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I mostly agree that that's the current state of things, but I'm a little more optimistic about the future. The software support for ARM in Windows has taken bi

I mostly agree that that's the current state of things, but I'm a little more optimistic about the future. The software support for ARM in Windows has taken big leaps and bounds in the last ~6 months; this, the more general x64 emulation, Office, WPF, and probably many others that I'm forgetting. Hardware-wise, we're finally getting a cheap ARM developer kit and we're seeing some very cheap ARM laptops like the Galaxy Book Go. The whole thing's frustratingly slow compared to Apple's transition, but I would not be surprised if ARM is a sizeable chunk of new Windows machines a few years from now.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
I would hope, but not to spoil your hope, but I'm less optimistic. The cheap hardware development kit comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c. For a development kit, that chip is a joke. It's slower than almost every Windows on ARM laptop you can buy right now, which already aren't known for having good performance. It also comes with only 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, hardly enough to even put Visual Studio on it. Microsoft's idea is that you'll only remote-deploy to it for testing because it's not powerful enough to actually do most programming on it. Compared to the $499 Apple Developer Kit which gave you an A12Z, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD... this thing better be, what, $200 at most? It's hardly a development kit if you can't actually develop on it. You also need to remember that Microsoft and Intel's fates are bound together. Intel can put up with Microsoft's affairs and flirtations, but if it ever started getting serious, Intel won't permit it to ever get to even minor threat level.
- ripley12 5y ago
  VS doesn't currently run on ARM (which sucks, but that's definitely a very high priority for the team; I suspect the recent 64-bit migration is setting the stage for ARM support), so there isn't much point in speccing it to run VS. Agreed that remote development/debugging is not ideal.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Like I said though about Intel making sure it never becomes a viable threat: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel-fires-warning-shots-at-microsoft-claims-x86-emulation-is-a-patent-minefield/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel...
  - my123 5y ago
    Visual Studio ran on Windows on Arm64 since the very beginning, it had broken local debugging for quite a while though... (and of course, doesn't run natively but under binary translation) Officially though, it is not considered as supported.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Snapdragon 7c DevKit looks poor, but it enforces app developers to optimize their app to poor cheap machines. This is somewhat good thing but personally I don't want to live with 7c.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Unless they just don't buy the development kit, because like I said earlier, there isn't much motivation to support Windows on ARM anyway. If your experience is miserable trying to support something you have almost no business case for, why bother?

gjsman-1000 5y ago

I would hope, but not to spoil your hope, but I'm less optimistic. The cheap hardware development kit comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c. For a development kit, that chip is a joke. It's slower than almost every Windows on ARM laptop you can buy right now, which already aren't known for having good performance. It also comes with only 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, hardly enough to even put Visual Studio on it. Microsoft's idea is that you'll only remote-deploy to it for testing because it's not powerful enough to actually do most programming on it. Compared to the $499 Apple Developer Kit which gave you an A12Z, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD... this thing better be, what, $200 at most? It's hardly a development kit if you can't actually develop on it. You also need to remember that Microsoft and Intel's fates are bound together. Intel can put up with Microsoft's affairs and flirtations, but if it ever started getting serious, Intel won't permit it to ever get to even minor threat level.

ripley12 5y ago
VS doesn't currently run on ARM (which sucks, but that's definitely a very high priority for the team; I suspect the recent 64-bit migration is setting the stage for ARM support), so there isn't much point in speccing it to run VS. Agreed that remote development/debugging is not ideal.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Like I said though about Intel making sure it never becomes a viable threat: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel-fires-warning-shots-at-microsoft-claims-x86-emulation-is-a-patent-minefield/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel...
- my123 5y ago
  Visual Studio ran on Windows on Arm64 since the very beginning, it had broken local debugging for quite a while though... (and of course, doesn't run natively but under binary translation) Officially though, it is not considered as supported.
fomine3 5y ago
Snapdragon 7c DevKit looks poor, but it enforces app developers to optimize their app to poor cheap machines. This is somewhat good thing but personally I don't want to live with 7c.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Unless they just don't buy the development kit, because like I said earlier, there isn't much motivation to support Windows on ARM anyway. If your experience is miserable trying to support something you have almost no business case for, why bother?