10 ms·
I can't help but wonder what Microsoft's answer to Apple Silicon will be going forward. They don't really make hardware, but selling Windows laptops gets harder
by kyleplum 4y ago
I can't help but wonder what Microsoft's answer to Apple Silicon will be going forward. They don't really make hardware, but selling Windows laptops gets harder and harder the further Apple gets ahead. It seems inevitable that there needs to be some ARM-based Windows laptops to compete in perf/watt to the M1/M2 but I don't know what company can provide an ARM chip that competes with Apple at this point.
- vorpalhex 4y agoSimply getting functional Windows on ARM would be helpful. The last surface ARM attempt went poorly.
- zerkten 4y agoDo you mean the Surface X?
- kyleplum 4y agoI have faith in MS software development - I believe they can get windows on ARM working - but as far as I can tell, all non-Apple ARM hardware implementations are significantly lacking in the laptop space. There are vendors making decent phone chips, but I've seen no indication of the ability to scale up to a laptop in the way Apple Silicon has.
- MBCook 4y agoYeah, my impression is that the arm windows laptops were basically using cell phone chips. And if you consider that arm cellphone chips are already behind Apple cellphone chips (which the M1/2 improved on)… not great performance for windows.
- cowtools 4y agoeven if they can get windows on ARM working, they still need to get vendors to distribute ARM versions of their software. This is another leg up for apple and the humble penguin.
- mwcampbell 4y agoHow is this an advantage for desktop Linux? Yes, open-source software can simply be recompiled, but desktop Linux-based platforms (particularly GNU/Linux) have never been great for proprietary app developers, and adding ARM to the mix doesn't make this any better.
- macintux 4y agoApple’s key advantage here, though, is one Microsoft would never voluntarily embrace: abandoning x86-64 in favor of ARM. Apple is willing to force its partners and customers to make the switch or get left behind. Microsoft would never do that, so Windows on ARM will presumably languish in application support indefinitely.
- SoftTalker 4y agoYes Apple is walking on familiar ground here. They abandoned M68K, then PPC, now Intel. They know they can do it, as they have done it before, and their customers will follow along, as they have done before.
- Shadonototra 4y agox86 is dead, full of security issues and is energy-intensive smartphones, even embedded devices, including cars nowadays are all on ARM, servers are building momentum too, not because it is shiny, but because of tangible gains on many aspects > Apple is willing to force its partners and customers to make the switch or get left behind. That's not true at all, the chip doesn't matter when you sell software, hardware and services It's like changing the internals of your Camera to provide a better experience and quality, why do you care about it? in fact you don't! You want a better Camera, company will pick what's best for the better Camera Apple provide a transparent translation layer to accompany the transition with Rosetta, it's effortless for the users That's the problem of Microsoft, they are incapable of designing proper UX solution to accompany their customers to better solutions, instead they force their customers to be stuck with inefficient solution, Microsoft don't even care nor dare cleaning their OS to provide up-to-date solutions It's a bloaty mess of 5 generations of different UI/UX Choosing Windows prevents you from having a seamless experience from your Watch -> Phone -> Desktop -> Car That's what Microsoft fanboy don't understand, they protect their poor decision making, their inefficient products and ultimately, it leads to the death of their products Microsoft Windows consumers are stuck That's why Windows Mobile, Metro, UWP, WinUI all flopped, the platform is no longer up to date And it's not just a chip issue, it's the whole ecosystem and culture, always too late to make changes, and here, incapable of providing a transition path, hence they are failing behind apple
- jjtheblunt 4y agoi use surface pro x on arm as a daily driver and it's excellent (on the beta release train anyway), and i use linux and osx too daily.
- speedgoose 4y agoI use a windows 11 arm vm on my m1 MacBook with parallel and the experience is pretty good.
- mwcampbell 4y agoDid you have to do anything legally dubious to get that Windows ARM VM running? I thought that Windows for ARM wasn't officially available except on Qualcomm devices.
- speedgoose 4y agoNo, it was extremely easy and I was surprised about it. Just install Parallel, select windows 11, wait a bit and it’s done.
- aseipp 4y agoWindows on ARM is basically completely different at this point, it's perfectly functional; they have x64 emulation as of recently and it just uses normal UEFI for booting, just like most other normal laptops. Honestly the emulation is pretty good even if it's not as fast as Rosetta2, and they even now have a new 64-bit Windows ABI and calling convention that allows developers to incrementally port their applications to AArch64 on an individual DLL-by-DLL basis (so the emulator can handle transitioning between an x64 app and an AArch64 DLL, or the other way around.) They aren't just doing nothing. The biggest problem is the hardware: you're basically just buying a poorly performing laptop with probably lagging Linux support if you get tired of Windows, and you could just buy an M1 Macbook and get superior performance and battery life for the same cost, and you can even just run Windows on that using Parallels and still get good performance. The AArch64 laptop market is mostly just Qualcomm processors and Apple, and if you actually care about the performance profile, there's basically no comparison between the two right now with current offerings; the Mac is the winner, and you can even run Linux on it.
- vorpalhex 4y agoNone of the major manufacturers are going to ship Linux to consumers. Having a version of Windows that actually has apps that they can ship means now building the hardware is worth it.
- MikusR 4y agoIt's not as fast as Rosetta2 because M1 is about 2-3 times faster than the Qualcomm Microsoft is using
- jklinger410 4y agoMicrosoft is a company full of bureaucrats who don't care about their product. Apple is going to take over the computing world here shortly.
- babypuncher 4y agoMicrosoft cares about their B2B products. While end users complain about Windows being a bloated mess, corporations still see no better alternative platform for deploying and managing a fleet of thousands (or tens of thousands) of machines.
- musictubes 4y ago
- api 4y agoIt's worse than that. They're busy turning off their users with dark patterns, terrible UX, ads and spam in the OS, and endless amounts of unnecessary telemetry.
- cowtools 4y agoIt's a false dichotomy. You could say the same about either company. Those are the inevitable consequences of proprietary software and vendor lock-in (my original comment was some rhetorical question, I edited it to be more direct and less passive-agressive)
- eitland 4y agoMicrosoft. They had some promising years but I always sensed a struggle in the wheelhouse. Now they are back to forcing Edge on people, ads on login screen and in the Start menu are their new inventions and their store is almost as broken as ever and most importantly hard earned trust flew out the window in the process.
- 4y ago
- aseipp 4y agoThe theory some people have is that Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia last year was their attempt to get their hands on some desktop-class CPU cores (Nuvia was originally aiming for the server market), and Microsoft has largely partnered with Qualcomm on all their previous offerings. So that might be their saving grace if they can actually materialize something in the next year. But I agree. Apple is pulling ahead a decent amount here and likely will stay in that leading position for a while, like they did in the phone space, and that makes all the competitors that much less appealing.
- skavi 4y agoNuvia by all accounts has an excellent team. IIRC, Qualcomm has redirected their efforts to laptop SoCs.
- aseipp 4y agoYeah, I have no doubt they can make an excellent core based on what I saw; it's just that there's a limited timeline before your competitors make their move, and Apple is very much moving right now. Hopefully they'll have something released within the next ~6-10 months.
- hiitechk 4y agoI see Microsoft as a SaaS company now, heavy on cloud and Azure. Apple is still a products company.
- paxys 4y agoThe question is who is Apple competing with with these new chips? Is it other PC/laptop makers (Microsoft, Lenovo, HP, Dell etc) or is it solely Apple on Intel? Whether Microsoft (and everyone else) needs to react or not depends on whether Apple's overall market share in the segment is going up.
- threeseed 4y agoTheir answer is this: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/microsoft-will-boost-windows-on-arm-with-a-new-dev-kit-and-arm-native-visual-studio/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/microsoft-will-boost... They will need to get developers up to speed porting their apps to ARM before they are even in a position to re-boot their Windows ARM strategy. But this is a multi-year journey which is likely to give Intel/AMD time to produce something more competitive.
- kyleplum 4y agoAs far as I can tell, the ARM hardware linked is vastly inferior to the current M1 hardware, let alone M2. > But this is a multi-year journey which is likely to give Intel/AMD time to produce something more competitive. And during this time Apple is going to release M2 Pro/Max, M3, etc. I just have a hard time seeing how Intel/AMD catchup in the laptop space.
- shadowpho 4y agoIt was hard to imagine Intel catching up to AMD pre C2D.
- jamiek88 4y agoAnd AMD to intel pre Ryzen. It takes a good 5 years of doing everything right though.
- sliken 4y agoWell fabs used to be hugely important, not only did each generation halve in linear size (4x in transistors per area), but each shrink was a big win on clock speed and power use. This revisions happened often, around 18 months. These days the shrinks are smaller, i.e. 5nm -> 4nm -> 3nm, but each gen lasts longer, and provides very modest improvements in power and clock speed. They are also coming out in ever slower release cycles. So now the competition has more time to catch up, and less of a disadvantage of they are a process behind. TSMC is currently leading, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and others are bidding for the latest/greatest, while Samsung and Intel try to close the gap with their fabs. Apple has an advantage of doing several generations in phones/tablets before bringing out the M1. Additionally they have an architecture license, so they do custom cores, not just what ARM is offering. This allowed them to tune their designs, use engineers from various companies they acquired to tune their chips, and get rid of the cruft, like 32 bit compatibility. With all that said I expect Apples the perf/watt advantage to decrease over time. What does seem somewhat unique is they have build in a relatively small, power efficient, and inexpensive package (compared to similar functionality) 128, 256, 512, and 1024 bit wide memory interfaces. Sure you could build a dual socket Epyc with 16 dimms and likely burns north of 100s of watts and takes at least 1 rack unit, or you could buy a mbp m1 max. To match the M1 ultra you'd have to switch to some exotic CPUs that use HBM and sold by companies that typically send 3-6 sales people in suites before revealing their prices.
- runevault 4y agoQuick Google search indicates Windows still holds a 74% market share. Apple has a long way to go before they are really crunching on Windows in the general market. Hardware superiority does not guarantee success, for many people what they are already comfortable with is fine.
- freediver 4y agoI assume what you refer to is this https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... If you look at the trend, macOS is gaining worldwide market share while Windows is steadily dropping. And macOS share in USA has already reached close to 25%.
- momenti 4y agoIt's behind a paywall for me.
- Macha 4y agoRight, but for Apple to gain share in the rest of world like they have in the US, they need to drop prices, and that'd hurt their margins, including in the US if enough people buy cheaper foreign macs (which is definitely a thing, in my western european country there's a couple of somewhat popular retailers selling imported US laptops which are cheaper than local SKUs)
- jcstauffer 4y agoWindows may still dominate, but 75% is far below the 90% it was 10 years ago, while MacOS has nearly doubled in the same timeframe. As someone who can remember this never changing, that's a pretty steep slope...
- runevault 4y agoOh it is far from nothing to be certain. And as Netflix's recent loss of subscribers and subsequent drop in stock price showed nothing is forever. But I'd still need to see the drop continue for a bit longer before I full on expect Microsoft to be in trouble. Mind you, I would like to see them follow in Apple's footsteps on the train the M1 is creating. It certainly makes it FEEL like there is more runway down this path then Intel's, with caveats for potential hardware vulnerabilities like specter that simply haven't been found yet on Apple silicon to inhibit optimizations.
- vegai_ 4y agoThe only reason to buy a Windows laptop is so you can install Linux on it. If Asahi gets there, the last reason will vanish.
- bee_rider 4y agoI am pretty happy in Intel+Linux. My device basically lasts all day. It does get kind of hot if I'm running some crunchy numerical code, but that's usually pretty short (assuming the thing I'm running is a laptop appropriate toy problem).
- lynguist 4y agoWhat is even a Windows laptop? A laptop for which Windows has drivers? You buy a laptop for which Windows has drivers in order to install Linux? That doesn’t make sense. What you mean to say is: you buy a laptop for which Linux has drivers for. Windows is not in this equation, my friend.
- babypuncher 4y agoSupposedly Qualcomm will have an M1-class laptop chip ready at the end of 2023. That timeframe does not inspire much confidence in me, seeing as it is three whole years after M1-based products first hit store shelves.
- bee_rider 4y agoContinue hoping that people who don't want to run MacOS still won't want to? I don't think they have any chance to match Apple in terms of efficiency while buying third party chips. The advantage comes from controlling the whole stack I think. Apple knows exactly what accelerators will be available for each generation, and their communication between hardware and software folks is presumably much tighter. Is the Wintel laptop/Macbook gap even that much larger than the Android/iPhone gap? The market for non-Apple devices is, I think, pretty large.
- guelo 4y agoI'm not convinced that Apple's advantage is due to ARM vs x86. I think it has more to do with Apple's exclusive rights to TSMC's most advanced proccess. After all Apple is also beating Qualcomm's ARM Android CPUs.
- seabriez 4y agoYeah, thats a good point. There's def something shady and untold about this whole thing; and that could explain it. Apple has deep pockets and considering they have done shady deals (like the Google default search engine) this could be another one of those.
- andoriyu 4y agoQualcomm hasn't made a single Qualcomm core since Apple released their first aarch64 SoC. Qualcomm had zero competition and decided to not really work on anything. Apple blindsided it with its very competitive aarch64 cores, Qualcomm had nothing to show, so they switched to ARM's core design. Customers kept paying Qualcomm for their SoC with ARM designed cores, so once again, Qualcomm had no reason to actually do anything but sit on their patents. Intel had a similar story, since Sandy Bridge "x86_64" part of CPU barely changed, most of the performance gain was somewhere from better process, more custom instructions (avx2, etc.), higher TDP (since ryzen). It's not ARM vs x86, it's Apple ARM cores vs everyone elses cores.
- lynguist 4y agoThe ISA does not matter in a CPU design. But the process node is also not the main reason. What matters is only microarchitecture. And Apple has by far the most performant microarchitecture design of all CPUs.
- avianes 4y agoISA does matter in a CPU design and CPU performance: - Variable instruction sizes make the front-end more complex and limits the decoding width; - Delayslot makes superscalar front-end more complex; - Page size limits VIPT L1 cache size; - Dedicated SIMD/FP architectural registers allow dedicated SIMD/FP physical register files; ... The choice and design of the ISA is extremely important, it's hard to argue that the ARM ISA has no impact on M1&M2 performance. But the ISA choice is obviously not enough to explain the whole performance of the M1&M2. Likewise, the manufacturing process cannot fully explain the performance of the M1&M2. The Apple microarchitecture is by far the most performant and efficient of all high-end superscalar CPU. But be careful with simplistic explanations, the microarchitecture is always constrained by the ISA/architecture, and the x86 ISA has some flaws that can affect the microarchitecture (least on the power consumption).
- cbhl 4y agoMicrosoft has ported Windows and Office to ARM for a decade, and they have both x86-to-arm (Windows 10) and x64-to-arm (Windows 11) translation technologies. They also have ARM-based Surface devices in the Microsoft Store (looks like the Surface Pro X is the current model). That said, the big business is still big business: Azure (Cloud), Office, and device management (MDM) / active directory are big focuses even in a heterogeneous computing environment that includes Chromebooks and Macs.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Matl 4y ago> selling Windows laptops gets harder and harder the further Apple gets ahead That's Apple's marketing but the 12th Gen P chips are perfectly capable of keeping up with Apple on the performance side and AMD's likely to be able to compete on the power consumption side as well. Yes, x86 is likely to never match ARM on battery life, but I believe they can be reasonably close for it not to be an issue.
- procinct 4y agoIt would be nice if they could get close in terms of battery. Every windows laptop I’ve ever had including my current one I use for work has had a battery life of around 3 or 4 hours. Compared to my MacBook Air which can easily seem to go over 24.
- pc86 4y agoI have an older work laptop but a nearly brand new (comparatively) battery that's about a year, maybe 18 months old. If I'm actually using my laptop, it will last maybe an hour or two. I might get it to last 3-4 if I just have email up with the screen dimmed. Not sure if it's Windows, too much work surveillance-ware, or just HP being garbage, but my M1 Mac will last twice as long as I've ever needed it to without getting plugged in. Even my older Intel MBP lasts most of the day.
- Matl 4y agoI am honestly a bit shocked at the low numbers you and parent are reporting. I have not used Windows in a long time but Linux is generally assumed to be less power efficient on laptops and yet I have no problem getting 7-9 hours out of my year old ZenBook 13 OLED. That's still nowhere near what you get on a MacBook Air but perfectly usable imo.
- Lio 4y agoMy experience with Linux, Ubuntu and Fedora on HP EliteBook and Dell XPS13 respectively is similar to the Windows numbers posted above. My 2014 MBP13 still gets better life than my daily driver XPS13 9370.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eitland 4y agoThere are plenty of people who don't like Mac. Me I am a Linux user, had already had a job that "forced" me to use Linux back in 2009 (yes, my boss demanded everyone used Linux, in 2009 and I absolutely did not complain as it had been my choice since 2005). I came to Mac that year and was very enthusiastic about what I had heard was like a polished, commercially supported Linux distro. I left three years later after having spent significant time trying to adapt to it. I was relieved to get back, even to Windows. Last fall I got a Mac Mini. Some of the warts are now fixable, but I only use it for things I won't have to do in anger or fear or anything like that.
- sharikous 4y agoIt's not clear if the ISA difference is so meaningful, perhaps it's only a small part of the performance boost. Don't forget that Apple moved from PPC to x86 to get better perf/watt and the PPC ISA is closer to ARM than x86. Intel or AMD back on their feet can probably match Apple in perf/watt. And I guess they are the closest competitors in the PC market.
- genewitch 4y agoi thought apple switched to x86 because two console companies were buying most of the PPC fab output? I distinctly remember that being the reasoning. Until Ryzen hit with the 3000 series x86 didn't have a better perf/watt than PPC, at a glance. In the 10 years between my 40 core HP server's release and the Ryzen 5950x's 16 cores, performance increased ~10%, but the TDP of the 5950x is 10% of the quad xeons in the HP. This is ignoring the fact that a single 5950x cost less in any market than a single xeon in that HP upon release. Does anyone else remember the Cavium ThunderX processors? Whatever happened to those? the perf/watt on those was supposed to be outstanding...
- gwbas1c 4y agoI just tried out the Surface X. (Arm-based Microsoft tablet running Windows.) There was a lot to like about it, but I returned it because it wouldn't connect to my printer and scanner. In general, compared to a Macbook: - It has a touchscreen - It has a detachable keyboard - It has a pen input Microsoft's execution on the device is flawed. (IE, in order to use it as a laptop it needs a much more sturdy hinged keyboard,) but there's clear differentiators in their lineup. IMO: Apple's lack of a touchscreen and detachable keyboard (or 270 degree fold) really hurts the Macbook lineup. If I could get a Macbook that I could also use as a table, or an iPad that truly ran OSX, I'd be happy.
- dboreham 4y agoI also invested in a Surface Pro X (I have macbooks but don't like to use them vs Windows), bought at a deep discount on Amazon. I persevered with the ARM-related issues and now love it. You really need to run the insiders' builds at present in order to get decent compatibility (e.g. Android apps and 64-bit Intel emulation). I have Docker and the complete stack of dev tools for my projects (Scala, Kotlin, Haskell, Rust, TS) running in WSL2 with VSCode IDE.