed this to happen, and I refuse to believe that we can't have good cameras without bumps.
> And Google clearly has no interest in innovation beyond copying Apple.
I disagree, I think both platforms have copied plenty from one another. I used to jailbreak my iOS devices to get similar functionality to Android. Hasn't been necessary for awhile, I feel like the platforms are near parity now, but claiming one is copying the other (with no reciprocity) seems farfetched.
Personally, I would like to see more "convergence" devices that let the little computer I carry around with me be anything I want it to be: a programmable general purpose computer, a streaming media server, or whatever else I want.
There are some projects that offer such functionality, but most require expert knowledge to setup or are not very widely-adopted or not very mature:
Okay. So they are “out there to try”. Have the majority of users been clamoring for it?
> Personally, I would like to see more "convergence" devices that let the little computer I carry around with me be anything I want it to be: a programmable general purpose computer, a streaming media server, or whatever else I want.
And you are in the modernity and so much so that it wouldn’t be a profitable business. Do you think Microsoft is going to give you that?
> Walled gardens are not where innovation happens because the gardeners uproot whatever does not meet their vision.
Where are all of the “innovations” that the majority of people care about - or even enough to make a profitable business - on Android where you can sideload and have third party web browser engines?
>> You really don’t think you’re out of touch with what most users want?
I don't claim to speak for what most people want. I think having more options than iOS and Android could help promote more consumer-friendly choices.
>> Yes because using an operating system from the other 1 trillion dollar market cap company is going to be a better alternative. Meet the new boss...
It would be another choice. Yes, they have similar incentives, but more choices help to drive innovation and keep all players competitive.
>> And you are in the modernity and so much so that it wouldn’t be a profitable business. Do you think Microsoft is going to give you that?
No. Microsoft is a better position than many to be a third choice in smartphone platforms, but they have shown poor initiative in the mobile space. They could try again or it could be some other organization with sufficient know-how and daring. (Something disruptive like Tesla or Starlink perhaps?)
>> Have the majority of users been clamoring for it?
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse." --Henry Ford
"Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do." --Steve Jobs
>> Where are all of the “innovations” that the majority of people care about - or even enough to make a profitable business - on Android where you can sideload and have third party web browser engines?
Android is innovative because it is more open than iOS. Even more innovation is possible given the right circumstances.
> I don't claim to speak for what most people want. I think having more options than iOS and Android could help promote more consumer-friendly choices.
Using Linux on the phone with the lack of integration, the poor interface etc is the opposite of “consumer friendly”.
Normal consumers are not asking for the ability to “program their phone and run media servers”.
> Android is innovative because it is more open than iOS. Even more innovation is possible given the right circumstances
>> Using Linux on the phone with the lack of integration, the poor interface etc is the opposite of “consumer friendly”.
Who said anything about using Linux on phones? I agree that a third smartphone platform would need to be user friendly. Whether based on Linux, OpenBSD, QNX, Symbian, or something is just a technical detail.
>> Normal consumers are not asking for the ability to “program their phone and run media servers”
No one asked for iPhone. They were quite happy with their Blackberry and Treo phones. My personal wants for a smartphone are not why having a third smartphone platform would help innovation and competition in the current stagnant duopoly.
>> “Open” is not an “innovation”.
Yes, but "Closed" sucks for everyone but the platform owners.
>> If you ask 99%+ of phone users. They don’t care about a “closed” phone platform anymore than console owners care.
No one cares until they are personally impacted.
>> And failing miserable. The market has spoken.
Markets shift with time and circumstances. Those on top will not be there forever.
>> And yet, it wasn’t “open standards” that brought any of the “innovations” to the market that users care about.
Most users are ignorant of the standards that they rely on. iOS and Android are built on POSIX standards and rely on numerous networking and telecommunication standards. The Internet and World Wide Web that people use their smartphones to access are built on standards. The "magical" experiences that Apple sells to users would not be possible without a veritable book of engineering standards:
>> How many decades have Linux advocates been promising the “year of the Linux desktop”?
I am not sure why you keep pulling Linux into the discussion. Just because Android uses Linux does not mean that other smartphone platforms would use it.
Not the OP but I've had this thought as well. Microsoft has an almost unassailable position on desktop even still. If they had a solid position in mobile they could probably expel Android/iOS from enterprise with the same bundling tactics they use to push out different software on Windows with their own (often but not always) inferior offerings. From there the consumer space would be weaker and enterprise may start to ignore iOS/Android altogether. iOS and Android may well be to entrenched at this point for this to be a realistic fear, but based on how aggressively Google reacted to Windows phone (The youtube app fiasco) I think they at least worry about it a great deal.
Ideally, we'd have 3 or more fairly evenly matched and interoperable OS choices on mobile and desktop but that doesn't seem likely to happen. Trapping the monopoly inside it's own castle may be the best we can get.
I feel similarly about people calling for Apple to open iOS up to different browser engines. Idealistically that is what I believe should happen, but realistically I think it would just result in Chrome being even more dominate. For the same reason I lament the death of IE and even the original Edge. I don't personally use IE or Safari but I benefited from them existing and having decent market share.
> Would you rather have an expensive device that you barely control or a cheaper device that spies on you?
It is unclear to me if modern Windows actually still spies on you any less than Google at this point. My feeling is if still does, it isn't by much.
>> Microsoft has an almost unassailable position on desktop even still. If they had a solid position in mobile they could probably expel Android/iOS from enterprise with the same bundling tactics they use to push out different software on Windows with their own (often but not always) inferior offerings.
>> It is unclear to me if modern Windows actually still spies on you any less than Google at this point. My feeling is if still does, it isn't by much.
Microsoft is in a good position to be a strong third contender in the mobile space, but that does not mean that they would be better in all aspects.
>> Ideally, we'd have 3 or more fairly evenly matched and interoperable OS choices on mobile and desktop but that doesn't seem likely to happen. Trapping the monopoly inside it's own castle may be the best we can get.
Yes. That is why I would like to see more choices with hopefully better treatment of consumers and developers. Right now consumers have limited choices and the mobile development experience is agonizingly painful. It seems like an opportunity for disruption, but the entrenched players are dug in deep and probably nearly impossible to dislodge.
(And let’s set aside the how they’d possibly be able to compete with the scale, market penetration, marketing spend, and mature app ecosystems of iOS/Android and Apple/Samsung.)
Privacy? Lack of advertising? Respect for the user’s choices? From the company that brought you Windows 11? Why does the world sorely need another closed-source operating system full of telemetry?
>Privacy? Lack of advertising? Respect for the user’s choices? From the company that brought you Windows 11? Why does the world sorely need another closed-source operating system full of telemetry?
Yes, I’m pretty sure that the Mac Mini is good as a machine for developing Mac and iOS applications. I have myself used it for this purpose in the past, and it worked very well.
There's a lot more use-cases though, of both systems.
If you want a "good" small computer and you already have a screen (or want to buy cheap ones) then these systems are fantastic.
Performance is completely fine for moderate-to-heavy workloads (assuming the heavy workloads are bursty) for the Mac mini, and hopefully this.
Both systems are what you would get if you didn't need a display or keyboard already, they're desktop replacements with a small footprint, and fantastic for the majority of computer workloads including a lot of development ones.
I imagine Dr. Su a couple of years ago whispered to a couple of lead technicians "you are going to start a little garage side project here at AMD; it will be the future"
I think I have to get one. To replace an obsolete HP Steam. I was gonna do the Mac Mini, but I don't think the M2 model is out yet. Just worry about Win ARM compatibility across remote desktop, citrix daas, etc ;)
I have a mac mini as a desktop in my home office and actual office, multiple screens, and almost all my windows are either browsers or shell windows to my Linux dev server. I've never developed a MacOS or iOS app.
They should give them away. I’d never spend $600 on any kind of windows product. Maybe we can install linux on it? But you’d have to be smoking crack not to buy a mac mini m1. It’s the best computer I ever used hands down
When Apple released its $500 ARM dev kit ahead of the M1, they offered a $200 credit in exchange for return. Something equivalent seems appropriate here. This isn’t meant to be a computer for mass consumption so shouldn’t be compared to the M1 Mini.
It seems to be priced relatively cheap already with 32GB Ram and a 512GB SSD. A Mac mini with only 16GB of memory already costs nearly twice as much and I really wish there were a 32 gb mini at all. I like my Mac mini, but I hit the memory limit from time to time.
Rumors claim a M2 mini in the next month, with a max of 24GB ram. Even more interesting is the rumor there will be a M2 pro mini which doubles the max ram and adds more CPU/GPU perf.
I don’t know if Windows on ARM has a future, but, IMHO, almost anything that encourages more happenings in the ARM ecosystem is a benefit—the whole world has gone mobile, and its longer battery life takes the cake over its more powerful x86/amd64 counterparts.
> Oddly, what I'd really like to see is ARM enter the NUC space. Maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like be able to pay $200-400 for a small, low power usage, decently performant machine. The 8th generation Intel NUC are good, but 28W TDP and it'd be nice to get it much, much lower than that. I know these are a small fraction of the overall market but personally I think it'd be cool.
Once you want something more powerful than Raspberry Pi or a board based on a mobile SoC your options whittle down considerably. There are "mini/micro" PCs but they don't touch the lack of power consumption.
I've always been tempted by them but the price per compute power never got to the point where I wanted to pull the trigger. I don't fault them at all for their design choices, they make complete sense, but I wanted the box to be more compute/memory heavy.
Intel might take exception since it was supposed to be their thing for their ISA, but you know what? “Next Unit of Computing” is a lot more apt here, at least from a Redmond perspective.
You'd think the actual NUC would be the ultimate perfect WinTel machine—I mean, it's right there in the name!-but I can't even get the Windows installer to boot my NUC.
If the ethernet port doesn't support multigigabit Ethernet, that is a shame. WiFi 6 is great, but we need more development, deployment, and support of multigigabit ethernet for corporate and enterprise customers!
There’s little point to such a feature for the intended use case, which is just to run some VMs to test builds on. At $600 with 32gb of ram multi-gig is asking a little much.
Not it's not, even $150 SBCs like odroid-h3 can have 2x 2.5gbit ethernet ports.
For server usecase this is very unbalanced as far as connectivity goes. Say you want to use the modem or wifi for internet access. Modem gives you 5gbit/s and you'll get out to your network just 1gbit. Wasteful, and it needlessly limits the opportnities.
That would likely be stretching the USB interface to the limit. Ethernet is full-duplex, USB is not.
Also this SoC doesn't even seem to have proper publicly available datasheet, and whatever marketing stuff qcom has on their website doesn't list USB at all, lol. So for all I care it can have just one host controller. Not interested in SoC with no datasheets, when it's not possible to answer basic questions about the SoC, like how many USB host controllers it has...
Break the build tools for their cash cow about once a month, and forbid anyone from developing for it without spending thousands of dollars on new hardware?
The M1 was November 2020. That’s two years ago, give or take a few weeks.
There is nothing close to the M1 available for a Windows ARM computer. There is nothing close from Intel/AMD if you just want an ultra-low power chip with very good performance.
I think the Newton was the first major use of the architecture outside the Acorn Archimedes.
"...an advanced, low-power processor was needed for sophisticated graphics manipulation. He found Hermann Hauser, who had developed the Acorn RISC Machine that utilized what became known as the ARM architecture, and put together Advanced RISC Machines, now Arm Ltd."
HDMI connectors cost a lot of money to the HDMI licensing authority. This payment is very painful if you have a small quantity of shipments. DisplayPort is free. And as others have pointed out, you just need to buy a cable.
Is there a list of things that are worse with 11? I had it pushed on one of my less frequently used devices and so far all that has been annoying has been the Explorer context menu which hides "less used" items (some of which I frequently need, of course) behind a "More" entry.
Personally I find Windows 11 fine although the decision to make the start bar only icons instead of icon + text is a bit bizarre in today’s trend towards (ultra)wide monitors.
- Taskbar cannot be pinned to the side on my widescreen monitors
- Items on taskbar cannot be un-grouped
- Cannot show text on taskbar
- News/weather widget is awful, full of clickbait news and tiny Weather widget, which is vastly inferior to having a live tile that opens to a full screen weather app
- Reduced start menu customization (live tiles / grid are replaced with folders that add an extra click)
Other than that I haven't used it enough to comment much more. I have it on my laptop which is mostly just used for gaming, and I can tolerate the taskbar and start menu regressions. But for me, most of using Windows is... using the taskbar and start menu. To take away most of their functionality seems like complete insanity!
Oh my god, so much this one. It's driving me insane. I keep hoping that the next round of Start menu "improvements" bring it back, but I keep getting disappointed.
This tool [1] can solve all of your Windows 11 problems. I simply refuse to use windows 11 without the full right click context menu. This open source program does that, and much, much more. Smaller task bar, grouping/ungrouping icons. So glad I found this.
They basically tried to remove everything that needs a 2nd mouse button. Plus many keyboard shortcuts are gone. It looks and feels like an iPad to me, not like an environment to be productive in.
Windows 10 (and perhaps 8) was the beginning of Windows as spyware and adware that exists to manipulate rather than serve the user (outside of past obscure edge cases like Windows's anti-piracy mechanisms and disabling debugging on audiodg.exe). Now we have forced Microsoft accounts at install time, gaslighting users for switching off Edge and sending your Edge browsing history to coupon clipping sites, telemetry in Windows and Visual Studio and every time you open a MSVC command prompt, Visual Studio phoning home your menu searched to the web for "cloud AI menu search results"...
It continues to suck how African countries are excluded from these product launches and from many products in general.
Microsoft has enough partners and regional offices because Office365 and Azure are the only worthy products for us in "shithole countries".
If Microsoft isn't intending on selling a lot of these devices, the cost of adding 1 or 2 African countries would be relatively small compared to the revenue they make from our regions.
I mean, expensive Macs came out, costing twice the shitty HP/Lenovo/Dell enterprise offerings with poor thermals and battery life. We bought them.
I would buy this device if it was for sale in my market, I see a benefit in testing my work on Windows ARM64.
Do we have any sense of how much of this is driven by privacy regulation? Newer versions of Windows have been more aggressive about collecting user information, so this would not at all surprise me.
Given that they are launching in some of the EU countries, not much. That said, I do hope their data harvesting breaks some laws somewhere and they get fined handsomely. This trend is atrocious.
I'd have to look. My previous employer spends a life changing amount of money on Azure. MS has a lot of local partners. They have an office here which seems adequately staffed (might be mostly consultants).
I'd say 90% of South African businesses use Office365 to done level.
We have Xbox subscriptions. When the Xbox came out, people bought it.
On the surface, Microsoft should be making decent revenue. It won't compare with the revenue from the 8 markets they chose. However that's my point, if they include smaller markets strategically in some launches, it can benefit them in the future.
"The Windows Dev Kit 2023 is now available to developers in 8 countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States."
Seems odd to leave India out while keeping China on the list next to France before Germany. Apple is going to manufacture the gadgets in India and the former Indochina region.
Will be interesting to see the memory capacity on the next new Mac Mini expected in one or two month.
The difference here is that the M1 in the M1 mac mini is faster than Apple's phone SoC (the A16).
The Qualcomm 8cx gen 3 (what a terrible name) in this machine is NOT faster than even Qualcomm's phone SoC (the 8 gen 1), let alone Apple's phone SoC.
It's absurd to be selling a desktop PC that's weaker than a phone.
It's a chicken or the egg dilemma. Non-Apple ARM is too slow, so nobody wants Windows ARM, and nobody wants Windows ARM, so nobody is seriously working on consumer-targeted ARM. It will probably fail because Microsoft is generally bad at managing and marketing their hardware projects and coordinating with manufacturers and retail partners. Also, yeah, the pricing and performance is abysmal. But there is some sense to trying to lay the groundwork for future ARM SoCs running Windows.
Right now, the biggest driver for Windows ARM adoption is, ironically, Apple's M1 and onwards because of people running it as a guest OS through Parallels.
Also, frankly, I'm okay with Microsoft failing at projects like this. We don't need another Apple-like presence on the market.
I’ve gotta agree with you there. I love my Apple gear, but I hear and understand the criticisms against them. The above argument sounds to me like “you think one monopolist is bad? Wait until there are 2 of them!”
No, in the non-Apple world, Microsoft doesn't drive the computing industry. It's market-driven coordination between a multitude of manufacturers and retailers where no one instance has control over the others. Apple is a vertically integrated monopoly that effectively rules all its partners (from apps to hardware) with an iron fist and can push its decisions on users (and partners) unilaterally.
So no, I don't want Microsoft to become another Apple.
From my point of view, Microsoft failing to do what Apple does is a good thing because it means there's some semblance of a working, competitive (if imperfect) market. They can't force other companies to dance to their tune.
XBox is a great example of horrible mismanagement that cost Microsoft many billions of dollars, was almost abandoned, and went through a very rocky path to get to where it is today which is still frankly not that great of a position (it lags behind Switch and Playstation):
Don Mattrick almost tanked that entire product and it survives today because Phil Spencer miraculously managed to turn it around after all of the previous leadership was forced out of the company.
>XBox is a great example of horrible mismanagement that cost Microsoft many billions of dollars
Guess what, so was the first NES, and the first Play Station, the first Game Boy, etc. for their respective companies.
Breaking into a new market, with a new product, in uncharted waters, with no prior experience, with no support from clueless executives who don't believe in the new product looking for any reason to stop you from burning cash, endless turf wars such large and expensive projects create, makes it is hard, brutally hard, for any company to succed on the first try.
>and went through a very rocky path
The Xbox 360 sold 85 million units, one of the best selling consoles of all time.
The first NES and Playstation were MASSIVE successes for their respective companies, as was the Gameboy. In fact, the NES is credited with single handedly putting an end to the video game crash of 1983. The Gameboy sold out in a matter of weeks and Nintendo managed to sell every single Gameboy that it produced for the course of its first two years.
Here's an article about how massive of a success the original NES and Gameboy were and how it revived Nintendo as a company:
I have no idea where you got the idea that any of those products were mismanaged or cost those companies enormous amounts of cash and in fact those specific examples are among the most successful product launches in video game history.
>The Xbox 360 sold 85 million units, one of the best selling consoles of all time.
The XBox 360 is the best selling console from Microsoft and ranks 9th among all consoles behind the Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Switch, Gameboy, and Wii.
>The first NES and Playstation were MASSIVE successes for their respective companies, as was the Gameboy.
I never said they weren't successful, I said they were also mismanaged during development like you said about the xbox, because management at Nintendo did not believe in the product.
>I have no idea where you got the idea that any of those products were mismanaged
Documentaries and war stories on youtube rabit holes.
>in fact those specific examples are among the most successful product launches in video game history
Today it's easy to say that with hindsight, but before they were launched, during their development, many in the company did not believe in those projects would succeed at all, leading to many internal fights and turf wars.
Also, Nintendo has a number of fuckups that bombed as well. Anyone remember the Virtualboy? Or the Wii-U? Gamecube also didn't sell too good.
The only thing that moves Nintendo merch is their exclusive IP (Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, etc), as their HW products are mediocre at best both in technical capabilities and in quality.
Can you please link to a Youtube video or article indicating that Nintendo management thought the Gameboy or NES would be a failure or that Sony thought that the Playstation would be a failure.
I am looking at some quick sources that I can find, and it looks like the complete opposite, that the management at Nintendo was very eager to develop a home video game console based on the success of their arcade games. They believed in the NES so much that when Atari bailed on its partnership agreement with them (due in no small part to the video game crash of 83), they went ahead and decided to do it alone.
Here is an article that was posted to HN awhile back that does a very deep dive into the development of the NES. It's an excerpt from the book "Console Wars" and it does not paint a picture at all like the one you're suggesting:
"Yamauchi wanted Nintendo to aggressively get into the videogame business, which was really two separate businesses: home consoles and coin-operated arcade games. He saw the potential in these industries and took the necessary steps for Nintendo to enter both."
As an FYI, Yamauchi was the President of Nintendo.
I'm not sure what point you're making here. As the OP said, you took some anecdata about the Xbox's issues and speak about it like it was a disaster. They had problems, as did Nintendo and Sega (as talked about in Console Wars). It certainly wasn't all roses. Sega stopped building systems altogether!
The Xbox 360/One outsold the NES/SNES. That's amazing.
I'm not the one making a point in this thread, I'm refuting the laughably false point that the other person made that the NES, Gameboy, and Playstation were mismanaged and ended up costing their respective companies significant sums of money.
>As the OP said, you took some anecdata about the Xbox's issues and speak about it like it was a disaster.
What anecdata are you talking about? I linked to a source on the subject and not just any source, it's an interview with the head of XBox, Phil Spencer. I have also followed up every single one of my posts with a reputable source.
OP claims that they also have sources that suggest that Sony and Nintendo did mismanage the launch of their respective consoles in a manner that cost them significant amounts of money, so I'd like to review those sources.
The fact that he was actively replying to me until I requested some evidence to back his claims is a strong indication that those sources never existed.
>The fact that he was actively replying to me until I requested some evidence to back his claims is a strong indication that those sources never existed.
I stopped replying to you because I saw you have a bone to pick and I have a life to live rather than trying to win an online argument with you.
The sources are on youtube, feel free to use the search function and watch them at your own convenience and make your own opinion. Good day sir.
Just have the decency to admit you have no source, maybe you misheard something, instead of doubling down on your ignorance. It's unbelievably pathetic otherwise.
> The Xbox 360 sold 85 million units, one of the best selling consoles of all time.
Define the best? It is 10th in a list of consoles that sold at least one million units. It sold less than console release later and went through even rockier path - PlayStation 3.
> so nobody is seriously working on consumer-targeted ARM.
Consumer targeted arm chips power most phones and tablets. Many of them are more than a handful for i5 and i3 class Intel chips and draw a lot less power. When you are talking about a $599 price point, you aren't talking about top-shelf Intel, anyway.
> But there is some sense to trying to lay the groundwork for future ARM SoCs running Windows
Now that ARM has grown up to be a viable alternative to Intel, this makes a ton of sense.
Outside m1/m2 there isn't any chip that can be compared to i5 intel 13 gen especially for PC space [that is in the same price bracket]. (maybe some arm chips can get close to i3 12100f but you can get it for 90 usd and get good single core performance so im not sure if in this price point is even any arm alternative)
what's the incentive for a chip manufacturer to put out a better ARM chip (eg comparable to the Apple M1)? I don't know that world well, so my best guess is that the margins go to the OS manufacturers, so unless you have guaranteed commitment from MSFT for a given volume, and some sharing of the margin, it's too risky to invest in the R&D to make a better ARM chip. The market for x86 chips is large and known, so for someone like Intel, it makes more sense to invest in the i3/i5 than in a new line of ARM. But that's all speculation - would love to hear the perspective of someone who understands the industry better.
Apple has done pretty amazing things with the m1. IMO the most unique part is scaling memory bandwidth.
The vast majority of PCs are running 128 bit wide memory, with workstation CPUs like the threadripper (and pro) being the exception, but a VERY small fraction of the market.
The M1 has 128 bit wide 67GB/sec peak (that you'll never see) bandwidth, like most PCs. Upgrade to the Pro and you get 200GB/sec. Max will take you to 400GB/sec, and Ultra takes you to 800GB/sec.
On the Intel (i3, i5, i7, i9) or AMD (ryzen r3, r5, r7, r9) you get ... the same memory bandwidth. Check the 8 core vs 16 core scaling numbers and for most benchmarks you'll see poor scaling. Sure you can increase GPU performance by adding GPUs, which reduces (but not removes) the need for extra memory bandwidth. Sadly iGPUs (outside the XboxX and PS5) largely stink and are only good enough for non-GPU intensive workloads. Apple on the other hand does scale GPU performance, granted not to the levels that AMD and Nvidia do.
So why can't anyone in the PC space do more memory bandwidth and a decent iGPU, especially when for years the GPUs were in short supply and had exorbitant prices. I think it does come down to OS support, volume (which could be problematic if current GPU customers avoid you), and potentially reducing profits for AMD (who would have sold an expensive external GPU). Not to mention that fast/wide ram requires soldering chips on board or increasing size/cost with large banks of ram. Even servers with 8 memory channels (minimum 8 dimms) only get you to the M1 pro level (1/2 of the m1 max and 1/4th of the m1 ultra).
Apple can say we have X% of the market today, and all new customers will be on our new platform with 2 years, so the driver, OS, iGPU, memory bandwidth, etc will be amortized over substantial volumes. Additionally Apple gets a larger fraction of the revenue, since they aren't paying Nvidia or AMD for a GPU. Who is going to push a MBP or Apple studio competitor that could ship the same volumes?
Long term there is a huge market for server-oriented CPUs that can compete with Intel Xeon, which currently has a near monopoly in the server market. Note that a lot of companies are already working on this: Ampere (ARM), Amazon (Graviton3, etc.), and likely Nvidia, Rivos (RISC-V), etc.
The best of market ARM designs don't really compete head-to-head with Xeon right now, but there are still a ton of server applications where they make already make sense. As a simple example companies like Google and Facebook have hundreds of thousands of servers that are doing things like running memcached or running some application like D/GFS where the server is mostly just doing a lot of I/O and doesn't necessarily need really beefy single-threaded CPU performance.
Longer term obviously if there are ARM or RISC-V CPUs that can compete head-to-head with Xeon in terms of features and single threaded performance then that opens up pretty much the entire enterprise/server market.
If my new zCPU chip is 60% as fast as a Xeon at your task, that’s a problem.
If it can do it at 40% of the Xeon’s power, things get interesting.
I could use twice as many zCPUs, be 20% faster, and use 20% less power. That also means less cooling capacity in my DC.
Some tasks will always need the absolute best single threaded performance. But a lot don’t. And the Xeon’s power requirements leave a large opening we’re starting to see other companies poke at with things like Graviton.
> what's the incentive for a chip manufacturer to put out a better ARM chip (eg comparable to the Apple M1)?
Intel & AMD’s consumer and/or server market share.
I can’t imagine going back to an Intel after an M1. The battery life is better. It’s dead silent. It doesn’t get warm. It’s like a totally different kind of object.
I know PC people (those who want Windows) aren’t interested in an M1 Mac. That’s fine.
But I see PC laptop reviews with 4 or 6 or maybe 8 hours of battery life. They get hot but the fan isn’t “too loud”. And I know the performance isn’t the same.
And I just wish reviewers would call it out. They’re not on the same level. I’m sure fanboys would complain about the comparison in every review, but why shouldn’t Windows users have something much better? It’s been proven possible. Hold AMD/Intel/Qualcomm to the fire more.
If Qualcomm could get a chip with reasonable performance at a reasonable price that just doesn’t get hot and waste all its battery playing space heater, I bet they could really get a hold on the laptop market.
Data centers know power/heat is everything. I’m not surprised they’re leading the way.
But as a consumer you’re stuck. You should have a machine with the performance of any normal/good laptop with way better thermals and battery life.
I’m not sure what the Uber-high end laptop would look like but surely it would do better than today.
The scale needs adjusting. What counts as “too hot”, “too short battery life”, “minimum performance.”
It all should have changed. But it didn’t. The industry acts like Macs are magic and therefor incomparable. “Of course that Boeing goes faster, it’s a jet engine plane. You can’t compare that to our cars.”
They’re both computers. It can be done. So why are Intel/AMD/Qualcomm getting off the hook to such a degree?
I just don’t understand it. It’s almost like Stockholm Syndrome or something. “Intel is nice to us, who are we to complain?”
>The industry acts like Macs are magic and therefor incomparable.
The cheapest M1 is $1300 in Canada. MacBook Pros are well over $2000. These prices are far beyond the budget of the majority of computer users. They are also beyond the requirements.
>Of course that Boeing goes faster, it’s a jet engine plane. You can’t compare that to our cars.
No, it's like comparing a BMW to a Honda. You spend a lot less money and then are surprised it doesn't perform as well?
Yes, the MBA is more expensive than most people would want to pay.
But it’s also not comparable to those laptops. It has a very high quality Retina display, the all-metal unibody construction, and Apple’s infamous profit margins.
There is no reason to think putting a similarly efficient processor in an otherwise standard PC laptop would raise the price much. Heck, Intel loves there margins too.
I don’t think the chip is too expensive. It’s all the other choices Apple makes that push the price up so much.
The solution to chicken-or-egg problems is known: you spend money to just overpower the problem. But MS and Qualcomm aren't doing that; they're half-assing their ARM hardware to save a little money.
Lol, Qualcomm is Oracle of hardware world. Buying a company is a no way an indicator that they want to do anything. They haven't delivered a good SoC since Apple released A7.
To name what? Subpar SoC that looses in benchmarks compared to older A14? If it weren't for patents Qualcomm holding, there would be so many good SoCs on a market.
Except for the fact ARM is suing them to prevent using any of the Nuvia tech in their chips, since the license terms with ARM didn't convey with the purchase.
There is a good chance they get on the verge of shipping and find they can't actually sell any of their new chips...
Does Qualcomm actually need to whole-ass a solution though? They're making gobs of money on mobile SoCs, any additional market for these chips is just gravy. Microsoft is the party that stands to really gain from a successful x86 alternative here but they don't seem like they're willing to pony up Apple or Google money to design their own chips yet.
Qualcomm is fully capable of building an SoC with eight X2 or X3 cores, for example, if MS is willing to pay for it. I think it's on MS that they didn't set higher performance goals for Qualcomm. Nvidia can also design good ARM chips (see Orin) but MS went and got married to Qualcomm (never do this!) so they can't use them.
>The solution to chicken-or-egg problems is known: you spend money to just overpower the problem.
Ah yes, "just spend more money" has solved so many problems over the years. Can anyone even name a single time a lot of money was spent and the product failed? Victory is practically guaranteed!
Close. The original NT targeted an experimental Intel cpu called i860 (RISC based) nicknamed “N10”. NT was, according to Wikipedia, a play on words for the target cpu architecture.
From Wikipedia: “One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten")”.
NT was always supposed to be multi architecture (MIPS, Alpha, IA-32). I’m not sure what happened to i860.
> It’s either MS keeps up or the future ahead is dark.
You say that as if Apple will become some sort of PC-market hegemon, driving consumers and professionals to use its proprietary ARM hardware and OS despite having traditional Windows- or Linux-based workflows, simply because Apple's ARM is just so much faster.
Here's the third option: nobody cares what Apple is doing over in its corner of the PC market; the PC market remains an x86 market; and it continues to be driven by the needs of corporate buyers buying 1000+-part orders of PCs to outfit entire (non-IT!) businesses with; where those businesses don't care about having the fastest computer, but simply need "a" computer, with support and parts their internal IT department can swap out when needed; where the biggest factor driving purchases is TCO; and where TCO is driven down by commoditization and competition, not by vertical integration.
This still misses a large risk for Microsoft. Business software is moving to web apps. The orders of 1000+ PCs you've described will be soon replaced by BYO personal devices (who's owners prefer vertical integration like Apple for ease of consumer use) and Chromebook esque devices which are even cheaper than traditional PCs for a business.
I wish Apple's proprietary computing platform keep niche but continue building good products. However iPhone become top share on some market and perhaps is it much higher share on enterprise?
PCs and "sealed consumer information-consumption appliances" (phones, tablets) are different market verticals — they will never converge, because the buyers of them have different needs that result in mutually-exclusive design constraints.
Even in Japan, where "nobody" owns a home PC, offices are still full of PCs; nobody is being handed a Macbook to do their work from, let alone a phone or tablet.
In my opinion, it's perfectly fine for Apple to win the "sealed appliance" space — since ~everybody else (your Samsungs, your Xiaomis, even Google) is just trying to do the same proprietary vertical-integration play that Apple is doing in that space; they're just worse at it than Apple is.
In contrast, Apple will never win the PC space, since their whole market strategy — "give people something different that forces them into our ecosystem" — is (and always has been) anathema to how boring, non-IT businesses want to use computers. Even companies whose workflows depend entirely on macOS "killer apps" (like desktop publishes back in the 1980s), who begrudgingly buy Macs to fulfill those needs, constantly lobby their app-developer ISVs to go multiplatform, so that they can toss out the Macs and revert to doing the same boring PC-centered IT that every other company around them is doing.
(And do note that Apple isn't trying to win the PC space. They were trying, historically — maybe up until the year 2001 or so. But ever since the iPod, and then the iPhone, Apple's strategy has moved to treating the Mac as a halo product category — a nice-to-have for those already in the Apple ecosystem for other reasons — rather than as something that's going to usurp the PC in its place one day. It's why, around that time, they killed XServe and Airport routers: they saw no further benefit in attempting to achieve corporate ubiquity, rather than complementarity.)
> . But there is some sense to trying to lay the groundwork for future ARM SoCs running Windows.
They've been doing exactly that since Windows 8, if not earlier. Perhaps the Year of Windows on ARM is somewhere around the corner from the Year of the Linux Desktop
I think we are on the ... third? ... attention cycle for this? Because they were trying pretty hard when W10 dropped too
At least according to this related blog post[0] (and submission[1]), they've put in work, albeit not as thorough and effective as Rosetta 2.
> To boost performance, we have added vendor-specific optimizations so your apps run well on a variety of Arm hardware. We have several runtime improvements to targeting server throughput (RPS) and latency.
Windows 11 can run AMD64 applications on ARM64 through a JIT, similar to how Rosetta operates [0]. I don't know if anyone has tried to compare them in benchmarks though.
8cx gen 3 is definitely faster multicore and about the same singlecore. The 8cx chips also have a wider memory bus and pretty massive GPU in comparison the the mobile parts. Looks like also far better cooling than a phone or thin and light laptop here as well.
Yeah I don't know what the parent is talking about Gen 3 is lightyears ahead of Gen 1 of this line of chips. Passmark has it at 4k for Gen 1 and 11k for Gen 3.
If you're referring to my comment, I'm not comparing the 8cx gen 3 to 8cx gen1, I'm comparing 8cx gen 3 (this desktop/laptop chip) to 8 gen 1 (QCOMM's flagship phone SoC).
As I said in my comment, QCOMM's naming sucks. cx is their desktop/laptop line. They have no designation for their phone line, so the confusion isn't surprising.
Exactly. Apple have the advantage of being able to tell consumers that if they want a new Mac, then they get no choice. They'll have to buy an M1 or M2. Despite of this Apple knew that M-series computers needed to be better than the previous Intel lineup, and noticeable so.
An ARM based Windows computer isn't a bad idea, I just question if Microsoft is able to deliver on it. Picking the same manufacturer, who repeatably failed to deliver usable ARM processors for desktop and laptops seem like a obvious mistake. This isn't their first attempt either, so why would I trust that this won't fail, like the last time? Apple had done this before an architecture transition before, Microsoft haven't, and I doubt they have the will to ensure that it will succeed. They are too tied up in the x86 world, too busy with Azure and they don't have the attention of the consumer market.
In terms of price, it's really close to the Mac mini. Factor in performance, then this thing is a bad deal.
The form factor is right for many uses, but I don't get who the potential buyers are.
>> An ARM based Windows computer isn't a bad idea, I just question if Microsoft is able to deliver on it.
Microsoft has already executed and brutally failed with ARM in the form of the disastrous Surface RT/Windows RT.
But, and more importantly.
Two people with unlimited resources are running a race car race.
One starts a year or two before the other. Even with unlimited resources; the other racer/team has unlimited resources, too.
So let’s say they can both reach a maximum of the speed of sound.
Apple’s already been going the speed of sound for a couple years now; they also have the advantage that their vehicle in the race has software and hardware that are married.
Microsoft is not only nowhere near the speed of sound, but even though they also have unlimited resources; they are severely hampered by separate hardware and software, with the exclusion of their surface tablets, whose previous incarnation of this race car model crashed and burned on the race track.
This isn’t a race where MS can or will catch up. They’re already years behind. Not that I encourage anyone to use an OS with built-in ads anyway. Just use Linux at that point.
If MS showed up with a backward compatibility layer as good as Apple’s Rosetta, they’d instantly be a strong competitor. Maybe not for gaming systems or high-end workstations — at least not immediately — but in the huge space of people who want a battery sipping laptop with access to a vast amount of software they’re already using.
I don't think MS needs to push this if they want to succeed, they need to start making a consumer friendly machine that Windows runs fantastically on.
For an "acceptable" laptop, the price point is already pretty close to $1000, and before I would have a tentative recommendation of MacBooks/Macbook Airs because of the learning curve of MacOS. With M1/M2 and how much better it is than anything else on the consumer market, I openly recommend it to anyone in the market for a new consumer machine. Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine.
I was discussing this with a colleague last night, but the M1/M2 chips and complimentary hardware let Apple do some amazing stuff out of the box without adjustment that Windows simply has no answer for. The integration of the complimentary hardware with the M1/M2 chips is so strong that I stumbled onto features I completely missed announcements on, and it legitimately "wow'd" me.
- Live Text caught me off-guard while drag/drop-ing an image to a chat app. I couldn't stop testing its limits and reading the dev docs
- I took surprise calls from really crowded + noisy places and was in disbelief that my call partners couldn't hear anything but my voice in crystal clear quality
- I ran games and software that just weren't possible on Intel Macs through Rosetta at pretty fine FPS/quality without incident
- I didn't need to change a single program from my workflow
Microsoft can likely do the same but they need to put the legwork in to make it happen. Personally I understand they have no interest in this and it makes sense -- they want you on Azure with your server workloads and this keeps the lights on at Microsoft, and as best I know the consumer market (not considering gaming) still favors Windows. But I guess that's why projects like this confuse me a lot since it must be a pretty substantial RND and manufacturing cost, neverminding advertising, but Microsoft doesn't seem to have their heart in it.
It's not about backwards compatibility - consumers don't need to keep Windows 3.0 apps running, not a statistically significant portion anyways, they just need modern apps to run fast and well, long battery life on portable devices, quiet machines, and that's it, but seems that this just isn't something Microsoft is interested in taking over.
I really can't think of Windows features in decades that "wow" so much as you just know what you get with Windows regardless of the version in terms of basic features; what worked on Windows XP probably works on Windows 11, but even that is starting to erode in a slow and painful way. There are quite a few programs on Windows I get the impression that Microsoft just doesn't want me to be running, but things like the Windows Store, Windows' implementation of security for unsigned apps, etc, these all feel like Microsoft isn't confident enough to fully invest into these new features or to drop them in order to advance.
Microsoft definitely has the talent and cash reserves to pursue a strong consumer laptop to compete with Apple; for whatever reason, they don't seem to have the interest though for consumer devices. Probably the simplest reason is the server market is theirs and this is plenty of money, but I just can't get why they continue with such forays then.
Edit: just elaborated on price point for consumer laptops and recommending machines.
> Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine.
I don't expect "casual" gamers setup Wine+Proton+MoltenVK. It's better to say that let's play game on PlayStation. If you mean really "casual", they play on iPhone.
I think the primary reason that windows rt failed totally is no software can run on it at all. Not only you can't run x86 software. You can't even download random executable and run it. It is basically killed by ms itself. It is always a mystery to me that why ms would expect user to buy a device that nearly run nothing.
It looks like they want to address this. But I wonder if they will succeed this time.
>It is always a mystery to me that why ms would expect user to buy a device that nearly run nothing.
Because at the end of the day, Windows RT was a creature born of greed. They saw dollar signs- Apple's 30% App Store cut- and as such wanted a machine that forced you to buy software only from them. There was no technical reason that normal software couldn't run on Windows RT, given that MS themselves did it with Office.
So confident were they that this would work that they threw the tablet features onto Windows 8 proper, relegating the reason people buy computers to a secondary function- after all, paying MS for the privilege of developing software was going to be the New Way forward. Besides, don't you want security?
I'll be curious to see benchmarks but it would be funny if Windows for ARM running in Parallels on an M1 MacBook Air ends up being a better dev machine than an official Windows for ARM dev box produced by Microsoft.
I think the point of this machine is to give Developers a test bed for apps they port to ARM Windows.
However, given that it took Microsoft more than a decade to decide to port their own Visual Studio to ARM Windows, I'm not sure why they think third parties are chomping at the bit.
If Microsoft wants to copy Apple, they need to copy the decision to immediately port all their first party software.
At 700€ price tag what a gift! It's 3-400€ too expensive for a very dispensable toy, especially given that the managed stack (.net) of Microsoft development tools can be tested on Raspberry Pi or M1, which are both very popular with developers.
Yes, I've mentioned elsewhere that they really should have gone all in on copying Apple and not only make the Dev kit cheaper, but issue a credit on future hardware purchases if the Dev returns the Dev kit when they get done porting their software.
It's not like you want to keep something this underwhelming forever at that price point.
By the way When the fuck did 32GB become an entry requirement, I am so saddened by the crappy software and stacks that treats memory like an infinite resource
GP was a dig at Microsoft Teams being utterly bad software that not only uses absurd amounts of memory for a chat app but also hogs all kinds of resources while still being generally laggy on high-end machines.
Agree. Further I nowadays see crappy software developers instead of being apologetic or at least modest, claim some kind of moral high ground along the lines of "This software wouldn't even exist if not for our accomplishments, so be thankful to us"
I'd hope some one have already or will write thesis on correlation between Rise of Javascript stack and narcissism in software industry.
The only dev environment that I know of where 32GB is an entry requirement is Professional (i.e. non-trivial, non-hobby/learner) Android development. You certainly do not need it to develop Windows applications.
Sure, Apple's got the superior ARM silicon. But an alternative take is that this SoC is plenty fast for non-poweruser desktop use (which should be the majority of users).
You don't need top shelf performance for browsing the web, checking your emails or writing some docs.
If people didn't want top-shelf performance why would they be using a desktop, instead of a phone, tablet, or laptop? Isn't performance the whole point of desktop?
A Mac mini with otherwise comparable specs (32GB RAM, 512GB SSD) is nearly three times as expensive as this Microsoft machine. I don't think it's fair to expect a CPU that beats the M1 or phones that cost more than $599.
M1 has 4 high performance cores called firestorm, and 4 energy efficient cores called icestorm. Same cores that are in the A14 which is in the Iphone 12.
Since then the A15 came out with some efficiency and performance improvements, it's in the M2 IPad and M2 MBA and presumably several future apple products.
The A16 has some efficiency and perfomance tweaks and is what's in the recently released iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.
So sure, the M1 in the M1 mac mini might have more power, cooling, and cores than the iPhone 14 pro, but the cores are actually slower at the same clock. Sure a phone will hit thermal limits sooner than a SFF PC.
It is a dev kit, for preview, I'm guessing them going with cheaper, available, to get software builts out that perform on shit hardware, is better than developer on better than consumer grade equipment only to have the applications choke when consumers have it.
I admit I'm disappointed in the showing, and I think that Microsoft not loosing out on this market is important to them. I'd be willing to be bet 2nd gen of this will likely be produced by a 3rd party vendor.
The Apple dev kit was about two thirds the speed of an Intel Mac Mini. Microsoft or Qualcomm hasn’t shown us what their production PC Arm chip will look like.
It really depends if they did their homework related to thermal management and ventilation. Some phones have relatively fast cpus but they throttle so quickly because of temp that power can only be used in short bursts.
I get it’s way harder for Windows but they failed the first time but Apple succeeded because they went all in for the M1. Windows ARM is doomed to fail with such fragmentation.
Maybe I am missing the point, but why wouldn't you rather buy a NUC instead of this slow box? I get it MS wants to be like Apple, meticulously copying anything that pops up there, but their brand is associated with different "experiences" and their main value lies in backwards compatibility and open hardware ecosystem.
The point of this is that it's an Windows-on-ARM devkit; you can't buy a ARM NUC that'll run Windows AFAIK (Intel doesn't make ARM machines), and you can't test ARM software natively on an x86-64 NUC.
Having worked with Windows on ARM in the past, I _hope_ you're right. But my experience has been that a ton of code is still going through the x86 emulation layer, which IMO is woefully lacking in performance, particularly compared to Apple's Rosetta 2 (which is a magical marvel of engineering).
I learned this lesson the hard way during the AMD Phenom era. Core count are not a good representation of performance because the 8 "big" cores could be blazing fast or be secretly powered by a hamster on a wheel. What is the actual benchmark performance on real applications you might use? Thats what matters at the end of the day.
And here's the difference between Microsoft and Apple: When Apple switches to ARM, people believe them. When Microsoft switches to arm, people ignore them. Why? Because Microsoft only ever half-asses such changes (see the terrible SOC in this).
They have no better choice. Name me, today, a desktop class ARM SoC that isn't made by Apple and represents the median performance band of the class.
Fundamentally, ARM Holdings is what Antitrust legislation was supposed to break down. They own the "ARM" name and control who can license the ARM IP and most importantly, how.
Ampere, the folks behind a lot of ARM servers, are by contract barred from getting into the market of making ARM chips for phones, desktops, or otherwise. That's the form of their license: Server-grade 96-core behemoths running at 3+Ghz and with the thermal output of a small space heater.
ARM holdings sets all sorts of weird restrictions and forces market segmentation to make sure that nobody "Accidentally" makes something that they don't immediately approve of. Qualcomm is basically locked into making phone SoCs for all eternity until they renegotiate their license with ARM holdings. They're in a shit situation because they have competition all over the place (Allwinner, Rockchip, a legacy Intel series, NXP, and Samsung to name a few), letting ARMHoldings bully them into not making something that rocks the boat too hard.
Apple pulled a massive show of force in making ARM license them desktop grade chips. You see, Apple has been a license holder for ARM for a bit now (with the Ax series chips) and makes up, ballpark, 15% of worldwide phones and now >50% of US phones. Apple had already idly said "we could... you know, not use an integrated solution" when they fiddled with Intel's radio baseband.
For ARM to try and sue Apple for breach of contract for developing the Mx series of desktop class ARM processors and get away with it, they'd be putting their market share dominance in four different major markets at risk. Qualcomm can't do that.
So that leaves Microsoft, who does not want to get into the processor fabrication business and who is still reeling over the antitrust lawsuit 20 years ago (which, I'll point out, was mostly over a shared text mangling library, for what it's worth) out in the dust looking for options, and the option they get is "Whatever Qualcomm will ship them."
Let me play my tiny violin for the Gigacorporation Microsoft that was so unfairly treated by ARM that they just had to take "Whatever Qualcomm will ship them". Poor Multi Billion Dollar, they never had a chance to compete on a fair playing ground.
Nah, this is just organizational incompetence. The same reason we got cortana, windows 8 or adds in the start bar.
> Apple pulled a massive show of force in making ARM license them desktop grade chips. You see, Apple has been a license holder for ARM for a bit now (with the Ax series chips) and makes up, ballpark, 15% of worldwide phones and now >50% of US phones. Apple had already idly said "we could... you know, not use an integrated solution" when they fiddled with Intel's radio baseband.
> For ARM to try and sue Apple for breach of contract for developing the Mx series of desktop class ARM processors and get away with it, they'd be putting their market share dominance in four different major markets at risk.
As I understand, Apple has a special license with a lot more leeway than those held by other companies thanks to Apple having been one of ARM's founders[0], so they may not have had to do any negotiations at all since they had the rights from the get-go.
I think another considerable difference is that Windows global footprint is 10x that of MacOS, so Microsoft has to keep both backwards compatibility and OEM's production plans in mind.
There is nothing for people to believe or not believe. MS cannot cannot discontinue x86 overnight because their OS is used by a much larger proportion of the world.
> There is nothing for people to believe or not believe. MS cannot cannot discontinue x86 overnight because their OS is used by a much larger proportion of the world.
Apple managed a competent compatibility layer, albeit with some special sauce in the SOC to make it fast. Is that too much to ask from Microsoft?
Windows is a general purpose OS, which is why it dominates two enormous markets: business software and games software. Microsoft will usually err on the side of developers because of this. The two companies' philosophies will of course be different.
If MacOS had similar mindshare in those markets, Mac developers would probably ask Apple to avoid overnight changes like the discontinuation of x86 Macs.
MS still provides security updates for Windows 7 despite its EOL occurring nearly 3 years ago. This is because many organizations still run critical software that they cannot shift away from, for whatever reason. Apple doesn't have to do that because no hospital or airport is running their logistics on MacOS.
Even with all this baggage, Windows on ARM has been available in some form since 2012's Surface RT.
Well when the M1 came out it was dramatically better than everything else available to Mac users outside some small use-cases (like Mac Pro + multi-GPU).
People would have mostly wanted it anyway.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with this hardware.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadPlus, if you read Microsoft documentation on Windows on ARM so far, Microsoft doesn't actually expect you to use an IDE on these machines - but rather run your code remotely on them. You'll be a lot happier with your IDE running on a more powerful machine. Of course, if you do that, the lack of a GPU on the M1 for a Windows on ARM VM becomes not really an issue.
When that happens it doesn't matter what CPU I have, things are nearly locked up.
I have little recent Windows development experience, but I wonder if Windows on native Arm gets the same sort of latency/lagginess reduction that going from Intel to Arm on macOS does? Even if the raw processing power is less, I would be happy with the tradeoff if Windows felt even snappier.
Any business which might have made use of this to take advantage of things like ARM devices being cheaper/more available than x86 devices (you literally can’t find an x86 tablet worth using for less than $400) long since ported to Android. Microsoft sort of missed the boat with ARM. Every time I see those little android based terminals littered around small businesses I think “man this sure is a business Microsoft lost for no real reason”
I wish Microsoft would support the WoA use case people could actually take advantage of. Using windows in a Mac VM. That would be by far the most effective way to get people to develop for the platform, not this product.
Has that changed? Otherwise it's nonviable at $DAYJOB,
Because Microsoft says it's the future? Microsoft is the worst at these promises. That's what they said about Windows 8, then Windows RT, the Windows Phone, the Windows Phone 8 platform, Windows 10 Mobile, UWP in General, the Windows Store, the relaunched Windows Store, Windows on ARM years ago, Project Reunion with XAML islands, Windows 10 S, Windows 10 X, Desktop Converter Bridge, the iOS Converter Bridge... I suppose they kept their promises with DirectX and that kind of thing. Right now, developer apathy for Windows is nearly insurmountable, and has been for the last decade, and Microsoft's constant changing of directions does not instill confidence.
https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-intel-...
As for the Desktop Converter, it's in the same boat. For the first few years, all it was, was a pile of PowerShell scripts. No GUI, mediocre documentation, run a pile of scripts to package your app for a Store almost nobody uses. Also the command to package the app requires Windows 10 Pro and, like, 30 command-line arguments that had to be perfect in order to work. Now it has a GUI, and more people use the Store than before, but the Store has abandoned the need to use it and now allows just directly downloading unpackaged Exes, rendering it mostly pointless.
Yes, they might have dropped the ball on more than one thing. You're especially right about Windows app ecosystem today, but it's not like Microsoft is constantly failing. They're doing phenomenal job on many fronts. They're certainly not that easy to write off.
edit: Was off on pricing of the Mac mini by $100.
I made off with a i3-8100T (about 3/4s as powerful, 35W TDP), with 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD in an ultra-small-form-factor case for less than $150. For $600, it makes absolutely no sense against anything used. Let's say it drew 50W vs 20W total use at 10 cents per KWh. It would take 5 years to save $130, if you ran it 24/7/365. A $450 used Intel small-form-factor system would run circles around it in performance (especially after any emulation / code conversion) and you'd break even.
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...
Anything power hungry gets really expensive quickly for home use, these days.
Now let's say in Europe, just one of them was called "The United Kingdom", where after a recent (temporary) energy price cap, electricity prices rose to _only_ 36p/kWh (41 cents US at current rates), and further rise are expected, and the cap had an end, bringing us potentially to double the current uni rate, then do the maths again and see why it might be a "crucial" component for many.
Running old, cheap hardware with high power usage has been impractical here and many other parts of the world for quite some time and that was before recent disastrous rises.
My "anecdote" is actually the majority of MS's history so far. You just can't claim it's scaremongering when they have released so many locked down ARM devices it's hard to remember all of them, and definitely easier to just remember the few "unlocked" devices they have ever released (just the X?).
And also "obviously" we should mention that even in the so-called unlocked Surfaces you are still forced to entirely disable Secure Boot in order to run Linux or _anything else_, with the consequences that implies. For example, it is dubious you will be able to load future versions of Windows, since those will require SB to be on (W11 already officially does, even if it doesn't seem to enforce it -- yet). A properly unlocked device would allow you to load your own signatures while keeping SB enabled.
Two Surface Pro X and one Surface Pro 9. I intentionally said "all ARM64 Windows devices", without restricting it to Microsoft ones, no matter how many there have been: it remains the current platform-wide policy, regardless of the FUD.
The rest of your comment is either strawmanning or shifting the discussion further away from where it started and I don't find it worth responding to.
Two devices compared to dozens of locked ones including the original Surface as well as the 2nd RT.
> I intentionally said "all ARM64 Windows devices", without restricting it to Microsoft ones
And how are non Microsoft devices relevant to a discussion of a Microsoft device? You made the same point before...
> The rest of your comment is either strawmanning or shifting the discussion further away
In case you didn't notice, all your 3 replies so far have been filled to the brim with _accusations_ of FUDing, irrelevance, strawmanning and whatever without even mentioning what is irrelevant or why. Everything I say is apparently an irrelevant anecdote, even thought it is actually the historical trend of MS ARM released devices, and the anecdote if anything is the last device only. Why are your arguments any better exactly?
Just looked over the energy report and it's averaging 0.18kWh daily (so the average power draw is 7.5W) - that's with a 3.5in SATA HDD. Better power use than my Raspberry Pi 4 with an external USB HDD!
If low power consumption is your main motivator, I'd say you can do a lot better with one of those instead.
1. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/proj...
I have never seen an ARM windows machine in the wild.
In fact I barely even see any windows 11 machines.
I disagree that "Most OEMs don't officially support Linux". Lenovo supports Linux on 17 laptops released in 2022 alone [1]. Dell also has a similar effort, with Linux supported on the 2022 XPS 13 Plus [2] among others. HP has its DevOne[3]
But at the moment, I don't know of an modern, high performance ARM laptop with official Linux support.
The closest thing I know of is the Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin Dev kit by NVIDIA[4].
[1] https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-fo... [2] https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops?q=&limit=20&release=22.... [3] https://hpdevone.com/ [4] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...
We need something. I’ve lost all faith in the hardware direction of iPhone. The 14 Pro (let alone Pro Max) is an absurd monstrosity. And Google clearly has no interest in innovation beyond copying Apple.
They've lost any sense of maintaining a cohesive design, or keeping things sleek and convenient. Performance has plateaued to a level of diminishing returns, so the only way they can get people to buy a new phone every year since iPhone 7 is to say "hey we put a bigger camera on it".
Product ran free with that mandate, and now we have this abomination: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/trevor-raab-ipho...
I have this recurring fantasy of an alternate history timeline where Steve Jobs never died, and when an engineer brought him the first iPhone 7 prototype, he held it in his hand, flipped it over, felt the camera bump, and said "You're fired. Get rid of the bump". I just refuse to believe he would have allowed this to happen, and I refuse to believe that we can't have good cameras without bumps.
I disagree, I think both platforms have copied plenty from one another. I used to jailbreak my iOS devices to get similar functionality to Android. Hasn't been necessary for awhile, I feel like the platforms are near parity now, but claiming one is copying the other (with no reciprocity) seems farfetched.
Would please you elaborate your argument?
Personally, I think having more choices would be better. The Apple vs. Google duopoly is limiting for consumers and developers.
Would you rather have an expensive device that you barely control or a cheaper device that spies on you?
More choices and competition, please.
Until other choices are available, people tend to accept the default or keep on doing what was done in the past.
There is a segment of consumers that would like choices beyond Apple and Google mobile operating systems:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/jul/04/c...
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/smartphones-5-alternativ...
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/break-away-from-android-ios-7-fr...
Personally, I would like to see more "convergence" devices that let the little computer I carry around with me be anything I want it to be: a programmable general purpose computer, a streaming media server, or whatever else I want.
There are some projects that offer such functionality, but most require expert knowledge to setup or are not very widely-adopted or not very mature:
https://maruos.com/
https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
Walled gardens are not where innovation happens because the gardeners uproot whatever does not meet their vision.
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/jul/04/c...
Yes because using an operating system from the other 1 trillion dollar market cap company is going to be a better alternative. Meet the new boss…
> https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/smartphones-5-alternativ...
And those alternatives are already out there and no one wants them in a first approximation to no one
> https://www.pcmag.com/picks/break-away-from-android-ios-7-fr...
Okay. So they are “out there to try”. Have the majority of users been clamoring for it?
> Personally, I would like to see more "convergence" devices that let the little computer I carry around with me be anything I want it to be: a programmable general purpose computer, a streaming media server, or whatever else I want.
And you are in the modernity and so much so that it wouldn’t be a profitable business. Do you think Microsoft is going to give you that?
> Walled gardens are not where innovation happens because the gardeners uproot whatever does not meet their vision.
Where are all of the “innovations” that the majority of people care about - or even enough to make a profitable business - on Android where you can sideload and have third party web browser engines?
I don't claim to speak for what most people want. I think having more options than iOS and Android could help promote more consumer-friendly choices.
>> Yes because using an operating system from the other 1 trillion dollar market cap company is going to be a better alternative. Meet the new boss...
It would be another choice. Yes, they have similar incentives, but more choices help to drive innovation and keep all players competitive.
>> And you are in the modernity and so much so that it wouldn’t be a profitable business. Do you think Microsoft is going to give you that?
No. Microsoft is a better position than many to be a third choice in smartphone platforms, but they have shown poor initiative in the mobile space. They could try again or it could be some other organization with sufficient know-how and daring. (Something disruptive like Tesla or Starlink perhaps?)
>> Have the majority of users been clamoring for it?
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse." --Henry Ford
"Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do." --Steve Jobs
>> Where are all of the “innovations” that the majority of people care about - or even enough to make a profitable business - on Android where you can sideload and have third party web browser engines?
Android is innovative because it is more open than iOS. Even more innovation is possible given the right circumstances.
Using Linux on the phone with the lack of integration, the poor interface etc is the opposite of “consumer friendly”.
Normal consumers are not asking for the ability to “program their phone and run media servers”.
> Android is innovative because it is more open than iOS. Even more innovation is possible given the right circumstances
“Open” is not an “innovation”.
Who said anything about using Linux on phones? I agree that a third smartphone platform would need to be user friendly. Whether based on Linux, OpenBSD, QNX, Symbian, or something is just a technical detail.
>> Normal consumers are not asking for the ability to “program their phone and run media servers”
No one asked for iPhone. They were quite happy with their Blackberry and Treo phones. My personal wants for a smartphone are not why having a third smartphone platform would help innovation and competition in the current stagnant duopoly.
>> “Open” is not an “innovation”.
Yes, but "Closed" sucks for everyone but the platform owners.
iOS developers have been suffering and Apple has little reason it fix the issues: https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...
Android developers face similar troubles: http://www.fosspatents.com/2022/07/developer-class-action-se...
The current smartphone duopoly is just two competing monopolies with consumers and developers caught in the middle.
Some organizations are trying to get "Open" smartphone marketplaces and more choice and competition in the markets:
https://appfairness.org/
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
Open standards and open markets encourage real competition and innovation.
If you ask 99%+ of phone users. They don’t care about a “closed” phone platform anymore than console owners care.
> iOS developers have been suffering and Apple has little reason it fix the issues: https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...
And what percentage of iOS users that collectively making billions are “suffering”?
> Some organizations are trying to get "Open" smartphone marketplaces and more choice and competition in the markets:
And failing miserable. The market has spoken.
> Open standards and open markets encourage real competition and innovation.
And yet, it wasn’t “open standards” that brought any of the “innovations” to the market that users care about.
How many decades have Linux advocates been promising the “year of the Linux desktop”?
No one cares until they are personally impacted.
>> And failing miserable. The market has spoken.
Markets shift with time and circumstances. Those on top will not be there forever.
>> And yet, it wasn’t “open standards” that brought any of the “innovations” to the market that users care about.
Most users are ignorant of the standards that they rely on. iOS and Android are built on POSIX standards and rely on numerous networking and telecommunication standards. The Internet and World Wide Web that people use their smartphones to access are built on standards. The "magical" experiences that Apple sells to users would not be possible without a veritable book of engineering standards:
https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/
https://www.iso.org/home.html
https://www.ecma-international.org/
>> How many decades have Linux advocates been promising the “year of the Linux desktop”?
I am not sure why you keep pulling Linux into the discussion. Just because Android uses Linux does not mean that other smartphone platforms would use it.
Ideally, we'd have 3 or more fairly evenly matched and interoperable OS choices on mobile and desktop but that doesn't seem likely to happen. Trapping the monopoly inside it's own castle may be the best we can get.
I feel similarly about people calling for Apple to open iOS up to different browser engines. Idealistically that is what I believe should happen, but realistically I think it would just result in Chrome being even more dominate. For the same reason I lament the death of IE and even the original Edge. I don't personally use IE or Safari but I benefited from them existing and having decent market share.
> Would you rather have an expensive device that you barely control or a cheaper device that spies on you?
It is unclear to me if modern Windows actually still spies on you any less than Google at this point. My feeling is if still does, it isn't by much.
>> It is unclear to me if modern Windows actually still spies on you any less than Google at this point. My feeling is if still does, it isn't by much.
Microsoft is in a good position to be a strong third contender in the mobile space, but that does not mean that they would be better in all aspects.
>> Ideally, we'd have 3 or more fairly evenly matched and interoperable OS choices on mobile and desktop but that doesn't seem likely to happen. Trapping the monopoly inside it's own castle may be the best we can get.
Yes. That is why I would like to see more choices with hopefully better treatment of consumers and developers. Right now consumers have limited choices and the mobile development experience is agonizingly painful. It seems like an opportunity for disruption, but the entrenched players are dug in deep and probably nearly impossible to dislodge.
(And let’s set aside the how they’d possibly be able to compete with the scale, market penetration, marketing spend, and mature app ecosystems of iOS/Android and Apple/Samsung.)
Privacy? Lack of advertising? Respect for the user’s choices? From the company that brought you Windows 11? Why does the world sorely need another closed-source operating system full of telemetry?
Hardware. I want a Surface Phone.
If you want a "good" small computer and you already have a screen (or want to buy cheap ones) then these systems are fantastic.
Performance is completely fine for moderate-to-heavy workloads (assuming the heavy workloads are bursty) for the Mac mini, and hopefully this.
Both systems are what you would get if you didn't need a display or keyboard already, they're desktop replacements with a small footprint, and fantastic for the majority of computer workloads including a lot of development ones.
This is probably closer to the Mac Mini with M1 that they shipped to kick-start the Apple Silicon transition for desktop apps.
Because if I was a windows programmer for today's customers, I can't really build things on a "Windows on Arm" device like this.
Like Apple before, I hope this is just the first salvo against the Windows+Intel, before we all switch to Arm chips (including Intel fabs).
AMD releases 32-core + ARM APUs
But probably crack
From 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783924
> Oddly, what I'd really like to see is ARM enter the NUC space. Maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like be able to pay $200-400 for a small, low power usage, decently performant machine. The 8th generation Intel NUC are good, but 28W TDP and it'd be nice to get it much, much lower than that. I know these are a small fraction of the overall market but personally I think it'd be cool.
Once you want something more powerful than Raspberry Pi or a board based on a mobile SoC your options whittle down considerably. There are "mini/micro" PCs but they don't touch the lack of power consumption.
Whoops. Never mind; they have an AMD Ryzen model now: https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/DS1621_P...
For server usecase this is very unbalanced as far as connectivity goes. Say you want to use the modem or wifi for internet access. Modem gives you 5gbit/s and you'll get out to your network just 1gbit. Wasteful, and it needlessly limits the opportnities.
Also this SoC doesn't even seem to have proper publicly available datasheet, and whatever marketing stuff qcom has on their website doesn't list USB at all, lol. So for all I care it can have just one host controller. Not interested in SoC with no datasheets, when it's not possible to answer basic questions about the SoC, like how many USB host controllers it has...
The original launch of CE was on MIPS and Super-H, but ARM appears to have gained support with Windows CE version 2.2.0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_Compact
The M1 was November 2020. That’s two years ago, give or take a few weeks.
There is nothing close to the M1 available for a Windows ARM computer. There is nothing close from Intel/AMD if you just want an ultra-low power chip with very good performance.
edit: I forgot about the A in ARM.
"...an advanced, low-power processor was needed for sophisticated graphics manipulation. He found Hermann Hauser, who had developed the Acorn RISC Machine that utilized what became known as the ARM architecture, and put together Advanced RISC Machines, now Arm Ltd."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
Around this time, DEC also chose to implement their StrongARM, so that pushed into embedded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
Maybe I'm biased because I'm on the Insider Program, and I get changes incrementally instead of as a big release in 2 years
Explorer Patcher can fix it all but you shouldn’t be obliged to fight the OS to feel productive.
- Taskbar cannot be pinned to the side on my widescreen monitors
- Items on taskbar cannot be un-grouped
- Cannot show text on taskbar
- News/weather widget is awful, full of clickbait news and tiny Weather widget, which is vastly inferior to having a live tile that opens to a full screen weather app
- Reduced start menu customization (live tiles / grid are replaced with folders that add an extra click)
Other than that I haven't used it enough to comment much more. I have it on my laptop which is mostly just used for gaming, and I can tolerate the taskbar and start menu regressions. But for me, most of using Windows is... using the taskbar and start menu. To take away most of their functionality seems like complete insanity!
Oh my god, so much this one. It's driving me insane. I keep hoping that the next round of Start menu "improvements" bring it back, but I keep getting disappointed.
[1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
Microsoft has enough partners and regional offices because Office365 and Azure are the only worthy products for us in "shithole countries".
If Microsoft isn't intending on selling a lot of these devices, the cost of adding 1 or 2 African countries would be relatively small compared to the revenue they make from our regions.
I mean, expensive Macs came out, costing twice the shitty HP/Lenovo/Dell enterprise offerings with poor thermals and battery life. We bought them.
I would buy this device if it was for sale in my market, I see a benefit in testing my work on Windows ARM64.
All South American, most Asian and most European countries are excluded. That sucks, too.
On the surface, Microsoft should be making decent revenue. It won't compare with the revenue from the 8 markets they chose. However that's my point, if they include smaller markets strategically in some launches, it can benefit them in the future.
Will be interesting to see the memory capacity on the next new Mac Mini expected in one or two month.
It's absurd to be selling a desktop PC that's weaker than a phone.
Right now, the biggest driver for Windows ARM adoption is, ironically, Apple's M1 and onwards because of people running it as a guest OS through Parallels.
Also, frankly, I'm okay with Microsoft failing at projects like this. We don't need another Apple-like presence on the market.
Don't we?
So no, I don't want Microsoft to become another Apple.
From my point of view, Microsoft failing to do what Apple does is a good thing because it means there's some semblance of a working, competitive (if imperfect) market. They can't force other companies to dance to their tune.
X-Box would beg to differ since 2002.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/121384/last-one-at-the-tab...
Don Mattrick almost tanked that entire product and it survives today because Phil Spencer miraculously managed to turn it around after all of the previous leadership was forced out of the company.
Guess what, so was the first NES, and the first Play Station, the first Game Boy, etc. for their respective companies.
Breaking into a new market, with a new product, in uncharted waters, with no prior experience, with no support from clueless executives who don't believe in the new product looking for any reason to stop you from burning cash, endless turf wars such large and expensive projects create, makes it is hard, brutally hard, for any company to succed on the first try.
>and went through a very rocky path
The Xbox 360 sold 85 million units, one of the best selling consoles of all time.
Here's an article about how massive of a success the original NES and Gameboy were and how it revived Nintendo as a company:
https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/19/18295061/game-boy-history-...
I have no idea where you got the idea that any of those products were mismanaged or cost those companies enormous amounts of cash and in fact those specific examples are among the most successful product launches in video game history.
>The Xbox 360 sold 85 million units, one of the best selling consoles of all time.
The XBox 360 is the best selling console from Microsoft and ranks 9th among all consoles behind the Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Switch, Gameboy, and Wii.
Read into that what you will.
I never said they weren't successful, I said they were also mismanaged during development like you said about the xbox, because management at Nintendo did not believe in the product.
>I have no idea where you got the idea that any of those products were mismanaged
Documentaries and war stories on youtube rabit holes.
>in fact those specific examples are among the most successful product launches in video game history
Today it's easy to say that with hindsight, but before they were launched, during their development, many in the company did not believe in those projects would succeed at all, leading to many internal fights and turf wars.
Also, Nintendo has a number of fuckups that bombed as well. Anyone remember the Virtualboy? Or the Wii-U? Gamecube also didn't sell too good.
The only thing that moves Nintendo merch is their exclusive IP (Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, etc), as their HW products are mediocre at best both in technical capabilities and in quality.
I am looking at some quick sources that I can find, and it looks like the complete opposite, that the management at Nintendo was very eager to develop a home video game console based on the success of their arcade games. They believed in the NES so much that when Atari bailed on its partnership agreement with them (due in no small part to the video game crash of 83), they went ahead and decided to do it alone.
Here is an article that was posted to HN awhile back that does a very deep dive into the development of the NES. It's an excerpt from the book "Console Wars" and it does not paint a picture at all like the one you're suggesting:
http://grantland.com/features/the-rise-of-nintendo-video-gam...
A relevant quote is:
"Yamauchi wanted Nintendo to aggressively get into the videogame business, which was really two separate businesses: home consoles and coin-operated arcade games. He saw the potential in these industries and took the necessary steps for Nintendo to enter both."
As an FYI, Yamauchi was the President of Nintendo.
The Xbox 360/One outsold the NES/SNES. That's amazing.
>As the OP said, you took some anecdata about the Xbox's issues and speak about it like it was a disaster.
What anecdata are you talking about? I linked to a source on the subject and not just any source, it's an interview with the head of XBox, Phil Spencer. I have also followed up every single one of my posts with a reputable source.
OP claims that they also have sources that suggest that Sony and Nintendo did mismanage the launch of their respective consoles in a manner that cost them significant amounts of money, so I'd like to review those sources.
The fact that he was actively replying to me until I requested some evidence to back his claims is a strong indication that those sources never existed.
I stopped replying to you because I saw you have a bone to pick and I have a life to live rather than trying to win an online argument with you.
The sources are on youtube, feel free to use the search function and watch them at your own convenience and make your own opinion. Good day sir.
Just have the decency to admit you have no source, maybe you misheard something, instead of doubling down on your ignorance. It's unbelievably pathetic otherwise.
Define the best? It is 10th in a list of consoles that sold at least one million units. It sold less than console release later and went through even rockier path - PlayStation 3.
Consumer targeted arm chips power most phones and tablets. Many of them are more than a handful for i5 and i3 class Intel chips and draw a lot less power. When you are talking about a $599 price point, you aren't talking about top-shelf Intel, anyway.
> But there is some sense to trying to lay the groundwork for future ARM SoCs running Windows
Now that ARM has grown up to be a viable alternative to Intel, this makes a ton of sense.
Outside m1/m2 there isn't any chip that can be compared to i5 intel 13 gen especially for PC space [that is in the same price bracket]. (maybe some arm chips can get close to i3 12100f but you can get it for 90 usd and get good single core performance so im not sure if in this price point is even any arm alternative)
The vast majority of PCs are running 128 bit wide memory, with workstation CPUs like the threadripper (and pro) being the exception, but a VERY small fraction of the market.
The M1 has 128 bit wide 67GB/sec peak (that you'll never see) bandwidth, like most PCs. Upgrade to the Pro and you get 200GB/sec. Max will take you to 400GB/sec, and Ultra takes you to 800GB/sec.
On the Intel (i3, i5, i7, i9) or AMD (ryzen r3, r5, r7, r9) you get ... the same memory bandwidth. Check the 8 core vs 16 core scaling numbers and for most benchmarks you'll see poor scaling. Sure you can increase GPU performance by adding GPUs, which reduces (but not removes) the need for extra memory bandwidth. Sadly iGPUs (outside the XboxX and PS5) largely stink and are only good enough for non-GPU intensive workloads. Apple on the other hand does scale GPU performance, granted not to the levels that AMD and Nvidia do.
So why can't anyone in the PC space do more memory bandwidth and a decent iGPU, especially when for years the GPUs were in short supply and had exorbitant prices. I think it does come down to OS support, volume (which could be problematic if current GPU customers avoid you), and potentially reducing profits for AMD (who would have sold an expensive external GPU). Not to mention that fast/wide ram requires soldering chips on board or increasing size/cost with large banks of ram. Even servers with 8 memory channels (minimum 8 dimms) only get you to the M1 pro level (1/2 of the m1 max and 1/4th of the m1 ultra).
Apple can say we have X% of the market today, and all new customers will be on our new platform with 2 years, so the driver, OS, iGPU, memory bandwidth, etc will be amortized over substantial volumes. Additionally Apple gets a larger fraction of the revenue, since they aren't paying Nvidia or AMD for a GPU. Who is going to push a MBP or Apple studio competitor that could ship the same volumes?
The best of market ARM designs don't really compete head-to-head with Xeon right now, but there are still a ton of server applications where they make already make sense. As a simple example companies like Google and Facebook have hundreds of thousands of servers that are doing things like running memcached or running some application like D/GFS where the server is mostly just doing a lot of I/O and doesn't necessarily need really beefy single-threaded CPU performance.
Longer term obviously if there are ARM or RISC-V CPUs that can compete head-to-head with Xeon in terms of features and single threaded performance then that opens up pretty much the entire enterprise/server market.
If my new zCPU chip is 60% as fast as a Xeon at your task, that’s a problem.
If it can do it at 40% of the Xeon’s power, things get interesting.
I could use twice as many zCPUs, be 20% faster, and use 20% less power. That also means less cooling capacity in my DC.
Some tasks will always need the absolute best single threaded performance. But a lot don’t. And the Xeon’s power requirements leave a large opening we’re starting to see other companies poke at with things like Graviton.
Intel & AMD’s consumer and/or server market share.
I can’t imagine going back to an Intel after an M1. The battery life is better. It’s dead silent. It doesn’t get warm. It’s like a totally different kind of object.
I know PC people (those who want Windows) aren’t interested in an M1 Mac. That’s fine.
But I see PC laptop reviews with 4 or 6 or maybe 8 hours of battery life. They get hot but the fan isn’t “too loud”. And I know the performance isn’t the same.
And I just wish reviewers would call it out. They’re not on the same level. I’m sure fanboys would complain about the comparison in every review, but why shouldn’t Windows users have something much better? It’s been proven possible. Hold AMD/Intel/Qualcomm to the fire more.
If Qualcomm could get a chip with reasonable performance at a reasonable price that just doesn’t get hot and waste all its battery playing space heater, I bet they could really get a hold on the laptop market.
But as a consumer you’re stuck. You should have a machine with the performance of any normal/good laptop with way better thermals and battery life.
I’m not sure what the Uber-high end laptop would look like but surely it would do better than today.
The scale needs adjusting. What counts as “too hot”, “too short battery life”, “minimum performance.”
It all should have changed. But it didn’t. The industry acts like Macs are magic and therefor incomparable. “Of course that Boeing goes faster, it’s a jet engine plane. You can’t compare that to our cars.”
They’re both computers. It can be done. So why are Intel/AMD/Qualcomm getting off the hook to such a degree?
I just don’t understand it. It’s almost like Stockholm Syndrome or something. “Intel is nice to us, who are we to complain?”
The cheapest M1 is $1300 in Canada. MacBook Pros are well over $2000. These prices are far beyond the budget of the majority of computer users. They are also beyond the requirements.
>Of course that Boeing goes faster, it’s a jet engine plane. You can’t compare that to our cars.
No, it's like comparing a BMW to a Honda. You spend a lot less money and then are surprised it doesn't perform as well?
Yes, the MBA is more expensive than most people would want to pay.
But it’s also not comparable to those laptops. It has a very high quality Retina display, the all-metal unibody construction, and Apple’s infamous profit margins.
There is no reason to think putting a similarly efficient processor in an otherwise standard PC laptop would raise the price much. Heck, Intel loves there margins too.
I don’t think the chip is too expensive. It’s all the other choices Apple makes that push the price up so much.
Compare this to Apple's $499 ARM Dev test kit that you could return for a $200 credit.
If Microsoft is serious about ARM, they need a very low barrier of entry for those willing to port their software.
There is a good chance they get on the verge of shipping and find they can't actually sell any of their new chips...
https://www.axios.com/2022/09/06/arm-qualcomm-nuvia-chip-gia...
Ah yes, "just spend more money" has solved so many problems over the years. Can anyone even name a single time a lot of money was spent and the product failed? Victory is practically guaranteed!
From Wikipedia: “One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten")”.
NT was always supposed to be multi architecture (MIPS, Alpha, IA-32). I’m not sure what happened to i860.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
Personally I’m not ok with being locked out of potential computing power by platform so I can’t get excited as MS struggles to keep up.
It’s either MS keeps up or the future ahead is dark.
You say that as if Apple will become some sort of PC-market hegemon, driving consumers and professionals to use its proprietary ARM hardware and OS despite having traditional Windows- or Linux-based workflows, simply because Apple's ARM is just so much faster.
Here's the third option: nobody cares what Apple is doing over in its corner of the PC market; the PC market remains an x86 market; and it continues to be driven by the needs of corporate buyers buying 1000+-part orders of PCs to outfit entire (non-IT!) businesses with; where those businesses don't care about having the fastest computer, but simply need "a" computer, with support and parts their internal IT department can swap out when needed; where the biggest factor driving purchases is TCO; and where TCO is driven down by commoditization and competition, not by vertical integration.
Microsoft cannot keep doing what they are doing.
Even in Japan, where "nobody" owns a home PC, offices are still full of PCs; nobody is being handed a Macbook to do their work from, let alone a phone or tablet.
In my opinion, it's perfectly fine for Apple to win the "sealed appliance" space — since ~everybody else (your Samsungs, your Xiaomis, even Google) is just trying to do the same proprietary vertical-integration play that Apple is doing in that space; they're just worse at it than Apple is.
In contrast, Apple will never win the PC space, since their whole market strategy — "give people something different that forces them into our ecosystem" — is (and always has been) anathema to how boring, non-IT businesses want to use computers. Even companies whose workflows depend entirely on macOS "killer apps" (like desktop publishes back in the 1980s), who begrudgingly buy Macs to fulfill those needs, constantly lobby their app-developer ISVs to go multiplatform, so that they can toss out the Macs and revert to doing the same boring PC-centered IT that every other company around them is doing.
(And do note that Apple isn't trying to win the PC space. They were trying, historically — maybe up until the year 2001 or so. But ever since the iPod, and then the iPhone, Apple's strategy has moved to treating the Mac as a halo product category — a nice-to-have for those already in the Apple ecosystem for other reasons — rather than as something that's going to usurp the PC in its place one day. It's why, around that time, they killed XServe and Airport routers: they saw no further benefit in attempting to achieve corporate ubiquity, rather than complementarity.)
They've been doing exactly that since Windows 8, if not earlier. Perhaps the Year of Windows on ARM is somewhere around the corner from the Year of the Linux Desktop
I think we are on the ... third? ... attention cycle for this? Because they were trying pretty hard when W10 dropped too
> To boost performance, we have added vendor-specific optimizations so your apps run well on a variety of Arm hardware. We have several runtime improvements to targeting server throughput (RPS) and latency.
Seems largely focused on .NET 7 though[2].
[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/10/24/availa...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33319535
[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/arm64-performance-impr...
[0] - https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2020/12/10/introdu...
As I said in my comment, QCOMM's naming sucks. cx is their desktop/laptop line. They have no designation for their phone line, so the confusion isn't surprising.
An ARM based Windows computer isn't a bad idea, I just question if Microsoft is able to deliver on it. Picking the same manufacturer, who repeatably failed to deliver usable ARM processors for desktop and laptops seem like a obvious mistake. This isn't their first attempt either, so why would I trust that this won't fail, like the last time? Apple had done this before an architecture transition before, Microsoft haven't, and I doubt they have the will to ensure that it will succeed. They are too tied up in the x86 world, too busy with Azure and they don't have the attention of the consumer market.
In terms of price, it's really close to the Mac mini. Factor in performance, then this thing is a bad deal.
The form factor is right for many uses, but I don't get who the potential buyers are.
Microsoft has already executed and brutally failed with ARM in the form of the disastrous Surface RT/Windows RT.
But, and more importantly.
Two people with unlimited resources are running a race car race.
One starts a year or two before the other. Even with unlimited resources; the other racer/team has unlimited resources, too.
So let’s say they can both reach a maximum of the speed of sound.
Apple’s already been going the speed of sound for a couple years now; they also have the advantage that their vehicle in the race has software and hardware that are married.
Microsoft is not only nowhere near the speed of sound, but even though they also have unlimited resources; they are severely hampered by separate hardware and software, with the exclusion of their surface tablets, whose previous incarnation of this race car model crashed and burned on the race track.
This isn’t a race where MS can or will catch up. They’re already years behind. Not that I encourage anyone to use an OS with built-in ads anyway. Just use Linux at that point.
For an "acceptable" laptop, the price point is already pretty close to $1000, and before I would have a tentative recommendation of MacBooks/Macbook Airs because of the learning curve of MacOS. With M1/M2 and how much better it is than anything else on the consumer market, I openly recommend it to anyone in the market for a new consumer machine. Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine.
I was discussing this with a colleague last night, but the M1/M2 chips and complimentary hardware let Apple do some amazing stuff out of the box without adjustment that Windows simply has no answer for. The integration of the complimentary hardware with the M1/M2 chips is so strong that I stumbled onto features I completely missed announcements on, and it legitimately "wow'd" me.
- Live Text caught me off-guard while drag/drop-ing an image to a chat app. I couldn't stop testing its limits and reading the dev docs
- I took surprise calls from really crowded + noisy places and was in disbelief that my call partners couldn't hear anything but my voice in crystal clear quality
- I ran games and software that just weren't possible on Intel Macs through Rosetta at pretty fine FPS/quality without incident
- I didn't need to change a single program from my workflow
Microsoft can likely do the same but they need to put the legwork in to make it happen. Personally I understand they have no interest in this and it makes sense -- they want you on Azure with your server workloads and this keeps the lights on at Microsoft, and as best I know the consumer market (not considering gaming) still favors Windows. But I guess that's why projects like this confuse me a lot since it must be a pretty substantial RND and manufacturing cost, neverminding advertising, but Microsoft doesn't seem to have their heart in it.
It's not about backwards compatibility - consumers don't need to keep Windows 3.0 apps running, not a statistically significant portion anyways, they just need modern apps to run fast and well, long battery life on portable devices, quiet machines, and that's it, but seems that this just isn't something Microsoft is interested in taking over.
I really can't think of Windows features in decades that "wow" so much as you just know what you get with Windows regardless of the version in terms of basic features; what worked on Windows XP probably works on Windows 11, but even that is starting to erode in a slow and painful way. There are quite a few programs on Windows I get the impression that Microsoft just doesn't want me to be running, but things like the Windows Store, Windows' implementation of security for unsigned apps, etc, these all feel like Microsoft isn't confident enough to fully invest into these new features or to drop them in order to advance.
Microsoft definitely has the talent and cash reserves to pursue a strong consumer laptop to compete with Apple; for whatever reason, they don't seem to have the interest though for consumer devices. Probably the simplest reason is the server market is theirs and this is plenty of money, but I just can't get why they continue with such forays then.
Edit: just elaborated on price point for consumer laptops and recommending machines.
I don't expect "casual" gamers setup Wine+Proton+MoltenVK. It's better to say that let's play game on PlayStation. If you mean really "casual", they play on iPhone.
It looks like they want to address this. But I wonder if they will succeed this time.
Because at the end of the day, Windows RT was a creature born of greed. They saw dollar signs- Apple's 30% App Store cut- and as such wanted a machine that forced you to buy software only from them. There was no technical reason that normal software couldn't run on Windows RT, given that MS themselves did it with Office.
So confident were they that this would work that they threw the tablet features onto Windows 8 proper, relegating the reason people buy computers to a secondary function- after all, paying MS for the privilege of developing software was going to be the New Way forward. Besides, don't you want security?
However, given that it took Microsoft more than a decade to decide to port their own Visual Studio to ARM Windows, I'm not sure why they think third parties are chomping at the bit.
If Microsoft wants to copy Apple, they need to copy the decision to immediately port all their first party software.
At 700€ price tag what a gift! It's 3-400€ too expensive for a very dispensable toy, especially given that the managed stack (.net) of Microsoft development tools can be tested on Raspberry Pi or M1, which are both very popular with developers.
It's not like you want to keep something this underwhelming forever at that price point.
By the way When the fuck did 32GB become an entry requirement, I am so saddened by the crappy software and stacks that treats memory like an infinite resource
I'd hope some one have already or will write thesis on correlation between Rise of Javascript stack and narcissism in software industry.
But most people only need a browser and maybe a few simple products anyway. A phone SoC is probably enough.
You don't need top shelf performance for browsing the web, checking your emails or writing some docs.
DIDN’T
Until electron
Since then the A15 came out with some efficiency and performance improvements, it's in the M2 IPad and M2 MBA and presumably several future apple products.
The A16 has some efficiency and perfomance tweaks and is what's in the recently released iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.
So sure, the M1 in the M1 mac mini might have more power, cooling, and cores than the iPhone 14 pro, but the cores are actually slower at the same clock. Sure a phone will hit thermal limits sooner than a SFF PC.
I admit I'm disappointed in the showing, and I think that Microsoft not loosing out on this market is important to them. I'd be willing to be bet 2nd gen of this will likely be produced by a 3rd party vendor.
Fundamentally, ARM Holdings is what Antitrust legislation was supposed to break down. They own the "ARM" name and control who can license the ARM IP and most importantly, how.
Ampere, the folks behind a lot of ARM servers, are by contract barred from getting into the market of making ARM chips for phones, desktops, or otherwise. That's the form of their license: Server-grade 96-core behemoths running at 3+Ghz and with the thermal output of a small space heater.
ARM holdings sets all sorts of weird restrictions and forces market segmentation to make sure that nobody "Accidentally" makes something that they don't immediately approve of. Qualcomm is basically locked into making phone SoCs for all eternity until they renegotiate their license with ARM holdings. They're in a shit situation because they have competition all over the place (Allwinner, Rockchip, a legacy Intel series, NXP, and Samsung to name a few), letting ARMHoldings bully them into not making something that rocks the boat too hard.
Apple pulled a massive show of force in making ARM license them desktop grade chips. You see, Apple has been a license holder for ARM for a bit now (with the Ax series chips) and makes up, ballpark, 15% of worldwide phones and now >50% of US phones. Apple had already idly said "we could... you know, not use an integrated solution" when they fiddled with Intel's radio baseband.
For ARM to try and sue Apple for breach of contract for developing the Mx series of desktop class ARM processors and get away with it, they'd be putting their market share dominance in four different major markets at risk. Qualcomm can't do that.
So that leaves Microsoft, who does not want to get into the processor fabrication business and who is still reeling over the antitrust lawsuit 20 years ago (which, I'll point out, was mostly over a shared text mangling library, for what it's worth) out in the dust looking for options, and the option they get is "Whatever Qualcomm will ship them."
Nah, this is just organizational incompetence. The same reason we got cortana, windows 8 or adds in the start bar.
Afaik Apple has an Architecture License which means they can do anything they want. They were one of the companies who co-founded ARM.
apple was part of the original ARM joint venture and gave it its initial capital
it's been there since day 0
> For ARM to try and sue Apple for breach of contract for developing the Mx series of desktop class ARM processors and get away with it, they'd be putting their market share dominance in four different major markets at risk.
As I understand, Apple has a special license with a lot more leeway than those held by other companies thanks to Apple having been one of ARM's founders[0], so they may not have had to do any negotiations at all since they had the rights from the get-go.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_(company)#Founding
Is there any evidence that anyone has been refused a license to develop a desktop arm cpu?
I mean, have you seen some of the latest desktop-grade hardware? I have had space heaters with less heat output than a 4090 at full tilt.
There is nothing for people to believe or not believe. MS cannot cannot discontinue x86 overnight because their OS is used by a much larger proportion of the world.
Apple managed a competent compatibility layer, albeit with some special sauce in the SOC to make it fast. Is that too much to ask from Microsoft?
Windows is a general purpose OS, which is why it dominates two enormous markets: business software and games software. Microsoft will usually err on the side of developers because of this. The two companies' philosophies will of course be different.
If MacOS had similar mindshare in those markets, Mac developers would probably ask Apple to avoid overnight changes like the discontinuation of x86 Macs.
MS still provides security updates for Windows 7 despite its EOL occurring nearly 3 years ago. This is because many organizations still run critical software that they cannot shift away from, for whatever reason. Apple doesn't have to do that because no hospital or airport is running their logistics on MacOS.
Even with all this baggage, Windows on ARM has been available in some form since 2012's Surface RT.
People would have mostly wanted it anyway.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with this hardware.