36 ms·
Microsoft launches Windows 10 on ARM
- TheCoreh 9y agoHopefully this partnership will allow Qualcomm to bring the Snapdragon performance on par with the Apple CPUs.
- niftich 9y agoWhy would that be the case? Do you foresee this putting a great deal of performance-related pressure on Qualcomm that wasn't there before, despite them being a top-shipping smartphone CPU vendor? Given Qualcomm's just-announced partnership with AMD [1], Qualcomm is clearly pursuing multiple strategies to compete with Intel, but they can leverage AMD to cover their weaknesses, instead of trying to outpace Apple's A-series in places where the market seems fine with the current Snapdragons. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855188
- microcolonel 9y agoWell, Apple and Qualcomm have taken different approaches. Having a (successful) desktop/laptop product will cause them to make architectural decisions which don't make sense on a smartphone in general.
- mtgx 9y ago> Do you foresee this putting a great deal of performance-related pressure on Qualcomm that wasn't there before Possibly. Although I don't doubt Apple may have superior expertise in designing ARM chips (which sounds strange when comparing to the #1 ARM chip maker), I think one of the main reasons Qualcomm hasn't been able to match Apple is that Qualcomm has to optimize its chip for a variety of OEM needs. Apple on the other hand, could even push the TDP by 20% on its chip, if it know that it can make up for that loss of efficiency with more optimized software that's developed specifically for that chip. The AMD partnership is very interesting. I hope they double down on that. Fun fact: Qualcomm wanted to buy AMD in 2015, but because of some terrible management and engineering choices with the Snapdragon 810, which led to a sales slump that year, the board was so furious that i wanted to sell Qualcomm's chip business! (and sell just modems). Of course, that would have been a terrible idea, business-wise, which is why if Broadcom buys Qualcomm I hope it does get rid of that board and Qualcomm's CEO from day one. Another fun fact: Qualcomm's Adreno GPU is AMD's old Mobile Radeon GPU division, and Adreno is an anagram of Radeon. I've been hoping someone like Qualcomm or Samsung buys AMD. Perhaps it may actually do that eventually, with or without Broadcom's help. Then we can see some real competition against Intel, and AMD alone simply lacks the funds to compete head-on with Intel in many areas. Also, now I'm starting to wonder if Broadcom knew about this deal and it's why it wanted to buy Qualcomm now.
- megy 9y ago> I think one of the main reasons Qualcomm hasn't been able to match Apple is that Qualcomm has to optimize its chip for a variety of OEM needs. This just makes no sense at all. So you are saying some OEM's want slow chips? No, of course not. Or are you saying that Samsung S8 has different needs to LG V30 or to the Google Pixel? No, of course not. There needs are all the same.
- lorenzhs 9y agoSmartphones and tablets are not Qualcomm’a only market by far. They have plenty of other customers, too.
- matthoiland 9y agoThe A11 chip is insane for a tablet. Would love to see a Surface Pro with this performance.
- baldfat 9y agoThe i5 and i7 of Surface Pros absolutely melt A11's performance. The A11 would have run laps for battery life though.
- bigdubs 9y agoNot really according to geekbench. a11: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/5286336 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/5286336 i7 (rmbp): https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/5285899 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/5285899 4.1k vs. 4.8k
- Joeri 9y agoInteresting that the multi-core score is a lot lower. Probably you're seeing thermal management in that multi-core score, meaning a macbook with active cooling should be able to reach much higher multi-core numbers. The A11 is way too overpowered for a phone or tablet. Apple is clearly in the awkward phase where they've almost gotten the right CPU to put in their laptops. The A12 will be a no-brainer. Same performance as i7, way better battery life, way cheaper to produce.
- bigdubs 9y agoI think hyperthreading with the i7 also gives it an edge with multi-core
- endorphone 9y agoNote that the A11 has two "big" cores, and four much slower but power efficient "little" cores. If they were making an A11 variant for desktop use they would have the power profile to use more big cores.
- bitmapbrother 9y agoWhy would this partnership have any significance on the performance of Qualcomm SoC's? Qualcomm doesn't really drive the performance of the architecture they license - that would be ARM. The next generation Snapdragon, Exynos and Kirin SoC's will all use ARM's new A75 and A55 core dynamIQ reference designs and their performance will be the same.
- ricw 9y agoThis is unlikely. Apple's CPU budget for it's devices is likely much higher than anything Qualcomm's customers are willing to pay (vs the current snapdragon pricing). Apple's CPUs are very very large and consequently relatively expensive. As an example, a latest gen snapdragon 835 has 3 billion transistors, while Apple's A11 has 4.3 billion.
- Symmetry 9y agoAnd those numbers severely understate the difference since, IIRC, a much larger fraction of Apple's SoC transistor budget is devoted to its application processors. EDIT: Found an image. More a simple understatement than a severe one. https://wccftech.com/apple-a10-fusion-cores-bigger-than-competition/ https://wccftech.com/apple-a10-fusion-cores-bigger-than-comp...
- endorphone 9y agoOf course competitors want more powerful options, and they certainly have the budget for it given the pricing of premium Android devices. Qualcomm simply fell behind. While Apple went for powerful, enormous cores in small numbers, Qualcomm and friends bet on simpler, smaller cores. Apple has started copy/pasting their fantastic cores, yielding the enormous transistor counts. I admit to being a skeptic when Apple went off to do their own thing, sure that a whole industry (and options like the Tegra) would make them eat their hat. Apple executed and are in a remarkable position now.
- ateesdalejr 9y agoCan't wait to see windows on a RPi soon... If windows even can run on 512 megs.
- wlesieutre 9y agoThere’s been a trimmed down “IoT” version on RPi for a few years https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-on-the-raspberry-pi-what-you-need-to-know/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-on-the-raspb...
- ghostly_s 9y agoSize aside, I tried installing Win10 To Go on a USB 3 flash drive recently (just a typical 'high speed' flash drive, not the external eSATA drives they certify) and the performance was beyond unusable. I can't imagine anything would run off an SD card.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y agoRPi 3 has 1 GB of RAM.
- joelthelion 9y agoSo what are people going to use this for? Servers? Tablets?
- mtgx 9y agoLow-end PCs in China, India, etc. Intel is selling even its Atom-based Celeron and Pentium chips for laptops at quite the premium (about $110 and $160 MSRP, respectively). I wouldn't expect these very first devices target that market, though, possibly because Qualcomm wants to be associated with more premium devices, but I think we'll see these chips in lower-end cost-competitive devices, too.
- solidr53 9y agoIoT
- david-cako 9y agoI think Microsoft is just realizing what Apple realized 8 years ago: ARM is the next x86 for the type of devices that people want to buy.
- jazoom 9y agoI think you forgot about Windows RT.
- neilalexander 9y agoWindows RT was not a failure because of ARM, or because the hardware was not capable. Windows RT was a failure because, once again, Microsoft showed that they are completely incapable of reading the market. They tried to market a Windows experience to consumers and then did not deliver on the Windows experience.
- jazoom 9y agoYou might be replying to the wrong comment. I didn't say anything about Windows RT being a failure. The only meaning I was trying to convey was that Microsoft DID try to push an ARM platform many years ago.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoThe difference between this and Windows RT is that this will emulate an x86 chip to allow you to run apps compiled for Intel.
- asniper 9y agoso I guess AMD compiled apps don't work? :P
- microcolonel 9y agoYeah, AMD64 applications don't yet work on this, only Intel ones. I think the stuff for a standard AMD64 machine isn't quite yet out of patent.
- yuhong 9y agoThe Intel patents for up to SSE2 should expire soon, and hopefully the AMD64 patents should be licenseable from AMD (if they are interested in that). I would not be surprised if this already emulates up to SSE2, given the likely release date and the fact that recent versions of MSVC already enable /arch:SSE2 by default.
- microcolonel 9y ago> I would not be surprised if this already emulates up to SSE2, given the likely release date. Yeah, even if they could be sued, they could settle for a couple years damages max, or quite possibly win, since they're doing DBT (no different from QEMU or loads of other x86 + SSE2 emulators).
- beagle3 9y agothough it's worth remembering that QEMU developers do not have the deep pockets that MS has -- and it is the depth of the pockets, rather than the (alleged) violation that drives law suits and threats.
- 9y ago
- stonewhite 9y agoI'm curious about how that battery life would be like with a linux installed. Also, I wonder the internals of that x86 emulation, if a linux program can leverage it?
- mtgx 9y agoLinux has supported x86 emulation on ARM chips for many years now, I think even before Android started supporting x86 chips.
- mjg59 9y agoEh kind of? qemu can be used with binfmt-misc to do CPU emulation while still passing syscalls to the running kernel, but it's a long way from perfect - there's various corner cases that cause problems.
- microcolonel 9y ago> Also, I wonder the internals of that x86 emulation, if a linux program can leverage it? It could probably be adapted for that, but since either Microsoft or Qualcomm is in control of it right now, and it generates a competitive advantage, I doubt either would be enthusiastic to publish it in such a form. For what it's worth, if about 1/3 native performance (not sure, but I figure the QCOM/MS DBT gets maybe 1/2-3/4 native, from the way it seems to work with applications in the demos) is acceptable, QEMU can do more or less the same thing already on Linux: running x86 userspace programs on AArch64 (also some other architectures). In fact, you can add a binary format handler to your system to have it transparently load x86 binaries in QEMU. Of course, this means having to set up a separate PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and a few other things.
- dest 9y agoSo, as Windows will be available on ARM, we will have more laptops with ARM, more than just Chromebooks. This seems like a win for users.
- greenhouse_gas 9y agoBut with a locked bootloader, so not necessarily
- neilalexander 9y agoThis might be a non-issue. The only people who are likely to care about installing alternative operating systems are power users, and power users may still prefer to buy more powerful Intel systems.
- yndoendo 9y agoAs a power user, I'm still looking for a good ARM battery efficient 2-in-1 to use as a light laptop and tablet that runs Linux. Not to use as a production machine but for content consumption. Being able to continually read a book or article while coding or performing a task on production machine would be better then having to swap between the two on one computer. Wouldn't choose Intel for that.
- scott_karana 9y agoI can't see why a 5W TDP Intel SOC wouldn't also be sufficient for that purpose. The Snapdragon 835 is 4.5W. Why the specific ISA desire?
- cwyers 9y agoHaving more shipping ARM devices gets you closer to that, even if these devices have a locked bootloader. The more robust the ecosystem around ARM with UEFI gets, the more the parts become commodity and if there's enough demand, someone will start shipping them with Linux or unlocked bootloaders. (Hate UEFI all you want, but standardizing on something is much better than the Android world where every SoC requires a custom bootloader and if the manufacturer doesn't support the kernel you want to run, tough. Having a standardized platform to run on means you can have a Linux distribution that supports running on any device that supports the standard.)
- Nullabillity 9y agoFrom Microsoft's Secure Boot OEM policy[0]: > The firmware setup shall indicate if Secure Boot is turned on, and if it is operated in Standard or Custom Mode. The firmware setup must provide an option to return from Custom to Standard Mode which restores the factory defaults. On an ARM system, it is forbidden to enable Custom Mode. Only Standard Mode may be enabled. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/compatibility/systems#systemfundamentalsfirmwareuefisecureboot https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com...
- kevin_b_er 9y agoTranslation: The ARM "computers" will only run software Microsoft blesses. Can we call it a computer anymore? It is more like a tablet when Microsoft demands digital restrictions management on the software that runs on the device.
- candiodari 9y agoSadly, I bet companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google see it more along the lines of "the free ride general purpose computing has gotten sharing hardware with our ecosystems should end".
- userbinator 9y agoFurther to that, you can't patch out the telemetry and other privacy-violating "features", without somehow finding an exploit. In fact, from that perspective this is no different than the typical locked-down iPhone or Android. What's worse than a computer with preinstalled spyware? A computer with preinstalled spyware you can't remove. When the Lenovo/Superfish thing happened, I commented at the time that it was at least something you could remove by reformatting and installing your choice of OS. Ideally we'd all buy computers with our own choice of software already, but if forced to choose, I'd rather buy one with preinstalled spyware I know I can remove, than one which claims to not have such software and be "more secure".
- y_u_no_rust 9y ago
- ngsayjoe 9y agoI thought Intel threatened to sue if Windows run x86 apps with Intel emulation on ARM? So QCOM is being sued right and left (Apple, Intel, and governments all over the world)?
- microcolonel 9y ago> So QCOM is being sued right and left (Apple, Intel, and governments all over the world)? For what it's worth, if you do competitive business like Qualcomm does, there will most likely be at least one pending lawsuit against you at any given time.
- mtgx 9y agoEmpty threats, I think. Either way, I think Intel is long overdue another anti-trust lawsuit from the EU for its GPU bundling in laptops, as well as other things. Don't worry, the EU has an anti-trust case against Qualcomm already.
- throwaway613834 9y agoDoes anyone know if/when Windows 10's x86-on-ARM thing might come out for phone(s)? I don't really care for the emulation on laptops but I need to upgrade my phone and this is a factor.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoCombined with the Continuum thing for Windows Phone (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum) this would be incredible. You could use your phone as a desktop replacement. Unfortunately, it seems like Microsoft has given up on Windows Phone already.
- throwaway613834 9y agoI thought it was supposed to be for phones. That's what I read last year: "I'm hearing this Cobalt [x86-on-ARM] technology is aimed at phone and possibly tablet/desktop devices." [1] I'm confused when it became a laptop thing at all. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-x86-on-arm64-emulation-a-windows-10-redstone-3-fall-2017-deliverable/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-x86-on-arm64-emulati...
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoMicrosoft announced they were going to make vanilla Windows 10 run on Snapdragon.
- throwaway613834 9y agoYeah but does that imply phones? Or is it about Snapdragon tablets or something?
- WorldMaker 9y agoIt's always been something of a laptop thing? Microsoft since Windows 8 has made it somewhat clear they think Windows needs a strong presence on ARM tablets to A) avoid Intel hegemony, B) remain competitive with the iPad in that space. "It doesn't run any of my apps," was perhaps the biggest complaint about Windows 8 ARM tablets, so it makes sense that x86-on-ARM was a big strategy push before the next attempt. Beyond that, rumor has it that Microsoft hopes selling tablets/laptops with ARM will open the Windows ARM space enough in the meantime while the Windows team is finishing the next version of key Windows shell components (nicknamed the "Composable Shell" or CShell), which would be make the Continuum experience for say Phones stronger because instead of switching entirely different shell applications (start menu, taskbar, et al) between form factors, the same applications responsively adapt themselves.
- StreamBright 9y agoI wish they launched an OS that has bare minimum interruption with things I do not care about. I seriously do not need anything from an OS than just a super lightweight interface to interact with applications and filesystems. Why is it so hard? The mail.app vs outlook is a great example of useful and useless UI. Both app does the same.
- jamesgeck0 9y agoOutlook isn't part of Windows 10. The default Windows 10 mail application is actually pretty comparable to Mail.app.
- megy 9y agoExactly, for most people they want the OS to get out of the way. Microsoft never seemed to get that. Constantly interrupting.
- aluhut 9y agoWindows 2000 was this. Or at least measured by every windows before and after it.
- mlazos 9y agoI’ve seen firsthand the amount of work that goes into building a complex, scalable system and the problem with your statements are that 1) It’s hard to measure at scale what each of your users cares about. This is especially true with “lightweight” interfaces - simpler UI means you have to carefully decide what you want to expose. 2) Generally the older software is, the more bloated it becomes - this is inescapable. The only real solution to this problem is full rewrites which rarely happen because they’re so expensive and time-consuming. By the time you ship an OS it might already have some bloat. 3) People like what they are used to. Remember the backlash with the Metro interface? Windows users would never get behind a major change to the Windows UI - everyone has been using it for almost 20 years now.
- FollowSteph3 9y ago
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoIntel lawsuit in 3… 2…
- batrat 9y agoMaybe dumb questions: 1. How can Intel sue MS for emulator, but linux(qemu) can get way with it? 2. Why MS tries to push the emulator, when they can just port their programs (already ported to Win RT I think) and provide developers some tools to port their apps?
- tree_of_item 9y agoThere are zillions of old Windows programs whose developers are long gone. They're never getting ported. The only serious way to do this is to emulate/translate old apps automatically.
- dingo_bat 9y agoThis is a big difference between os x/iOS and windows/Android. On the apple platforms developers are expected to keep doing all kinds of things in response to apples directives. Nobody will do that for windows and Android.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago1. QEMU is a free and open source application. 2. No one ported apps to Windows RT besides Microsoft.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI hope and expect Apple to watch this closely. Playing with the iOS 11 on an iPad pro 10.5 suggests a bit what a Macbook Air might look like in 'appliance' mode with one of their customized ARM processors. The really interesting bit however is whether or not ARM notebook computers can become a 'thing' for real. There have been a couple of runs at it by people without the resources to do something competitive with the thin and light laptops of today, doing it "for real" has always seemed a bit out of reach. It becomes more and more clear to me that something like a Chromebook type OS and a walled garden app store is a really attractive proposition for people who don't do development on their machines.
- tomaskafka 9y agoTry RDPing from iPad to Windows 10, for me it feels amazing, and I'd gladly buy iPad-like device with Windows 10 for working on the road.
- esturk 9y agoWhich app were you using for this? the MS RDP app? I was trying it but couldn't get it to work in my LAN when my windows 10 was using usb tethering. Maybe I'll try again with a proper access point.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoAren't you just describing literally the Microsoft Surface?
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI've got both a Surface Pro and an iPad pro and it would be a Surface with an ARM processor, sort of. The sort of comes from the fact that the windows resources are remote in the iPad case which allows for faster response and more media/storage on the remote machine. The Surface Pro doesn't last quite as long on battery power as the iPad does and it can be constrained in its storage space (I've got an additional 256MB SD card plugged into mine and its still tight). But the interesting thing for me are the two approaches to window dynamics. The Surface Pro is difficult to operate with a finger, ok with the stylus.
- waytogo 9y agoSomething I wanted from Apple. First time Microsoft seems to be more focused than Apple (which works on semi-innovations like touchbars).
- cjsuk 9y agoNone of MSFT’s innovation actually works properly though. If they just invented the light bulb you’d have to replace it once an hour.
- simplyinfinity 9y agoThat's how light bulbs actually worked way back when. And now you have practically light bulbs that live for 10+ years and are 10 times more energy efficient. Remember when you had to reinstall windows XP every few months? Yeah, i haven't reinstalled my windows since windows 8 came out. I've done upgrade to 8.1, 10, 10 CU without re-installation or "refresh".
- giancarlostoro 9y agoEven with Vidta and 7 I never had to reinstall my OS. I had the same Windowd 7 install from 2012 till 2015 ~ and I think I stopped because I wanted to use Linux from then on instead.
- cjsuk 9y agoThis is lost on me because I’ve had to reinstall Windows 10 twice this year. Boot loop and latent network on a Thinkpad T440. Before that, I did it once a year going back to NT3.51
- olyjohn 9y agoIs that because Windows is better, or you're just better at dealing with it? XPs big problem was IE and malware infections, other than that it was as reliable as any current version of Windows today. Once you have to manage 3500 PCs and you see the same stupid issues coming up over and over, you realize it's not really any better. Computer stores may not be as busy cleaning malware from desktops and laptops, but my team is every bit as busy cleaning up bad updates, fixing BSODs and trying to find documentation that doesn't exist for whatever feature was released last week.
- molsson 9y agoIt's obviously not easy by any stretch of the imagination to port something as complex as Windows to a new platform, but I'm still surprised it took THAT long to finish this.
- criddell 9y agoNo kidding. This was announced in 2011, right? NT was available on Intel, Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS chips. I'm surprised it was that hard to add ARM. Or is this something different?
- com2kid 9y agoWindows has been running on ARM for ages. Windows RT was an early go, but even before that internal builds of Windows for ARM were kept around. Windows Phone 8 ran on the Windows 8 kernel, and Windows 10 Mobile ran on the Win10 kernel. It seems like the hard part here was doing the seamless emulation of x86 apps. Writing a production quality general purpose emulator is hard.
- coredog64 9y agoIt's not like Microsoft doesn't have examples to draw on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
- megy 9y agoWho says that it was just finished recently? There are a large number of things that go into projects like this, Windows could have been ported years ago, but they were not ready.
- cjsuk 9y agoWindows RT 2. We know where that went.
- TYPE_FASTER 9y agoIt will be interesting to see if this ends up in the industrial/rugged handheld market, or if Microsoft has conceded that market to Android for good. I guess it could be up to the device manufacturers.
- bhouston 9y agoWhat is the performance on the cross compiled apps? What about directx or opengl support? Benchmarks please for chrome or ie or Firefox.
- Raphael 9y agoSomething tells me Edge will have an advantage, at least for awhile.
- TekMol 9y agoDo the devices that it runs on make good linux machines? I would love something as light as the Galaxy Tab S2 (Less then 400g!!) that I can use with Linux and a type cover. I would be able to work everywhere I go. Because carrying around 400g with me all the time would be worth it.
- Raphael 9y agoYou can run Linux on Chromebooks.
- awiesenhofer 9y agowhat would be a good, ultralight chromebook for that? any suggestions?
- TekMol 9y agoThere is a 400g chromebook?
- kevin_b_er 9y agohttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/compatibility/systems#systemfundamentalsfirmwareuefisecureboot https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com... You will be forbidden by DRM from running linux on it. Their policy is clear on only permitting Microsoft signed OS to boot and forbidding the device manufacturer from permitting you to run an OS not crytographically blessed by Microsoft.
- tw04 9y agoThat is talking about Windows mobile. Windows mobile != Windows 10 on ARM. While it may apply to w10 on arm, we don't know yet as none of that documentation has been released. The reason it was a hard requirement on mobile is thanks to the carriers. That being said, please don't spread fud, it helps no one. If you have an actual WoA document we can complain up ms about, great. But this is not that.
- greywolf 9y agogreat! garbage on smallest of platforms...
- akhilcacharya 9y agoThe 24-hour, always connected battery life dream may be a reality by this time next year.
- stevefan1999 9y agoI'm not a fan of ARM CPU but I'm quite curious about the x86 emulation on Windows 10 ARM platform, does it run like qemu-user-static-x86 just like how Wine did? (while all x86 syscall/WinAPIs have direct replacement on Windows 10 ARM) Should someone generously share some articles, I’d really appreciate that help.
- paraxion 9y agoSo can I dust off my Surface RT that's effectively a paperweight?
- katastic 9y agoFrom the same people that brought us Windows RT and ARM Surface tablets... got many of my clients to buy them... and then magically decided "Windows RT and ARM sucks. We don't support them anymore." So I'll hold my breathe before recommending ANY of my clients use this.
- atomicnumber1 9y agoWith Microsoft partnering with Qualcomm, won't it just increase the monopoly of Qualcomm? Is it even possible to increase monopoly?
- Paraesthetic 9y agoYES YES YES. FINALLY!
- alkonaut 9y agoWill developers be able to build classic desktop (Win32) ARM applications?
- captainmuon 9y agoThe code is there in Visual C++, and people could already built native ARM applications to run on (jailbreaked) Windows RT. But reading between the lines, it seems that MS will not currently offer that option, but rather encourage people to write UWP/Modern apps, and emulate x86. MS themselves are compiling Office natively for ARM (like they did for Windows RT, and like they do notepad, calc, ...). I wonder how UWP apps work technically on ARM. I heard apps will be compiled on the fly to run on ARM. Managed code (C#) just runs on the CLI or can be AOT compiled. But C++ is also a first-class citizen. Will you ship x86 code that is emulated/recompiled, or will you ship both x86 and ARM, or some kind of intermediate representation (like I think you do on iOS)?
- xaldir 9y agoGood. I still don't want it.