11 ms·
This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and exp
by ocdtrekkie 6y ago
This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms.
Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is compulsory/expected, and consequently, most vendors have simply passed on supporting them.
- arsome 6y agoI think we'd see a serious boom in Windows on ARM if ARM vendors had a performance benefit to offer and Microsoft implemented a backwards compatibility layer as Apple has in this case. The difference here is in the offering. Microsoft was making a tablet offering where they're just not competitive with no ability to use x86 software while Apple here is offering much more - backwards compatible and all. Until then there's just no reason to bother with ARM and vendors and users alike can see that. Only recently has Microsoft announced a backwards compatibility layer, if we can see some hardware vendors step up to Apple levels of performance, there might be a serious shot now: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315733-64-bit-x86-emulation-officially-coming-to-windows-on-arm https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315733-64-bit-x86-emul...
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago> Microsoft implemented a backwards compatibility layer as Apple has in this case Windows-on-ARM already has 32-bit x86 emulation - and 64-bit x64 emulation is coming soon: * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on-arm-x86-emulation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on... * https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315733-64-bit-x86-emulation-officially-coming-to-windows-on-arm https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315733-64-bit-x86-emul... I haven't looked too deeply, but it seems to use the same WoW (Windows-on-Windows) mechanism that's been present in Windows NT going back to at least Windows XP 64-bit Edition (no, not 2005's "Windows XP x64", but the original 2001 Windows XP for Intel Itanium IA-64). > The WOW64 layer of Windows 10 allows x86 code to run on the ARM64 version of Windows 10. x86 emulation works by compiling blocks of x86 instructions into ARM64 instructions with optimizations to improve performance. A service caches these translated blocks of code to reduce the overhead of instruction translation and allow for optimization when the code runs again. The caches are produced for each module so that other apps can make use of them on first launch. Looks like Windows dynamically translates code in DLLs/EXEs on a JIT/on-demand basis and caches each translated run-of-code.
- ogre_codes 6y agoRunning x86 code via Rosetta on the MacBook Air is significantly faster than it is running on the previous generation. With the Surface X, that isn't remotely the case. It's a pretty major gap. This is from the Verge's review of the Surface Pro X: > The worst part is that even if an app installs, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have a great experience. Photoshop installs and opens just fine on the Surface Pro X, but the usability of it is terrible. https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20950487/microsoft-surface-pro-x-7-review-comparison-specs-photos https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20950487/microsoft-surfac... Maybe it's improved since then? Everything I've heard suggests there is a pretty big performance penalty running x86 code on Windows ARM. If there is a significant performance hit on the M1, the performance gains of the M1 are so good, it erases the difference. The only way an emulation layer works is if the new platform is fast enough to erase that difference. When Apple moved from PowerPC to x86, it nearly did. With this transition, Apple knocked it out of the park. Microsoft? Not so much.
- Arcuru 6y agoRosetta seems to have a similar performance hit to Microsoft's solution (10-30% overhead compared to native, depending on the workload). The difference is that Microsoft is locked into using Qualcomm chips, which just aren't very close to Apple's performance.
- ogre_codes 6y agoThe impression I got was that it was a lot slower than a 30% performance hit, but perhaps the Qualcomm CPU is that much slower? If so, it really begs the question—Why bother making a tablet-laptop thing which performs so poorly?
- lmm 6y agoThe tablet-laptop form factor is great, and a lot of people simply don't need high performance but do need to run some specific line of business application from 2003, so including x86 emulation makes sense.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoIt’s probably more complicated than that: Microsoft’s customers have traditionally been very different from Apple’s, and they valued perpetual backwards compatibility over Apple’s approach.
- EamonnMR 6y agoIf you liked apple because it ran your Mac apps, you already got off that train when they moved to Intel in the first place.
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoNo, you got off that train during the 68K to PPC transition.
- zeckalpha 6y ago6502 to 68k
- tait 6y agoI actually did leave Mac at 68000 to 68020 transition. Color was interesting but too much money for a high school kid... Cue a shiny 386 for which you could by Turbo Pascal!!
- PeterStuer 6y agoNow that was a real disaster that made me leave the Apple ecosystem.
- dpritchett 6y agoYes! Today is a good day to reread Phil Haack’s 2014 essay on the lengths MS goes to for backwards compatibility: https://haacked.com/archive/2014/05/27/backwards-compatibility/ https://haacked.com/archive/2014/05/27/backwards-compatibili... Edit: Haack heavily cites Raymond Chen from 2003: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031015-00/?p=42163 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031015-00/?p=42...
- yyyk 6y agoBoth behaviours make perfect sense for the respective companies. Apple is selling hardware (and now services), the software at most should break even. Apple gets obvious benefits from its approach - verticle integration, hw sales... Microsoft sells software. MS doesn't care if the platform is x86 or ARM. Why would it? MS gets paid either way. As far as its concerned it would offer the option (to make Windows future-proof and run on more devices) and let the market decide.
- aidenn0 6y agoMicrosoft cares because if Mac laptops have twice the battery life of windows laptops, nobody will blame Intel
- yyyk 6y agoIt still doesn't make sense for MS to push ARM that way - Apple isn't offering its ARM processors to 3rd parties. The best non-Apple processors are obviously x86 right now.
- Aperocky 6y agoIs it though, or is it lacking the software investment that Apple made. There are a good amount of chipsets that are now on 5nm processing. But only Apple made a full desktop OS to go with it.
- aidenn0 6y agoHaving used linux on High end ARM phone chips, my 4 year old Intel laptop, also runnign linux, is far more performant than they are.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoMy question is what is the play for Intel and AMD right now? Are they shitting their pants or is this something that was somewhat expected given the progression of Apple's chips and their announced plans? Do Intel/AMD understand how Apple managed to so outmaneuver them? Is the performance gain Apple has delivered an inherent advantage of ARM over x86, and if so, does that imply that we are going to be seeing a migration to ARM in the PC space in the coming decade? I'm deeply fascinated by these questions. I'd love it if someone in the chip design industry who is knowledgeable about the situation would comment.
- ytch 6y agoAlso Adobe release Photoshop beta for Mac/Windows ARM. It is ironic that windows ARM was released long before, but Adobe support it until Mac ARM on Market.
- philliphaydon 6y agoI think one of the other reasons is that Apple designed their own cpus. And put a lot of effort in. Microsoft just grabbed some off the shelf stuff for the surface. So it’s not even close in terms of performance. Imagine if Microsoft said you could get a surface with arm processor, 16gb of ram, with 20+ hours of battery life and the same perf as an i5 processor. And it lived up to the hype. People would love it. My 2c
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoSurfaces are very, very custom. Their x86 versions even are almost entirely bespoke: There are custom Surface drivers for nearly every component. Their hardware team is top notch, and I guarantee you hardware is not where Microsoft is falling flat. The Surface Duo is another example: The hardware was ready for years. If it'd launched when it was, they'd have scooped the foldable trend super early. But the Windows on ARM platform was still such a joke, they gave up and put Android on it.
- lostlogin 6y ago> Their hardware team is top notch That keyboard... it makes the bad Apple ones look top shelf. I know removable keyboards are a different thing but I cringe remembering the clicks and trackpad.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoHonestly, the typing experience for me of the Surface keyboard is perfectly fine... it's just that the form factor makes lap-use difficult. I didn't think it'd be a problem for me, but a year or two in, I felt regret there. The Surface Book seems like a vast improvement in that regard... but it's extremely expensive, and relied on an overengineered latching mechanism. Dell made a really neat Book alternative, the Latitude 7285, which was really compelling, but by the time I was in the market, they'd abandoned that form factor already. :/
- dagw 6y agoI don't know, I think the Surface pro keyboard is surprisingly good all things considered. I agree the trackpad doesn't feel great, but it is accurate and usable enough and the typing experience is certainly no worse than any other similarly sized laptop I've used and better than many. For a removable keyboard I think they've done a great job.
- Iv 6y agoMicrosoft can't even let go of x86 and make x86_64 mandatory. It could them years to recognize ARM as a valid target.
- v7p1Qbt1im 6y agoAt it‘s most basic, Microsoft‘s makes billions by enabling enterprise customers to remain lazy. If you don‘t force them they will never move an inch. They‘d rather pay insane amounts for support for decades old shitty software than to finally modernize. It‘s easy money for MS. Though I‘m sure Windows devs hate it.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y agoNo, this is not the reason. The reason is that Apple didn't half-ass anything, and they executed with competence. The Apple M1 is so good, it outperforms most everything else natively in single-thread, and every other previous x86-based MBP when using Rosetta, all the while offering superior battery life, and its not even that expensive because those are the entry-level models. Microsoft never had anything remotely like this. Their hardware is ok, but they forgot one important detail, that Apple has taken to heart like nobody else: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. (Alan Kay)" Why would anyone want to switch to ARM on Windows if it wasn't a lot better than x86? What if their WOW x86 emulation was really slow? For Microsoft, "own hardware" means plugging cots parts together. The best they can achieve is a "premium look & feel", but they can't do anything game-changing. For Apple, it means owning and designing the most important chips themselves. Because they are controlling the whole hardware & software stack, they can do things nobody else can. This is the difference in understanding design as "how it looks" vs "how it works". Apple has a custom MSR in their M1 implementation to toggle Total Store Ordering, which enables them to run either the native, more relaxed ARM or the more strict x86 memory model. They probably use other tricks as well, but there is a reason Rosetta is as fast as it is.
- totalZero 6y agoAlmost every software offering under the sun runs natively on Windows, so it doesn't exactly make sense to give MacOS a pat on the back for that particular achievement with WoW. I am all for innovation and I welcome any chip that runs cooler while offering better performance with the apps I use. But so far, 90% of the praise I've seen of M1 either comes from benchmarking software that doesn't reflect my real world usage, or directly from Apple's marketing. It's a bit early to draw conclusions about how much of a smash hit M1 is going to be. We don't know much about its performance, aside from a few benchmarks here and there.
- GeekyBear 6y agoEight years after Microsoft's first attempt to move to ARM with Windows RT, you still can't run legacy 64 bit Win32 software on a Surface Pro X. There is absolutely no excuse for that. Just as there was no excuse for the Surface RT not having a touch native version of Office despite them selling it as a tablet, or the Surface Pro X not having ARM native versions of ALL of Microsoft's software. Where's the ARM native version of Visual Studio? How can you expect other vendors to take Windows on ARM seriously if Microsoft doesn't?
- StreamBright 6y agoMicrosoft still has a severe UX disadvantage with Windows and failed to understand that simplicity over complexity always wins. Most Microsoft products from Ballmer era are trying to do too much. VS Code is the prime example that you can produce a product with few features, people are going to use it and if you don't commit the previous mistakes that poison the UX of Word and Windows you are going to succeed. 5 years ago if somebody told me that I am going to be using a Microsoft product more than Vim for programming and text editing I would have not believed. Microsoft has the ability to innovate and produce amazing products it just they carry too much weight from the past and that holds back entire product lines.
- aquadrop 6y agoWhy Windows on ARM is doomed? It's there. Microsoft just doesn't have immediate need or reason to switch to it immediately, while Apple does.
- GeekyBear 6y agoI'd say it's doomed because not even Microsoft has bothered to create ARM native versions of all their software. Apple went all in on ARM native versions of their stuff on day one.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoMicrosoft was committed to supporting Windows on Itanium but Intel mucked it up in several areas - if they perhaps got AMD onboard (a free license to the architecture - which would have made AMD64 moot) and made the first variant faster than x86 and consumer priced/focussed. I am afraid that X86 will live on forever more with just more wacko instruction extensions that nobody will use.
- pjc50 6y agoApple own the whole vertical of their platform. Microsoft don't: they are in Google's position with Android, that they have to work with the third party hardware vendors and their value-subtracted software and so on.
- nix23 6y ago>they are in Google's position with Android Not true, Google just doesn't have to care what CPU is in your Phone. You can have Mips/Arm/x86/powerpc whatever you want.
- Shivetya 6y agoWell consider this, when WOW came out it supported PowerPC and Intel so WOW has effectively lasted longer than Apple on Intel did
- savoytruffle 6y agoWorld of Warcraft came out over half a year before Apple announced the Intel transition.