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I suspect that, ironically enough, it will be Apple’s move to ARM that will cause an infection point for Windows on ARM adoption. I’m looking forward to it!
by FreakyT 6y ago
I suspect that, ironically enough, it will be Apple’s move to ARM that will cause an infection point for Windows on ARM adoption.
I’m looking forward to it!
- ricw 6y agoHopefully also for Linux on both server and desktop side. The M1 as the first powerful ARM consumer device plus the availability of ARM servers in the cloud will hopefully lead to the ARM eco-system breaking out of its mobile stronghold.
- tjoff 6y agoSo far ARM devices have mostly been quite locked up and hard to install anything else than what was shipped on them. Until that changes I don't see much point of ARM as it will only erode the PC that we have become accustomed to. I'd much rather live in an x86-only ecosystem than one without choice.
- my123 6y agoThe Windows on Arm devices and Arm Macs are not locked down. (and neither are the Arm Chromebooks by the way too)
- monocasa 6y agoWindows on Arm devices don't allow you to disable secure boot last time I checked. That's "locked down" if I can't run a kernel I compile.
- my123 6y agoWhat? Every single one of them does. Just switch to the UEFI Setup and disable Secure Boot. Note that I'm talking about Arm 64-bit Windows, and not the earlier Windows RT which is dead. Details for Linux for the best-supported Windows on arm64 laptops on that front at: https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/build https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/build
- monocasa 6y agoAs of 2017, they both didn't allow UEFI Secure Boot to be disabled, and didn't allow UEFI Secure Boot to be switched into Custom Mode. It looks like they walked some of that back at some point.
- my123 6y agoThey did. Every single Windows on Arm64 system since release allowed Secure Boot to be off. That limitation only applied on 32-bit Arm systems (Windows RT & Windows 10 Mobile, ARM != ARM64)
- monocasa 6y agoThen that's not "every single one of them", because there are Windows on ARM devices that aren't ARM64.
- entropicdrifter 6y agoArm Macs are kinda locked down, but that's just for now. We'll see over the next year or so what the community comes up with as far as natively installing Linux goes.
- my123 6y agoThey are not. Locked down = Apple explicitly prevents it through code signing. Here, Apple doesn't prevent it in any way, and drivers can be developed. (drivers not present in Linux is not and will never mean that a device is locked down, don't stretch things please)
- rjzzleep 6y agoI see, and having to reverse engineer drivers to be able to run anything else on it to you somehow means that it's open?
- my123 6y agoNot locked down and open aren't the same things, don't conflate matters/deflect to another thing please.
- rjzzleep 6y agoYou're the one who's conflating things. The fact that you somehow think that someone _no longer_ locking you out of their bootloader is now considered open just shows how far we've gone off the rails. By that definition 99.99% of devices are open because you can just swap out the rom. All you need to do is figure out the pin and wiring and the serial protocols involved in communicating. My ducky keyboard is NOT open even though I replaced the firmware with my own. What kind of insane logic is that? And the fact that you and the other person here keeps conflating ANY documentation about ANY part of the hardware as contributing to Linux is even more ridiculous.
- saagarjha 6y ago
- cesarb 6y ago> The Windows on Arm devices [...] are not locked down. https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2012/jan/12/microsoft-confirms-UEFI-fears-locks-down-ARM/ https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2012/jan/12/microsoft-c... "[...] But for ARM devices, Custom Mode is prohibited: “On an ARM system, it is forbidden to enable Custom Mode. Only Standard Mode may be enable.” [sic] Nor will users have the choice to simply disable secure boot, as they will on non-ARM systems: “Disabling Secure [Boot] MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems.” [sic] Between these two requirements, any ARM device that ships with Windows 8 will never run another operating system, unless it is signed with a preloaded key or a security exploit is found that enables users to circumvent secure boot."
- my123 6y agoThis is for 32-bit Arm, back in the Windows RT and Windows Phone days. This never applied to ARM64 Windows, ever.
- bitwize 6y agoOf course. No one adopts a new technology in the PC world until Apple gives it social proof. See also: USB, WiFi (didn't hit it big until AirPort became a thing), hiDPI displays, USB-C, etc.
- adolfojp 6y agoYeah, remember when the PC world adopted the Intel chips after Apple gave them social proof? Or journaling file systems, or preemptive multitasking, or protected memory, or true multi user support. Apple always leads the way, right?
- Razengan 6y agoMost of those techs are not consumer-facing though.
- adolfojp 6y agoAnd the ARM chips are?
- Razengan 6y agoFaster performance for twice the battery time seems to be.
- my123 6y agoProper multi-user support (which is something that the iPad still doesn't have at all today...) and a reliable operating system that doesn't crash multiple times a day are definitely customer-facing features. A fast processor and a machine that doesn't heat up are customer facing too.
- birdyrooster 6y agoMacBook Pro can keep you from having children it gets so hot
- 6y ago
- wffurr 6y agoThe real breakthrough will be when another chipmaker can come anywhere close to the M1. Nothing on the ARM, Qualcomm, or MediaTek roadmap is even close. The Cortex X is a baby step in the direction of the M1, but the M1’s architectural advantages (gigantic memory bandwidth, 8-way decode, re-order buffers twice as deep, specialized instructions for x86 translation and reference counting atomics, and so on) remain untouched. Hopefully this lights a fire under some of the other chipmakers and they’ll adjust course, but we’ll see. In the meantime, it’s almost embarrassing for the rest of the industry just how far ahead Apple’s chips are. It’s been that way in smartphones for a long time now, and now it’s coming to laptops and desktops.
- nextos 6y agoAMD Ryzen 7 5800U is, according to leaked benchmarks, not too far from M1.
- akmarinov 6y agoInteresting - what’s the power consumption on it?
- terramex 6y agoPrevious gen (4800U) was 15W TDP by default (configurable between 10W and 25W). This new one (5800U) was not yet officially announced.
- my123 6y agoSadly, TDP is far from held on those. What you get at 15W is the base clock present at: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15324/amd-ryzen-4000-mobile-apus-7nm-8core-on-both-15w-and-45w-coming-q1 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15324/amd-ryzen-4000-mobile-a... For the Ryzen 7 4800U, that's just 1.8GHz. 4.2GHz which is the turbo clock blows through that limit by a lot. (of course that's for multi-core workloads) For Ryzen 5th generation, we have this for per-core only power draw, without the I/O: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di... We can see from the graph at https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/PerCore-1-5950X_575px.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/PerCore-1-5950X_575p... that to reach 6.6W per core, the clock has to fall to 3.8GHz. At such a clock, Zen 3 is way behind the Apple M1 performance wise.
- Zenst 6y agoIn many ways that ecosystem for such laptops is already there thanks to Google and Chromebooks, many of which ARM based. So adding a bit more memory and storage and if the Windows fans don't get to bite, be many a Linux folk who would snap up such offerings if the price is right and they certainly could be.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gameswithgo 6y agoFirst step might be a console using an ARM cpu, which can push gaming adoption, and then windows proper can follow.
- terramex 6y agoNintendo Switch have been using ARM cpu for 3 years, before that Nintendo 3DS/DS used it too - but much more ancient version. Also - smartphones use ARM cpus and those have been a mature gaming platform for years. I'd say that a mainstream gaming console based on ARM would not change much, just like Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and Wii U did not cause PowerPC to rise in general popularity,
- ReverseCold 6y agoNintendo consoles have never had powerful hardware though. It's about the first party IP (Mario, etc.) and not the hardware. I think gp means a performance-focused console on ARM, not nintendo or mobile.
- DerekL 6y ago> Nintendo consoles have never had powerful hardware though. Not quite. Their last three consoles (Wii, Wii U, and Switch) were about a generation behind their competition, but the first four (NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube) were comparable to their rivals.
- muro 6y agoNoticed your username, one of my favorite games for C64 as a kid.
- vhogemann 6y agoSay, like the Nintendo Switch?
- mhh__ 6y agoThe switch is roughly 10x less GPU power than a PS5 for about 2/3 of the price.
- abhiminator 6y agoI'm absolutely for it. The more competition in the space, the better. I hope recent software advances in ARM by Apple pushes Microsoft to focus more of their efforts in building a competent translation software layer for x86-64 apps (in contrast to their current garbage-ish emulation layer that makes their ARM devices running legacy x86-64 apps nearly unusable, in some cases) like Rosetta 2. And also hoping those advances by MSFT in turn push Apple to make an even better version of Rosetta 2 (because mainstream x86-64 apps will probably be around at least for the next couple of decades, imo), leading to a 'golden age' of sorts for translation/emulation software.
- my123 6y agoXTAJIT, which is the x86(_64) application compatibility layer on Arm Windows is far from garbage, and got a ton of engineering work. The problem is that having a 30% performance penalty on a Snapdragon 8cx (because Arm only started really caring about fast CPUs starting from the Cortex-A76, which is the first generation stemming from that effort, resulting in not-ideal perf characteristics for x86 emulation) results in not very good performance. This can only be fixed through better, smarter Arm hardware. (which is coming)
- ta6893486 6y agoSo Nvidia's recent acquisition would be a very good move after all?
- aksss 6y agoI’m sure you meant inflection rather than infection, but somehow it still works and makes complete sense. :D
- MrsPeaches 6y agoAka an Eggcorn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
- aksss 6y agoCool, that's new to me, thanks. "Liberman discussed the case of a woman who substitutes the phrase egg corn for the word acorn, and he argued that the precise phenomenon lacked a name. Pullum suggested using eggcorn itself as a label."
- ummonk 6y agoWord.
- DCKing 6y agoEven if Microsoft's x86-64 emulator will be slower than Rosetta2 (and given their different approaches, it likely will), having that run on an ARM Mac will likely still be the best experience for Windows on ARM. The thing holding back Windows on ARM is one of the key selling points of Windows: all your legacy programs just work. Windows is far, far superior in this over macOS and even Linux [1]. Windows 1.0 apps run on a modern Windows 10 install. For that to be a thing on Windows on ARM, you need high emulation performance. The Snapdragons that Windows on ARM devices come with just are not up to that task at all. Making Windows on ARM more enjoyable to use and more accessible to developers (which are more likely to have Macs than underpowered niche devices) should really incentivize Microsoft to get Windows to run on ARM Macs at least using virtualization. Virtualization on Apple Macs is solving a supply problem of high performance, reasonably easy to buy hardware for both Microsoft and Linux distros aiming to work well on ARM. [1]: Although ironically, Wine on Linux/Mac is often even better at running legacy Win32 programs than Windows is. But I digress.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago>Even if Microsoft's x86-64 emulator will be slower than Rosetta2 Is there anything stopping MS from copying Apple's approach? I know Rosetta 1 was technology licenced from Transitive Corporation, is Rosetta 2 completely Apple in-house tech?
- DCKing 6y ago> Is there anything stopping MS from copying Apple's approach? One thing I don't completely understand about Rosetta2 is when it performs static recompilation and when it's doing dynamic recompilation. I'm under the impression that a lot of Rosetta2's magic is in static recompilation. I don't know in which cases it statically recompiles and in which cases it dynamically recompiles though. If anyone knows anything about this I'd really like to understand this better. If my hunch about Rosetta2 focusing largely on static recompilation is correct, Microsoft can't copy this approach easily. Static recompilation is very hard to make reliable. It's probably doable in Apple's use case (doable, definitely not easy), where their only aim was probably to make everything that runs on Intel-based Catalina or Big Sur on Apple Silicon. However, Intel-based 64-bit Windows 10 can (attempt to) run all 32-bit Windows software made since Windows 95. That's a much wider and diverse range of software, and the only approach to make that reliable is to depend on the slower dynamic recompilation. If my hunch about Rosetta2 is not correct, and it's achieving these performance numbers on pure dynamic recompilation, all I can say is hats off to Apple. Microsoft would do good to pay them a large amount of money to license their tech in that case (or to copy as much of their approach anyway).
- ineedasername 6y agoThat will all depend on chip development. If someone else can get i7 level cpu performance and gtx 1050 level gpu performance at those levels of power consumption then absolutely. I just wonder how much work was being done in that direction before the M1, i.e., are we a year away from seeing an early version, or 3 years? If it's closer to 3, Intel and AMD have some breathing room, or at least enough runway to launch their own similar efforts. (though at this point I seriously doubt Intel's ability to execute, and they are very far down the road of path-dependency in the choices they've made)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]