17 ms·

Windows 10 on ARM

450 points by vlangber 9y ago

nickhalfasleep 9y ago
Great potential for a Win10 phablet I can develop on that also lets me make phonecalls. Not for big projects, but an anywhere device. Does Win10 support non VoIP calls?
- ManFromUranus 9y ago
  I think it does since MS did a big overhall on their windows architecture, phone, xbox, and desktop all run the same base services just with different GUI's. Technically an XBOX could make phone calls but has no GUI or hardware for it.
- mtgx 9y ago
  I doubt Microsoft would be going the phablet direction, even if Windows on ARM now supports "desktop apps". There's still the issue of having a horrendous desktop UI on a phone. Heck, it still pisses me off that legacy Windows apps don't even properly support 1080p screens. It should be way worse to squeeze them in a small screen as well.
- scholia 9y ago
  (1) Windows 10 smartphones currently make cellular voice calls so that feature is already in the mobile version of Windows 10. (2) There's no reason why Samsung or one of the Chinese manufacturers couldn't make a Windows 10 phablet. Microsoft made Windows free on small-screen devices, so I assume it will continue to be free, or at worst, "zero paid". [Microsoft had a Windows offering where OEMs paid $10 for the OS but got a $10 rebate for setting Bing as the default search engine. So technically, Windows wasn't free, but OEMs didn't pay anything to use it.]
faragon 9y ago
If that runs great on phones, and has virtualization support for e.g. running ARM Linux guests, I would change both my Android phone and my Ubuntu laptop for one phone (e.g. Snapdragon 835 or better + 8-12GB RAM + 256GB flash + USB 3.0 OTG), using a dummy screen + keyboard as laptop replacement.
- Retric 9y ago
  I am not sure there is a huge gap from dummy screen + keyboard + battery to laptop and your not going to be able to power a laptop screen from a cellphone battery.
  - faragon 9y ago
    I would use the "dummy screen + keyboard" only when plugged, obviously.
- skdotdan 9y ago
  Maybe you are describing the rumored Surface Phone?
- MrMember 9y ago
  A desktop/mobile convergence phone is my dream. I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
  - wand3r 9y ago
    I think I get it; but could you expand a bit on what you mean?
    - MrMember 9y ago
      A phone form factor device that can run a full desktop OS, or something close to it. Canonical was getting close with Ubuntu Touch but that's essentially dead now. I don't want a gimped version of Windows like I'd get with Continuum, I don't want a "desktop-like" version of Android like Samsung is doing, I want a full version of Linux or Windows that can run desktop applications.
      - wand3r 9y ago
        Ah ok; I actually want something similar; a tablet that can act like a phone but only on WiFi so I don't have a phone bill. Basically; an iPad but w/ real integration & iMessages etc via a free or cheap VoIP number w/o data
platipuss 9y ago
I hope they drop this on the surface 2. It would save it from being a paper weight.
- emehrkay 9y ago
  Was the SurfaceRT an ARM device? I have one collecting dust, would be nice if it got an update
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Yes. The RT devices ran ARM, which was one of the reasons for the locked down software policy (nothing else would run anyway).
    - aidenn0 9y ago
      Except that you were also denied much of the existing API and can only install software if you have a developer key from MS. I use my RT device for media playback in the car, but the windows-RT version of VLC hasn't been updated in years, and is somewhat buggy.
      - stirlo 9y ago
        It also took VLC more than 2 years to develop and release the RT version. By the time it was released the market had already declared RT dead.
  - pedasmith 9y ago
    You might find that there are a lot of updates in the queue :-) . I dusted mine off a few months ago, and there were quite a number of them.
- poizan42 9y ago
  A qualified guess would be that you can just install it, because the bootloader is Microsoft signed so it would pass the secure boot check. Edit: Apparently Surface 2 isn't AArch64, so probably not.
daburninatorrr 9y ago
Man, that League of Legends desktop icon on the test machine is such a tease. I would love to know what the status of x86 gaming on ARM devices would be, especially for something competitive that runs on most anything like LoL
- intrasight 9y ago
  I'm sure that tease was no accident
- kyriakos 9y ago
  They already shown LoL and Photoshop running on ARM a few months ago in a demo video. Google it :)
  - cm2187 9y ago
    But wasn't it with hardware emulation?
  - yarauuta 9y ago
    I could not find it for some reason. Could you provide the link please?
  - jaytagdamian 9y ago
    I have seen the photoshop video, but not League of Legends - got a link?
- fnord123 9y ago
  Spotting things in the details: Haru is propping his phone up with bricks from a Jungian personality test. Apparently Haru brings people together and results oriented. http://blog.mcchristie.com/wp-content/uploads/insights-bricks.jpg http://blog.mcchristie.com/wp-content/uploads/insights-brick...
0x0 9y ago
Does the x86/x64 cpu emulation work for JIT code or other self-modifying code? (Copy protected games, for example?) In the linked presentation they just briefly mention doing a load time(?) transpile of x86 to arm64 and caching the result on disk. What about exe packers that map memory rw then rx after unpacking, such as UPX?
- poizan42 9y ago
  They say that it's a dynamic translation layer, so presumably it doesn't make a distinction about where the code came for (except maybe you'll lose some performance optimization if they are caching translated code)
  - tmccrmck 9y ago
    Most dynamic emulators don't do instruction by instruction emulation - they take in a whole block of instructions and translate that block, caching chunks that may be used without any inference (eg. branching). Once you hit a similar instruction block you don't have to do any translation; just execute from the cache. This is why you have a load time for reading from an x86 image.
- amaks 9y ago
  It's actually only x86 emulation. x64 is not supported according to the video.
sxates 9y ago
There have been rumors of a 'surface phone' that runs Win 10 (not mobile) for a couple years now. Most expected some kind of future Intel chip to enable that, but ARM support certainly opens up the possibility. Just what Windows phones need - another OS change!
- ams6110 9y ago
  I'd be very interested in a Windows 10 phone if it has automatic updates that do not depend on the carrier, to avoid the Android situation where only certain phones get updates on a timely basis.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    This was the case for the Win7/8 Nokia phones, so the signs are good. (Although I'm in the UK, where the carriers are less abusive)
    - flukus 9y ago
      Weren't there a bunch of windows 7 phones that never got updated to windows 8?
      - abrowne 9y ago
        That was MS, not the carriers.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Windows 10 Mobile gets OS updates directly from Microsoft. Verizon does not support Windows 10 Mobile at all, but my four year old Verizon Lumia Icon got Windows 10 version 14393.1198, which released yesterday, yesterday. Microsoft has chosen to drop a lot of older models from the Creator's Update, but is still providing cumulative/security updates to the Anniversary Update right now, which is supported on all phones which run Windows 10 Mobile. At least, at present, if you have a Windows 10 Mobile device, you have recent security updates, regardless of make or model.
niftich 9y ago
Does this emulation work for x86-64 executables too? EDIT: no [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/7/13866936/microsoft-windows-10-arm-desktop-apps-support-qualcomm https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/7/13866936/microsoft-window...
satysin 9y ago
Microsoft are seriously killing it in emulation these days. First I was amazed with them getting Xbox 360 (PPC) games running at full speed or better on the Xbox One (x86) and now we have x86 on ARM. They have some wizards working on this stuff. Edit: I wonder if Dave Cutler is involved in this x86 on ARM stuff? I think he was with the Xbox 360/Xbox One.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Kenji 9y ago
  As far as I know, they don't emulate Xbox 360 games on Xbox One, they port and compile it for the new console, creating entirely new binaries. Not much emulation going on there. Correct me if I'm wrong. EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_games_compatible_with_Xbox_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_games_compati... "Unlike the emulation of original Xbox games on the Xbox 360, the Xbox One does not require game modification, since it emulates an exact replica of its predecessor's environment – both hardware and software operating systems." I stand corrected.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    http://support.xbox.com/en-US/games/game-setup/play-xbox-360-games-on-xbox-one http://support.xbox.com/en-US/games/game-setup/play-xbox-360... > Xbox 360 games run within an emulator on Xbox One, which means you'll be able to use most features from both systems while playing games, such as screenshots, broadcasting, and Game DVR.
  - satysin 9y ago
    It uses emulation. While it is true the user needs to download a 'game image' rather than play the game directly from disc this is because that image is a virtual hard disk that contains the game and a customised Xbox 360 virtual machine that has tweaks for the game. It is similar to PC console emulators that have specific configs for certain games.
    - 9y ago
mtgx 9y ago
HN is probably not the right target for this type of device. Either way we need Windows 10 on ARM to succeed for Intel to have more competition. I also do think it will be successful if it works at least as well as Intel's Atom-based Celeron and Pentium laptop chips, especially in emerging markets. Intel shot itself in the foot by replacing the Core architecture in mobile Celerons and Pentiums with Atom, and also by starting to rename lower performance Core M chips to Core i3 and Core i5. This will make it easier for ARM and AMD to "catch-up" and even beat Intel at these levels, because Intel got greedy and tried to trick the market with lower-performing chips at the same price points as for previous (and more powerful) generations.
- cwyers 9y ago
  Depends on what the results end up being, but there could be a lot of HN users happy to have this as a second/third device, especially those of us who still cling to desktops as our daily drivers.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  Given the recent unpleasantness with the Intel ME, I imagine there'd be a ready audience on HN for anything that makes alternate architectures more practical.
- toast0 9y ago
  > Intel shot itself in the foot by replacing the Core architecture in mobile Celerons and Pentiums with Atom Core mobile Celeron and Pentium are still available, for example Celeron 3865U [1], it's just Intel got tired of having names with useful information in them. That processor should probably have a name like Core v7 2C-2T 1.8Ghz-15W which has most of the useful information, but 3865U is what we got, so you have to filter out the atom chips yourself. [1] https://ark.intel.com/products/96507/Intel-Celeron-Processor-3865U-2M-Cache-1_80-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/96507/Intel-Celeron-Processor...
Dolores12 9y ago
Ha-ha, Microsoft will do it again. For Windows on all devices!
- mtgx 9y ago
  Not really. This is more about allowing ARM to enter the PC market. ARM couldn't break into the PC market without Microsoft's help and by being fully supported by Windows. The only other alternative were Chromebooks, and even Google didn't bother to make a big push for ARM in Chromebooks.
poizan42 9y ago
For any Microsoft insiders with knowledge about this, a few questions: 1. In the talk they claim that they get "near native" speed from the translation. Can we have some real number of what can be expected? What about warm up time? 2. Is the x86 translation layer only available in user space, or can x86 drivers be loaded for hardware that doesn't have arm drivers yet (or the manufacturer doesn't care about making them) 3. Are there any plans in the future for supporting x64 code as well in the translation layer? Edit: One more: 4. Are there any plans on supporting Arm v7 in the future, e.g. with Surface/Surface 2 support?
- wolfgke 9y ago
  5. How do they solve the problem that x86 has a much stronger memory model than ARM, which makes emulation of multithreaded x86 code pretty hard without introducing a huge performance disadvantage?
  - kyberias 9y ago
    What do you mean, could you elaborate on that a bit? How is x86 "memory model stronger" and why would application code be affected?
    - valarauca1 9y ago
      Strength of memory model refers to concurrency guarantees. Also gets deep into caching architectures, OOO, and inter-cpu communications. This is a deep rabbit hole because modern processors are speculatively executing THOUSANDS of instructions ahead. So what you have/haven't written to memory is slightly existential. Here is a good blog post about it http://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/ http://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/ The TLDR: x64 tries REALLY HARD to ensure your pointers always have the newest data. ARMv6, very much. ARMv7 kind of. ARMv8 fairly.
      - wfunction 9y ago
        Thousands? I thought it was more like a dozen or two at most. Any link on that?
pjc50 9y ago
Interesting - something they should have done rather than the orphan WindowsRT, in my opinion. I wonder if this ends up being the inheritor of Windows CE for embedded ARM-flavoured devices. I also wonder if this means that the Win10 ARM kernel has the full Windows API - so if you built an ARM PE executable that could run natively. I suspect 95% of the pieces are in place for that but it's not yet been productised.
- RachelF 9y ago
  A lot of people who were burned when they dumped Windows RT will be very cautious of this.
- zeta0134 9y ago
  I feel like this is in response to the pushback against Windows RT honestly. They put the cart before the horse on that one, trying to get everyone to use an app store with no apps, and quickly realizing that the base Windows experience wasn't enough for the vast majority of their users. Killing Windows RT was the right choice, because it was never designed to do something like this. It had a weak translation layer for Win32's API built right in, and they would have needed to do some wizardry to have the two live side by side. No, I think RT was a useful but failed experiment, and I'm excited to see them take this approach with Win32 emulation on ARM. If it works as well as these demos suggest it does, it could finally provide a good path for ARM into consumer laptops and even desktops, to spark some great competition in the space. I'm excited to see where this goes.
xemoka 9y ago
This excites me. I work with a lot of geospatial industry tools, many mobile tools are still based on old window CE/pocket PC/windows mobile platforms; I hope to see these snapdragon devices overtake this area. Mobile data collection tools on iOS and android devices are rather poor (at least open source ones), hopefully this will help solve this problem—we'll just be able to use windows applications that work and are better developed. The windows ecosystem still seems easier to me than iOS / Android, perhaps that's just my bias or that I see more development options. This could be a huge turning point for Microsoft's mobile divisions. x86 drivers are still something I'm curious about here... [edit: I should also mention, the reason why geospatial tools comes into play here is because the snapdragon CPUs have integrated GSM and GNSS (GPS) on the die. Currently, x86 based tablets have to use a separate component, and many don't come with it or even provide GNSS as an option]
- pishpash 9y ago
  It's not your bias. The Windows ecosystem has always been pretty good for developers. If it weren't for the ten-year Ballmer purgatory, MS would have been all over this space, where little iOS and Android toys still haven't hit puberty. Reinventing the wheel has been an overall giant waste of time for the industry.
wand3r 9y ago
I am seriously impressed with Microsoft. I haven't used windows in years but they are releasing tons of useful things. VSCode is great on Ubuntu and every version of OS X I have run it on. Plus tons of other cool things like bash on win; etc. Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS
- artmageddon 9y ago
  > Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS How so?
  - wand3r 9y ago
    I am not a super user of AWS and have light demands as far as the console. I find the documentation and dashboard pretty decent; burnrate monitor and basic services(vm, ip, storage) easy enough. The naming and requirements-- and also the split up of resources v. Classic is pretty annoying. On AWS I was through a sea of services I don't need w/ poor docs, clunky configs and a lot of security tiers. Their pricing is baffling and I really just think it looks terrible. Azure has similar issues; but I can navigate it better and feel more comfortable w) it
    - artmageddon 9y ago
      Thanks for your input on this. I'm considering getting my AWS Developer certificate so I'm glad to have some warning about it going in..
      - wand3r 9y ago
        Again; this is my own opinion and I am not on a competitive dev team. AWS is the defacto standard; and I think learning the API keeps you out of the UI. Azure has one too; they are both clunky and more than I need but; and someone who uses AWS hopefully will chime in-- my guess is most people use the API almost exclusively. I don't have enough familiarity to judge it; have only use it a bit and a while ago
mmcconnell1618 9y ago
Windows 10 on ARM would allow Apple Bootcamp on ARM-based MacBooks. There have been rumors about Apple moving to ARM and potentially bringing processors in-house. I wonder if that influenced Microsoft's thinking.
- cwyers 9y ago
  You think that this actual shipping product that Microsoft developed might have been influenced by these "rumors" that are never actually sourced to anyone in Apple?
Zigurd 9y ago
Strategically interesting because, up to now, the Dalvik bytecode runtime and the subsequent pre-compiling ART runtimes were the best way to do ISA-independent application environments. Apple's fat binaries got in early enough in their (smaller) developer community for Apple to avoid being tied to an ISA. Microsoft was handcuffed to an x86 legacy boat anchor. But now they have escaped, and those other approaches are less of an advantage.
kev009 9y ago
Microsoft is one of the few companies that really grok Systems Software right now.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  They always did, but FOSS people always downplay the work that Microsoft Systems Research does, as if having a clone of an existing OS and UIs was some kind of innovation.
  - nytal 9y ago
    And you get every situation to shit on FOSS people and praise ms, right? Do you get paid for this?
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      My account managers are quite happy with what I get doing enterprise consulting.
      - nytal 9y ago
        Java noob?
- nytal 9y ago
  Nope, it's the one spending the most on PR and useless projects which attract tech noobs.
  - kev009 9y ago
    Red Hat?
wolfgke 9y ago
Does this mean that Windows 10 (not Windows 10 IoT Core) will also come to Raspberry Pi 3?
- d9 9y ago
  Good question. How much memory on RPi3 and how much required to run Windows10?
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    RPi3 has 1 GiB of RAM. The system requirements of Windows 10 (cf. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifications https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifica...) are 1 GiB for 32 bit and 2 GiB for 64 bit (both on x86). So I think if Microsoft is willing to, it should work, in particular if they slim down the fictional RPi3 version of Windows 10 (which I would strongly recommend). I personally see the much larger performance regression for Windows 10 on RPi3 in the fact that at least on Windows 10 IoT Core there was no hardware acceleration of graphics on RPi3 when I last tested it (about a year ago), which caused it to feel rather sluggish.
- MikusR 9y ago
  I guess not. It requires hardware features from Snapdragon 820/835.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    Do you know particular details what these hardware features are?
    - mtgx 9y ago
      I'm guessing it's both a performance issue and a "let's not support too many different ARM chips from the beginning" issue. Snapdragon 835 will probably be the minimum level of ARM performance Microsoft will accept. We may start seeing Samsung's Exynos and a high-end MediaTek processor being supported in a year or two.
wfunction 9y ago
Can someone explain how they are achieving high execution speed? I would have expected the speeds (or at least the start-up times, if we have dynamic recompilation) for x86 on ARM to be outright abysmal.
- mark-r 9y ago
  There's a reason their demo apps were pre-installed. The initial recompilation is cached so that running it the second time will be much quicker than the first.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
d9 9y ago
What about .Net on ARM?
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  I believe there was a mention in the Day 1 BUILD keynote somewhere that Samsung's work on .NET on ARM (built for Tizen specifically, but I would imagine generically useful) was going to be open sourced to the .NET Core project at some point.
  - d9 9y ago
    So, as of today, Windows 10 on ARM support x86 win32 or UWP, but not a .Net?
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Oh, UWP .NET has always supported ARM (since Windows 8). I assumed the question was about .NET needs outside of the UWP.
      - WorldMaker 9y ago
        Also, the Win32 x86 emulation I would imagine would support most/all .NET Win32 applications, to whatever extent the Win32 .NET Framework gets added to emulation image.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  .NET always supported ARM for embedded deployments, and nowadays UWP as well, so they have enough code around to update RyuJIT to also support ARM.
0xFFC 9y ago
Please correct me If I am wrong. But I think with WSL and this, Microsoft proved they are much much more superior than Google and Apple when it comes to serious system software development (they have to be, they have developed one of the most complex Kernel of the all times and maintained and improved it for decades. Yes I am linux guy too. But Widnows Kernel is extremely complex and well architectured piece of software ever written). Yes, Google does have very good applications, apple does have too. But when it comes to hardcore system software development stuff. They are unbeatable. Emulating entire x86 on ARM? This is mind blowing. They have pulled good emulation before too (one I think was inside XBOX). But this is going to be serious. I would say very serious. Extremely good battery life would give Microsoft, very good edge over Apple. 1) Qualcomm will be the winner. and so other ARM CPU manufacturer. and Intel is the biggest loser here. 2) Microsoft will hit market with this. After this they will have extremely good position to release good phone, and here we stand, I see successful future for Windows Phone. 3) From Computer Architecture perspective, the bottleneck is not memory or CPU speed. It is IO and energy. I don't know how this will impact on IO. But I am almost sure this is unbeatable from energy efficiency, and when I (and almost all people I know) buying a laptop. battery life is almost the most important aspect of it.
- nbevans 9y ago
  I voted you up as it's rare a Linux man would show any kind of respect to the - actually very very good - NT kernel. Good post also.
  - nytal 9y ago
    The NT kernel is actually terrible, that's why linux devs hate it.
    - adolfojp 9y ago
      How is it terrible? This is an honest question.
- mtgx 9y ago
  I agree this is harder and more impressive, but I thought Google's idea to run the entire Android framework at near-native speeds on Chrome OS inside a container was quite a smart technical solution as well.
mikerg87 9y ago
Any word on actual devices that can run this for sale. Configurations ?
israrkhan 9y ago
This is how Windows RT should have been in the first place.
asveikau 9y ago
Emulation should be a last resort. They should ship an SDK with all the proper import libs and a cl.exe etc. that can target proper Win32 on ARM.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  Agree. But that would mean people would make new Win32 apps which can theoretically be sold on other places than the store. (I realize Win32 apps + bridge makes it possible to sell store apps based on Win32 too - but it's not exactly the way they want it to happen). It feels like microsoft these days think that people who make desktop apps and don't sell them in the store are robbing them. Microsoft just needs the library of legacy Win32 apps to get their Windows-on-arm to take off, but they want as much as possible of new apps to be using the store. Not least evident by the new "The app you are installing is not from the windows store" messages in Creators Update.
  - asveikau 9y ago
    It would mean they would have to admit that Windows is not an iPhone or an iPad, that they shouldn't blindly copy what that other fruit-themed vendor has been doing, that maybe people own their computers (not the platform vendor) and want to use them. Failure to acknowledge this is why 8/RT failed and they are trying to repeat it edging just a bit closer towards sane but it's pretty disappointing that they won't go the whole way.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      I think they are trying to make the legacy desktop a professional and enterprise one, because there is no money selling operating systems to consumers. If they can get the huge chunk of people who are using their computers without an enterprise domain, and without heavy workstation apps (basically just doing internet/docs/games) to use a cheap and safe iOS-style windows, then they can at least start getting 30% cut of the app sales from all those people. I'm not too worried about that as long as there is a proper windows for professionals. In the above scenario they could start charging more of a premium than they do today for the legacy windows desktop because there would be no consumer version of it.
fnord123 9y ago
They are doing this because they want the benefits of great ARM battery life. But they are emulating x86 on ARM. So they believe that emulated x86 on ARM will have a better battery life than native x86. The only way I think this could be possible is if they measure battery life of an idle device. Maybe someone can disabuse me of this belief.
- martinald 9y ago
  Keep in mind, if you're just using a web browser, Skype and office, these are likely to all be ARM native. It's only when you boot up an x86 program it even comes into play - for a lot of users that will be very rare.
- pilsetnieks 9y ago
  Because they aren't running everyting in the emulator - the kernel, drivers, many of their own apps, and in future possibly 3rd party apps as well are run natively. They're emulating x86 for apps and some system DLLs. (There's a schematic at about 8 minutes.)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- angryteabag 9y ago
  Might be costly to emulate x86 - negating the power-saving benefits of ARM, however as it'll be using an SOC, they would have a lower physical presence. Imagine the motherboard on your phone, but in your laptop. The rest of the space would be used for batteries.
- stirlo 9y ago
  If you imagine a hybrid PC/phone device you could very well restrict x86 emulation to when the device is in PC mode and thus has a larger battery/AC power available in which case battery life isn't as big an issue.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Most computers are idle most of the time.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
Really interesting. I can see a potential milestone Windows 10 S on an Arm V8 based laptop with all day battery+. Sort of a Surface RT but without any excuses. If Apple follows suit and creates a light weight, network centric laptop experience around iOS, then you'll have three contenders for the 'appliance' environment, ChromeOS, Windows 10 S, and iOS. Each with their own 'laptop' design ethic, Pixel, Surface, MacBook.
- Corrado 9y ago
  I think I might take this line of reasoning a bit further and have Apple actually come out with an ARM (A11?) powered computer. Given that you could put multiple ARM chips in a MBP I could see a whole lot of power for very little money. Another thought would be switching the Mac Mini to ARM. Consequently, all this ARM talk has got to be making Intel nervous. I don't think now would be the best time to buy any INTC stock. :/
derefr 9y ago
Odd thought: the existence of an ARM Windows, makes it much simpler for Apple to ship ARM PCs. The macOS development stack has been re-tooled to output LLVM bitcode within its "fat" binaries for a good while now. It'd be very simple for Apple to throw the switch on a compile farm ala the one Google has for Android APKs, and suddenly have ARM downloads for everything on the Mac App Store (without requiring any re-submissions.) Which means it wouldn't be hard at all for Apple to ship a "functional" ARM macOS computer... just, until now, such a machine wouldn't have had a very good Windows story. No Boot Camp, no cheap virtualization, etc. Suddenly, that story is a solved problem.
- monocularvision 9y ago
  This idea keeps popping up. LLVM bitcode is way too architecture specific to allow that to happen. Chris Lattner has stated it himself.
  - derefr 9y ago
    "x86 bitcode" can be transpiled into "ARM bitcode." Yes, you could do the same thing with a plain x86-ISA binary, but such a binary might have sections that are very hard to transpile efficiently/effectively—because e.g. they exist as the result of compiling hand-optimized x86 ASM source modules. Targeting bitcode constrains the inputs a bit more, such that the input to the transpiler won't be using extremely-microarchitecture-specific instructions. And yes, the results wouldn't be 100% efficient. But it would be efficient enough—like Rosetta—to serve as an effective stop-gap to allow ecosystem consumers to continue to consume their purchased apps on new devices, until ecosystem developers upload explicitly re-optimized apps. (And it would—like Rosetta—at least let apps from "dead" development studios run, rather than killing them off entirely.)
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    For the LLVM bitcode as produced by the tools available at http://llvm.org/ http://llvm.org/ , yes it is correct. However you are forgetting three very important points: 1 - Apple is free to use their own fork of LLVM bitcode 2 - Apple controls what those bitcodes actually mean on their compiler stack 3 - LLVM guys already had a few talks at LLVM conferences about creating an actual platform independent form of bitcode
Skywing 9y ago
I'm out of the loop on ARM. Can somebody explain the significance of it?
- cosinetau 9y ago
  It's the processor architecture that in the past was used primarily on servers. Now it's almost universally used in mobile devices, too. It's ubiquity has caused a much larger technological demand for cross-platform development, which is one of the reasons why technologies like JavaScript and Rust have become so popular. Additionally, it's lower power and lower heat compared to it's x86 cousins.
  - abrowne 9y ago
    > in the past was used primarily on servers Embedded devices, yes, but ARM on servers is more like ARM's perpetual future.
- mtgx 9y ago
  It means Intel won't have just AMD Ryzen's great performance/dollar to worry about now, but also ARM chips' even better performance/dollar. If you don't think this is a real problem for Intel look back at why Intel failed in the mobile market. Yes, Qualcomm was "established", but few would've thought Intel can't at least beat lesser known competitors such as MediaTek. It couldn't because Atom chips and Intel's cost structures in general are much higher than those of ARM chip makers - to the point where it prohibits Intel from competing head-on with ARM chip makers. Intel invested at least $10-$15 billion in the mobile market, and it only had 2% market share to show for it at the end. You can't even blame LTE modem technology for it, because Intel actually had better LTE tech than MediaTek, second only to Qualcomm. If anything, it should've helped Intel become Qualcomm's main competitor. For now, we'll only see competition between ARM chips and Intel chips in budget laptops (which happen to be the most popular type of laptops), but with Moore's Law dying and Intel hitting a ceiling on performance/core, there's no reason why ARM chips can't catch-up to Intel at the higher-end levels of performance, too. And don't forget that right now ARM chip makers are still building first for smartphones. That means they try to have a 4-5W TDP for the entire SoC at most. They haven't even tried to build a chip that has 15W, 30W or 45W TDP for a laptop. But if things go well enough for them in budget laptops, I could see them start building those types of chips, too. This is also MediaTek's story in the mobile market. It started out competing with Qualcomm only in $100 smartphones with low-cost chips, and now it has just announced a 10nm high-end chip (Helio X30) that will compete against Snapdragon 835. It may not be quite as good still, but it should be close enough (the closest MediaTek has gotten, in fact). I imagine Microsoft will begin supporting that chip (or its successors) in Windows 10 soon enough, too.
wfunction 9y ago
Anybody know when we can expect a phone out that can emulate x86 Windows 10? End of 2017 is the first estimate I heard but I'm not sure how realistic that is.
Keyframe 9y ago
That company could do so much impact if only they had laser focus and distribution execution. Still so much talent with them.
cptskippy 9y ago
That's a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Mouse and a Belkin USB 2.0 hub. They're like 10 years old.
- fetbaffe 9y ago
  Fitting when doing a video on backwards compatibility.
drewg123 9y ago
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned FX!32. That was the binary translation layer that Windows NT on DEC Alpha used back in 1996 or so to run x86 Windows binaries. There is an old Digital Technical Journal article about it here: http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol9num1/vol9num1art1.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol9num1/vol9num1art1.pd... Everything old is new again!
- qubex 9y ago
  Ah, DEC Alpha! I had one that ran NT 4.0 and pre-release copies of Windows 2000 (amongst other things) and the day Microsoft decided not to release Windows 2000 for it was one of the saddest of my life (until then).
- wmu 9y ago
  AFAIR they had a kind of profile-based optimization. It was amazing.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
kabdib 9y ago
Props to D.M. for the pivotal work. You know who you are :-) -- ST boot sector guy
- dantle 9y ago
  Not the first time I've seen a reference to D.M. and pivotal work.[0] Is giving a shout out to D.M. some sort of Microsoft meme? [0] https://github.com/netmf/llilum https://github.com/netmf/llilum
yuhong 9y ago
I hope that recompiled desktop apps will be allowed in addition to emulation.
mataug 9y ago
Wow, This is brilliant. Microsoft is making leaps and bounds improvement to keep their consumer base happy. Almost ten years after switching to Linux, I think I might gladly use a windows machine as a second PC.
angryteabag 9y ago
I dont know much about where to find these chip or what I am looking for but... http://i.imgur.com/mRdk6ZD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/mRdk6ZD.jpg This is an ancient chip, however I also found MediaTek ones for ~ $10, which had 4 cores and were 1.6ghz SoC. Sounds to me like we could seriously see $100 laptops that actually function soon.
ericfrederich 9y ago
If they're supporting x86 emulation to run desktop apps will they support compiling native desktop ARM apps? They're essentially supporting the end result, I would hope they don't force developers to go through emulation to try to encourage them to write a universal windows app

450 points by vlangber 9y ago

Great potential for a Win10 phablet I can develop on that also lets me make phonecalls. Not for big projects, but an anywhere device. Does Win10 support non VoIP calls?

ManFromUranus 9y ago
I think it does since MS did a big overhall on their windows architecture, phone, xbox, and desktop all run the same base services just with different GUI's. Technically an XBOX could make phone calls but has no GUI or hardware for it.
mtgx 9y ago
I doubt Microsoft would be going the phablet direction, even if Windows on ARM now supports "desktop apps". There's still the issue of having a horrendous desktop UI on a phone. Heck, it still pisses me off that legacy Windows apps don't even properly support 1080p screens. It should be way worse to squeeze them in a small screen as well.
scholia 9y ago
(1) Windows 10 smartphones currently make cellular voice calls so that feature is already in the mobile version of Windows 10. (2) There's no reason why Samsung or one of the Chinese manufacturers couldn't make a Windows 10 phablet. Microsoft made Windows free on small-screen devices, so I assume it will continue to be free, or at worst, "zero paid". [Microsoft had a Windows offering where OEMs paid $10 for the OS but got a $10 rebate for setting Bing as the default search engine. So technically, Windows wasn't free, but OEMs didn't pay anything to use it.]

faragon 9y ago

If that runs great on phones, and has virtualization support for e.g. running ARM Linux guests, I would change both my Android phone and my Ubuntu laptop for one phone (e.g. Snapdragon 835 or better + 8-12GB RAM + 256GB flash + USB 3.0 OTG), using a dummy screen + keyboard as laptop replacement.

Retric 9y ago
I am not sure there is a huge gap from dummy screen + keyboard + battery to laptop and your not going to be able to power a laptop screen from a cellphone battery.
- faragon 9y ago
  I would use the "dummy screen + keyboard" only when plugged, obviously.
skdotdan 9y ago
Maybe you are describing the rumored Surface Phone?
MrMember 9y ago
A desktop/mobile convergence phone is my dream. I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
- wand3r 9y ago
  I think I get it; but could you expand a bit on what you mean?
  - MrMember 9y ago
    A phone form factor device that can run a full desktop OS, or something close to it. Canonical was getting close with Ubuntu Touch but that's essentially dead now. I don't want a gimped version of Windows like I'd get with Continuum, I don't want a "desktop-like" version of Android like Samsung is doing, I want a full version of Linux or Windows that can run desktop applications.
    - wand3r 9y ago
      Ah ok; I actually want something similar; a tablet that can act like a phone but only on WiFi so I don't have a phone bill. Basically; an iPad but w/ real integration & iMessages etc via a free or cheap VoIP number w/o data

platipuss 9y ago

I hope they drop this on the surface 2. It would save it from being a paper weight.

emehrkay 9y ago
Was the SurfaceRT an ARM device? I have one collecting dust, would be nice if it got an update
- MBCook 9y ago
  Yes. The RT devices ran ARM, which was one of the reasons for the locked down software policy (nothing else would run anyway).
  - aidenn0 9y ago
    Except that you were also denied much of the existing API and can only install software if you have a developer key from MS. I use my RT device for media playback in the car, but the windows-RT version of VLC hasn't been updated in years, and is somewhat buggy.
    - stirlo 9y ago
      It also took VLC more than 2 years to develop and release the RT version. By the time it was released the market had already declared RT dead.
- pedasmith 9y ago
  You might find that there are a lot of updates in the queue :-) . I dusted mine off a few months ago, and there were quite a number of them.
poizan42 9y ago
A qualified guess would be that you can just install it, because the bootloader is Microsoft signed so it would pass the secure boot check. Edit: Apparently Surface 2 isn't AArch64, so probably not.

daburninatorrr 9y ago

Man, that League of Legends desktop icon on the test machine is such a tease. I would love to know what the status of x86 gaming on ARM devices would be, especially for something competitive that runs on most anything like LoL

intrasight 9y ago
I'm sure that tease was no accident
kyriakos 9y ago
They already shown LoL and Photoshop running on ARM a few months ago in a demo video. Google it :)
- cm2187 9y ago
  But wasn't it with hardware emulation?
- yarauuta 9y ago
  I could not find it for some reason. Could you provide the link please?
- jaytagdamian 9y ago
  I have seen the photoshop video, but not League of Legends - got a link?
fnord123 9y ago
Spotting things in the details: Haru is propping his phone up with bricks from a Jungian personality test. Apparently Haru brings people together and results oriented. http://blog.mcchristie.com/wp-content/uploads/insights-bricks.jpg http://blog.mcchristie.com/wp-content/uploads/insights-brick...

0x0 9y ago

Does the x86/x64 cpu emulation work for JIT code or other self-modifying code? (Copy protected games, for example?) In the linked presentation they just briefly mention doing a load time(?) transpile of x86 to arm64 and caching the result on disk. What about exe packers that map memory rw then rx after unpacking, such as UPX?

poizan42 9y ago
They say that it's a dynamic translation layer, so presumably it doesn't make a distinction about where the code came for (except maybe you'll lose some performance optimization if they are caching translated code)
- tmccrmck 9y ago
  Most dynamic emulators don't do instruction by instruction emulation - they take in a whole block of instructions and translate that block, caching chunks that may be used without any inference (eg. branching). Once you hit a similar instruction block you don't have to do any translation; just execute from the cache. This is why you have a load time for reading from an x86 image.
amaks 9y ago
It's actually only x86 emulation. x64 is not supported according to the video.

sxates 9y ago

There have been rumors of a 'surface phone' that runs Win 10 (not mobile) for a couple years now. Most expected some kind of future Intel chip to enable that, but ARM support certainly opens up the possibility. Just what Windows phones need - another OS change!

ams6110 9y ago
I'd be very interested in a Windows 10 phone if it has automatic updates that do not depend on the carrier, to avoid the Android situation where only certain phones get updates on a timely basis.
- pjc50 9y ago
  This was the case for the Win7/8 Nokia phones, so the signs are good. (Although I'm in the UK, where the carriers are less abusive)
  - flukus 9y ago
    Weren't there a bunch of windows 7 phones that never got updated to windows 8?
    - abrowne 9y ago
      That was MS, not the carriers.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Windows 10 Mobile gets OS updates directly from Microsoft. Verizon does not support Windows 10 Mobile at all, but my four year old Verizon Lumia Icon got Windows 10 version 14393.1198, which released yesterday, yesterday. Microsoft has chosen to drop a lot of older models from the Creator's Update, but is still providing cumulative/security updates to the Anniversary Update right now, which is supported on all phones which run Windows 10 Mobile. At least, at present, if you have a Windows 10 Mobile device, you have recent security updates, regardless of make or model.

niftich 9y ago

Does this emulation work for x86-64 executables too? EDIT: no [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/7/13866936/microsoft-windows-10-arm-desktop-apps-support-qualcomm https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/7/13866936/microsoft-window...

satysin 9y ago

Microsoft are seriously killing it in emulation these days. First I was amazed with them getting Xbox 360 (PPC) games running at full speed or better on the Xbox One (x86) and now we have x86 on ARM. They have some wizards working on this stuff. Edit: I wonder if Dave Cutler is involved in this x86 on ARM stuff? I think he was with the Xbox 360/Xbox One.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Kenji 9y ago
As far as I know, they don't emulate Xbox 360 games on Xbox One, they port and compile it for the new console, creating entirely new binaries. Not much emulation going on there. Correct me if I'm wrong. EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_games_compatible_with_Xbox_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_games_compati... "Unlike the emulation of original Xbox games on the Xbox 360, the Xbox One does not require game modification, since it emulates an exact replica of its predecessor's environment – both hardware and software operating systems." I stand corrected.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  http://support.xbox.com/en-US/games/game-setup/play-xbox-360-games-on-xbox-one http://support.xbox.com/en-US/games/game-setup/play-xbox-360... > Xbox 360 games run within an emulator on Xbox One, which means you'll be able to use most features from both systems while playing games, such as screenshots, broadcasting, and Game DVR.
- satysin 9y ago
  It uses emulation. While it is true the user needs to download a 'game image' rather than play the game directly from disc this is because that image is a virtual hard disk that contains the game and a customised Xbox 360 virtual machine that has tweaks for the game. It is similar to PC console emulators that have specific configs for certain games.
  - 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago

HN is probably not the right target for this type of device. Either way we need Windows 10 on ARM to succeed for Intel to have more competition. I also do think it will be successful if it works at least as well as Intel's Atom-based Celeron and Pentium laptop chips, especially in emerging markets. Intel shot itself in the foot by replacing the Core architecture in mobile Celerons and Pentiums with Atom, and also by starting to rename lower performance Core M chips to Core i3 and Core i5. This will make it easier for ARM and AMD to "catch-up" and even beat Intel at these levels, because Intel got greedy and tried to trick the market with lower-performing chips at the same price points as for previous (and more powerful) generations.

cwyers 9y ago
Depends on what the results end up being, but there could be a lot of HN users happy to have this as a second/third device, especially those of us who still cling to desktops as our daily drivers.
smacktoward 9y ago
Given the recent unpleasantness with the Intel ME, I imagine there'd be a ready audience on HN for anything that makes alternate architectures more practical.
toast0 9y ago
> Intel shot itself in the foot by replacing the Core architecture in mobile Celerons and Pentiums with Atom Core mobile Celeron and Pentium are still available, for example Celeron 3865U [1], it's just Intel got tired of having names with useful information in them. That processor should probably have a name like Core v7 2C-2T 1.8Ghz-15W which has most of the useful information, but 3865U is what we got, so you have to filter out the atom chips yourself. [1] https://ark.intel.com/products/96507/Intel-Celeron-Processor-3865U-2M-Cache-1_80-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/96507/Intel-Celeron-Processor...

Dolores12 9y ago

Ha-ha, Microsoft will do it again. For Windows on all devices!

mtgx 9y ago
Not really. This is more about allowing ARM to enter the PC market. ARM couldn't break into the PC market without Microsoft's help and by being fully supported by Windows. The only other alternative were Chromebooks, and even Google didn't bother to make a big push for ARM in Chromebooks.

poizan42 9y ago

For any Microsoft insiders with knowledge about this, a few questions: 1. In the talk they claim that they get "near native" speed from the translation. Can we have some real number of what can be expected? What about warm up time? 2. Is the x86 translation layer only available in user space, or can x86 drivers be loaded for hardware that doesn't have arm drivers yet (or the manufacturer doesn't care about making them) 3. Are there any plans in the future for supporting x64 code as well in the translation layer? Edit: One more: 4. Are there any plans on supporting Arm v7 in the future, e.g. with Surface/Surface 2 support?

wolfgke 9y ago
5. How do they solve the problem that x86 has a much stronger memory model than ARM, which makes emulation of multithreaded x86 code pretty hard without introducing a huge performance disadvantage?
- kyberias 9y ago
  What do you mean, could you elaborate on that a bit? How is x86 "memory model stronger" and why would application code be affected?
  - valarauca1 9y ago
    Strength of memory model refers to concurrency guarantees. Also gets deep into caching architectures, OOO, and inter-cpu communications. This is a deep rabbit hole because modern processors are speculatively executing THOUSANDS of instructions ahead. So what you have/haven't written to memory is slightly existential. Here is a good blog post about it http://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/ http://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/ The TLDR: x64 tries REALLY HARD to ensure your pointers always have the newest data. ARMv6, very much. ARMv7 kind of. ARMv8 fairly.
    - wfunction 9y ago
      Thousands? I thought it was more like a dozen or two at most. Any link on that?

pjc50 9y ago

Interesting - something they should have done rather than the orphan WindowsRT, in my opinion. I wonder if this ends up being the inheritor of Windows CE for embedded ARM-flavoured devices. I also wonder if this means that the Win10 ARM kernel has the full Windows API - so if you built an ARM PE executable that could run natively. I suspect 95% of the pieces are in place for that but it's not yet been productised.

RachelF 9y ago
A lot of people who were burned when they dumped Windows RT will be very cautious of this.
zeta0134 9y ago
I feel like this is in response to the pushback against Windows RT honestly. They put the cart before the horse on that one, trying to get everyone to use an app store with no apps, and quickly realizing that the base Windows experience wasn't enough for the vast majority of their users. Killing Windows RT was the right choice, because it was never designed to do something like this. It had a weak translation layer for Win32's API built right in, and they would have needed to do some wizardry to have the two live side by side. No, I think RT was a useful but failed experiment, and I'm excited to see them take this approach with Win32 emulation on ARM. If it works as well as these demos suggest it does, it could finally provide a good path for ARM into consumer laptops and even desktops, to spark some great competition in the space. I'm excited to see where this goes.

xemoka 9y ago

This excites me. I work with a lot of geospatial industry tools, many mobile tools are still based on old window CE/pocket PC/windows mobile platforms; I hope to see these snapdragon devices overtake this area. Mobile data collection tools on iOS and android devices are rather poor (at least open source ones), hopefully this will help solve this problem—we'll just be able to use windows applications that work and are better developed. The windows ecosystem still seems easier to me than iOS / Android, perhaps that's just my bias or that I see more development options. This could be a huge turning point for Microsoft's mobile divisions. x86 drivers are still something I'm curious about here... [edit: I should also mention, the reason why geospatial tools comes into play here is because the snapdragon CPUs have integrated GSM and GNSS (GPS) on the die. Currently, x86 based tablets have to use a separate component, and many don't come with it or even provide GNSS as an option]

pishpash 9y ago
It's not your bias. The Windows ecosystem has always been pretty good for developers. If it weren't for the ten-year Ballmer purgatory, MS would have been all over this space, where little iOS and Android toys still haven't hit puberty. Reinventing the wheel has been an overall giant waste of time for the industry.

wand3r 9y ago

I am seriously impressed with Microsoft. I haven't used windows in years but they are releasing tons of useful things. VSCode is great on Ubuntu and every version of OS X I have run it on. Plus tons of other cool things like bash on win; etc. Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

artmageddon 9y ago
> Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS How so?
- wand3r 9y ago
  I am not a super user of AWS and have light demands as far as the console. I find the documentation and dashboard pretty decent; burnrate monitor and basic services(vm, ip, storage) easy enough. The naming and requirements-- and also the split up of resources v. Classic is pretty annoying. On AWS I was through a sea of services I don't need w/ poor docs, clunky configs and a lot of security tiers. Their pricing is baffling and I really just think it looks terrible. Azure has similar issues; but I can navigate it better and feel more comfortable w) it
  - artmageddon 9y ago
    Thanks for your input on this. I'm considering getting my AWS Developer certificate so I'm glad to have some warning about it going in..
    - wand3r 9y ago
      Again; this is my own opinion and I am not on a competitive dev team. AWS is the defacto standard; and I think learning the API keeps you out of the UI. Azure has one too; they are both clunky and more than I need but; and someone who uses AWS hopefully will chime in-- my guess is most people use the API almost exclusively. I don't have enough familiarity to judge it; have only use it a bit and a while ago

mmcconnell1618 9y ago

Windows 10 on ARM would allow Apple Bootcamp on ARM-based MacBooks. There have been rumors about Apple moving to ARM and potentially bringing processors in-house. I wonder if that influenced Microsoft's thinking.

cwyers 9y ago
You think that this actual shipping product that Microsoft developed might have been influenced by these "rumors" that are never actually sourced to anyone in Apple?

Zigurd 9y ago

Strategically interesting because, up to now, the Dalvik bytecode runtime and the subsequent pre-compiling ART runtimes were the best way to do ISA-independent application environments. Apple's fat binaries got in early enough in their (smaller) developer community for Apple to avoid being tied to an ISA. Microsoft was handcuffed to an x86 legacy boat anchor. But now they have escaped, and those other approaches are less of an advantage.

kev009 9y ago

Microsoft is one of the few companies that really grok Systems Software right now.

pjmlp 9y ago
They always did, but FOSS people always downplay the work that Microsoft Systems Research does, as if having a clone of an existing OS and UIs was some kind of innovation.
- nytal 9y ago
  And you get every situation to shit on FOSS people and praise ms, right? Do you get paid for this?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    My account managers are quite happy with what I get doing enterprise consulting.
    - nytal 9y ago
      Java noob?
nytal 9y ago
Nope, it's the one spending the most on PR and useless projects which attract tech noobs.
- kev009 9y ago
  Red Hat?

wolfgke 9y ago

Does this mean that Windows 10 (not Windows 10 IoT Core) will also come to Raspberry Pi 3?

d9 9y ago
Good question. How much memory on RPi3 and how much required to run Windows10?
- wolfgke 9y ago
  RPi3 has 1 GiB of RAM. The system requirements of Windows 10 (cf. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifications https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifica...) are 1 GiB for 32 bit and 2 GiB for 64 bit (both on x86). So I think if Microsoft is willing to, it should work, in particular if they slim down the fictional RPi3 version of Windows 10 (which I would strongly recommend). I personally see the much larger performance regression for Windows 10 on RPi3 in the fact that at least on Windows 10 IoT Core there was no hardware acceleration of graphics on RPi3 when I last tested it (about a year ago), which caused it to feel rather sluggish.
MikusR 9y ago
I guess not. It requires hardware features from Snapdragon 820/835.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  Do you know particular details what these hardware features are?
  - mtgx 9y ago
    I'm guessing it's both a performance issue and a "let's not support too many different ARM chips from the beginning" issue. Snapdragon 835 will probably be the minimum level of ARM performance Microsoft will accept. We may start seeing Samsung's Exynos and a high-end MediaTek processor being supported in a year or two.

wfunction 9y ago

Can someone explain how they are achieving high execution speed? I would have expected the speeds (or at least the start-up times, if we have dynamic recompilation) for x86 on ARM to be outright abysmal.

mark-r 9y ago
There's a reason their demo apps were pre-installed. The initial recompilation is cached so that running it the second time will be much quicker than the first.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

d9 9y ago

What about .Net on ARM?

WorldMaker 9y ago
I believe there was a mention in the Day 1 BUILD keynote somewhere that Samsung's work on .NET on ARM (built for Tizen specifically, but I would imagine generically useful) was going to be open sourced to the .NET Core project at some point.
- d9 9y ago
  So, as of today, Windows 10 on ARM support x86 win32 or UWP, but not a .Net?
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Oh, UWP .NET has always supported ARM (since Windows 8). I assumed the question was about .NET needs outside of the UWP.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Also, the Win32 x86 emulation I would imagine would support most/all .NET Win32 applications, to whatever extent the Win32 .NET Framework gets added to emulation image.
pjmlp 9y ago
.NET always supported ARM for embedded deployments, and nowadays UWP as well, so they have enough code around to update RyuJIT to also support ARM.

0xFFC 9y ago

Please correct me If I am wrong. But I think with WSL and this, Microsoft proved they are much much more superior than Google and Apple when it comes to serious system software development (they have to be, they have developed one of the most complex Kernel of the all times and maintained and improved it for decades. Yes I am linux guy too. But Widnows Kernel is extremely complex and well architectured piece of software ever written). Yes, Google does have very good applications, apple does have too. But when it comes to hardcore system software development stuff. They are unbeatable. Emulating entire x86 on ARM? This is mind blowing. They have pulled good emulation before too (one I think was inside XBOX). But this is going to be serious. I would say very serious. Extremely good battery life would give Microsoft, very good edge over Apple. 1) Qualcomm will be the winner. and so other ARM CPU manufacturer. and Intel is the biggest loser here. 2) Microsoft will hit market with this. After this they will have extremely good position to release good phone, and here we stand, I see successful future for Windows Phone. 3) From Computer Architecture perspective, the bottleneck is not memory or CPU speed. It is IO and energy. I don't know how this will impact on IO. But I am almost sure this is unbeatable from energy efficiency, and when I (and almost all people I know) buying a laptop. battery life is almost the most important aspect of it.

nbevans 9y ago
I voted you up as it's rare a Linux man would show any kind of respect to the - actually very very good - NT kernel. Good post also.
- nytal 9y ago
  The NT kernel is actually terrible, that's why linux devs hate it.
  - adolfojp 9y ago
    How is it terrible? This is an honest question.
mtgx 9y ago
I agree this is harder and more impressive, but I thought Google's idea to run the entire Android framework at near-native speeds on Chrome OS inside a container was quite a smart technical solution as well.

mikerg87 9y ago

Any word on actual devices that can run this for sale. Configurations ?

israrkhan 9y ago

This is how Windows RT should have been in the first place.

asveikau 9y ago

Emulation should be a last resort. They should ship an SDK with all the proper import libs and a cl.exe etc. that can target proper Win32 on ARM.

alkonaut 9y ago
Agree. But that would mean people would make new Win32 apps which can theoretically be sold on other places than the store. (I realize Win32 apps + bridge makes it possible to sell store apps based on Win32 too - but it's not exactly the way they want it to happen). It feels like microsoft these days think that people who make desktop apps and don't sell them in the store are robbing them. Microsoft just needs the library of legacy Win32 apps to get their Windows-on-arm to take off, but they want as much as possible of new apps to be using the store. Not least evident by the new "The app you are installing is not from the windows store" messages in Creators Update.
- asveikau 9y ago
  It would mean they would have to admit that Windows is not an iPhone or an iPad, that they shouldn't blindly copy what that other fruit-themed vendor has been doing, that maybe people own their computers (not the platform vendor) and want to use them. Failure to acknowledge this is why 8/RT failed and they are trying to repeat it edging just a bit closer towards sane but it's pretty disappointing that they won't go the whole way.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    I think they are trying to make the legacy desktop a professional and enterprise one, because there is no money selling operating systems to consumers. If they can get the huge chunk of people who are using their computers without an enterprise domain, and without heavy workstation apps (basically just doing internet/docs/games) to use a cheap and safe iOS-style windows, then they can at least start getting 30% cut of the app sales from all those people. I'm not too worried about that as long as there is a proper windows for professionals. In the above scenario they could start charging more of a premium than they do today for the legacy windows desktop because there would be no consumer version of it.

fnord123 9y ago

They are doing this because they want the benefits of great ARM battery life. But they are emulating x86 on ARM. So they believe that emulated x86 on ARM will have a better battery life than native x86. The only way I think this could be possible is if they measure battery life of an idle device. Maybe someone can disabuse me of this belief.

martinald 9y ago
Keep in mind, if you're just using a web browser, Skype and office, these are likely to all be ARM native. It's only when you boot up an x86 program it even comes into play - for a lot of users that will be very rare.
pilsetnieks 9y ago
Because they aren't running everyting in the emulator - the kernel, drivers, many of their own apps, and in future possibly 3rd party apps as well are run natively. They're emulating x86 for apps and some system DLLs. (There's a schematic at about 8 minutes.)
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angryteabag 9y ago
Might be costly to emulate x86 - negating the power-saving benefits of ARM, however as it'll be using an SOC, they would have a lower physical presence. Imagine the motherboard on your phone, but in your laptop. The rest of the space would be used for batteries.
stirlo 9y ago
If you imagine a hybrid PC/phone device you could very well restrict x86 emulation to when the device is in PC mode and thus has a larger battery/AC power available in which case battery life isn't as big an issue.
adrianN 9y ago
Most computers are idle most of the time.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

Really interesting. I can see a potential milestone Windows 10 S on an Arm V8 based laptop with all day battery+. Sort of a Surface RT but without any excuses. If Apple follows suit and creates a light weight, network centric laptop experience around iOS, then you'll have three contenders for the 'appliance' environment, ChromeOS, Windows 10 S, and iOS. Each with their own 'laptop' design ethic, Pixel, Surface, MacBook.

Corrado 9y ago
I think I might take this line of reasoning a bit further and have Apple actually come out with an ARM (A11?) powered computer. Given that you could put multiple ARM chips in a MBP I could see a whole lot of power for very little money. Another thought would be switching the Mac Mini to ARM. Consequently, all this ARM talk has got to be making Intel nervous. I don't think now would be the best time to buy any INTC stock. :/

derefr 9y ago

Odd thought: the existence of an ARM Windows, makes it much simpler for Apple to ship ARM PCs. The macOS development stack has been re-tooled to output LLVM bitcode within its "fat" binaries for a good while now. It'd be very simple for Apple to throw the switch on a compile farm ala the one Google has for Android APKs, and suddenly have ARM downloads for everything on the Mac App Store (without requiring any re-submissions.) Which means it wouldn't be hard at all for Apple to ship a "functional" ARM macOS computer... just, until now, such a machine wouldn't have had a very good Windows story. No Boot Camp, no cheap virtualization, etc. Suddenly, that story is a solved problem.

monocularvision 9y ago
This idea keeps popping up. LLVM bitcode is way too architecture specific to allow that to happen. Chris Lattner has stated it himself.
- derefr 9y ago
  "x86 bitcode" can be transpiled into "ARM bitcode." Yes, you could do the same thing with a plain x86-ISA binary, but such a binary might have sections that are very hard to transpile efficiently/effectively—because e.g. they exist as the result of compiling hand-optimized x86 ASM source modules. Targeting bitcode constrains the inputs a bit more, such that the input to the transpiler won't be using extremely-microarchitecture-specific instructions. And yes, the results wouldn't be 100% efficient. But it would be efficient enough—like Rosetta—to serve as an effective stop-gap to allow ecosystem consumers to continue to consume their purchased apps on new devices, until ecosystem developers upload explicitly re-optimized apps. (And it would—like Rosetta—at least let apps from "dead" development studios run, rather than killing them off entirely.)
- pjmlp 9y ago
  For the LLVM bitcode as produced by the tools available at http://llvm.org/ http://llvm.org/ , yes it is correct. However you are forgetting three very important points: 1 - Apple is free to use their own fork of LLVM bitcode 2 - Apple controls what those bitcodes actually mean on their compiler stack 3 - LLVM guys already had a few talks at LLVM conferences about creating an actual platform independent form of bitcode

Skywing 9y ago

I'm out of the loop on ARM. Can somebody explain the significance of it?

cosinetau 9y ago
It's the processor architecture that in the past was used primarily on servers. Now it's almost universally used in mobile devices, too. It's ubiquity has caused a much larger technological demand for cross-platform development, which is one of the reasons why technologies like JavaScript and Rust have become so popular. Additionally, it's lower power and lower heat compared to it's x86 cousins.
- abrowne 9y ago
  > in the past was used primarily on servers Embedded devices, yes, but ARM on servers is more like ARM's perpetual future.
mtgx 9y ago
It means Intel won't have just AMD Ryzen's great performance/dollar to worry about now, but also ARM chips' even better performance/dollar. If you don't think this is a real problem for Intel look back at why Intel failed in the mobile market. Yes, Qualcomm was "established", but few would've thought Intel can't at least beat lesser known competitors such as MediaTek. It couldn't because Atom chips and Intel's cost structures in general are much higher than those of ARM chip makers - to the point where it prohibits Intel from competing head-on with ARM chip makers. Intel invested at least $10-$15 billion in the mobile market, and it only had 2% market share to show for it at the end. You can't even blame LTE modem technology for it, because Intel actually had better LTE tech than MediaTek, second only to Qualcomm. If anything, it should've helped Intel become Qualcomm's main competitor. For now, we'll only see competition between ARM chips and Intel chips in budget laptops (which happen to be the most popular type of laptops), but with Moore's Law dying and Intel hitting a ceiling on performance/core, there's no reason why ARM chips can't catch-up to Intel at the higher-end levels of performance, too. And don't forget that right now ARM chip makers are still building first for smartphones. That means they try to have a 4-5W TDP for the entire SoC at most. They haven't even tried to build a chip that has 15W, 30W or 45W TDP for a laptop. But if things go well enough for them in budget laptops, I could see them start building those types of chips, too. This is also MediaTek's story in the mobile market. It started out competing with Qualcomm only in $100 smartphones with low-cost chips, and now it has just announced a 10nm high-end chip (Helio X30) that will compete against Snapdragon 835. It may not be quite as good still, but it should be close enough (the closest MediaTek has gotten, in fact). I imagine Microsoft will begin supporting that chip (or its successors) in Windows 10 soon enough, too.

wfunction 9y ago

Anybody know when we can expect a phone out that can emulate x86 Windows 10? End of 2017 is the first estimate I heard but I'm not sure how realistic that is.

Keyframe 9y ago

That company could do so much impact if only they had laser focus and distribution execution. Still so much talent with them.

cptskippy 9y ago

That's a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Mouse and a Belkin USB 2.0 hub. They're like 10 years old.

fetbaffe 9y ago
Fitting when doing a video on backwards compatibility.

drewg123 9y ago

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned FX!32. That was the binary translation layer that Windows NT on DEC Alpha used back in 1996 or so to run x86 Windows binaries. There is an old Digital Technical Journal article about it here: http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol9num1/vol9num1art1.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol9num1/vol9num1art1.pd... Everything old is new again!

qubex 9y ago
Ah, DEC Alpha! I had one that ran NT 4.0 and pre-release copies of Windows 2000 (amongst other things) and the day Microsoft decided not to release Windows 2000 for it was one of the saddest of my life (until then).
wmu 9y ago
AFAIR they had a kind of profile-based optimization. It was amazing.
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kabdib 9y ago

Props to D.M. for the pivotal work. You know who you are :-) -- ST boot sector guy

dantle 9y ago
Not the first time I've seen a reference to D.M. and pivotal work.[0] Is giving a shout out to D.M. some sort of Microsoft meme? [0] https://github.com/netmf/llilum https://github.com/netmf/llilum

yuhong 9y ago

I hope that recompiled desktop apps will be allowed in addition to emulation.

mataug 9y ago

Wow, This is brilliant. Microsoft is making leaps and bounds improvement to keep their consumer base happy. Almost ten years after switching to Linux, I think I might gladly use a windows machine as a second PC.

angryteabag 9y ago

I dont know much about where to find these chip or what I am looking for but... http://i.imgur.com/mRdk6ZD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/mRdk6ZD.jpg This is an ancient chip, however I also found MediaTek ones for ~ $10, which had 4 cores and were 1.6ghz SoC. Sounds to me like we could seriously see $100 laptops that actually function soon.

ericfrederich 9y ago

If they're supporting x86 emulation to run desktop apps will they support compiling native desktop ARM apps? They're essentially supporting the end result, I would hope they don't force developers to go through emulation to try to encourage them to write a universal windows app