4 ms·

You're wrong about Microsoft here. They too have loads of experience developing their SW for multiple architectures, even moreso than Apple. Windows NT shipped

You're wrong about Microsoft here. They too have loads of experience developing their SW for multiple architectures, even moreso than Apple. Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. Just read their papers on arch emulation. What they don't have and Apple has is 10+ experience in shipping tailor made ARM chips fit to their needs, because they always left chip design to their partners, as they were always a SW company first not a HW product company like Apple, and this isn't something they can start and catch up with in the snap of a finger.

mschuster91 3y ago
> Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. The entire NT stuff has gone down the drain. The last non-x86 platforms were dropped around 2000 [1] until ARM entered the picture in 2012, but the latter was mostly used for Windows Phone for many years which itself got discontinued around 2017. All these many thousand human-years of experience have long ago retired or went to other companies, their institutional knowledge is effectively lost for Microsoft. And that is the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
- dboreham 3y ago
  Cutler is still there :)
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    As per his last interview, nowadays busy porting GNU/Linux into XBox running on Azure, for AI workloads when they are idle. Somehow there is a certain irony on that.
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  Windows 2000 shipped with x86 support only. But just one year later, Windows XP had an Itanic port at launch.
hakfoo 3y ago
The problem isn't even building NT for ARM/RISC-V/SH-4 or whatever, it's being able to reproduce enough of the surrounding universe that Windows on x86-64 has. Apple has more leverage over devs; they can say "No more x86-64 in N years" and the developers basically have to move to ARM or abandon MacOS. This bootstraps the market; people who want MacOS have to suck it in and buy ARM because it's the only new hardware we'll be seeing in the future. Microsoft doesn't control the hardware sector to put a hard deadline on new x86-64 products, and it would be suicidal to cut off the x86-64 software support at any time in the near future. This means we'll see new x86-64 Windows machines in the store, and all the third-party apps supporting x86-64 Windows, for years to come. So as a consumer, why would I want an ARM-Windows machine? It has little exclusive software, is likely buggier and less mature, and probably runs the vast majority of x86-64 software in an emulation penalty box.
- dzonga 3y ago
  yeah, I wouldn't count microsoft or intel out. arm cpu performance advantages at low power are great. i'm typing this on an m2. but i'm sure intel will figure out how to have great cpu's at low power draws that perform well. amd already did. so i'm sure intel will.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  > Apple has more leverage over devs; they can say "No more x86-64 in N years" and the developers basically have to move to ARM or abandon MacOS. I think Microsoft could do the same thing as far as devs go. If Apple can exert that influence over devs with their extreme minority market share, I think MS could too. The problem for MS is their customers. Apple customers will buy whatever Apple puts out, because they're extremely loyal to the brand. The same isn't true for Microsoft, and I imagine that pressure would cause them to fold on any major changes.
  - xxs 3y ago
    >I think Microsoft could do the same thing as far as devs go That's absolutely unrealistic. The main Windows part is the backward compatibility + the corporates. Nowadays Microsoft develops stuff written in Javascript, not their own frameworks, even.
ack_complete 3y ago
They do have lots of experience porting Windows to multiple platforms. They don't have very good experience managing the user experience of Windows transitioning between platforms. I was one of the early adopters of Windows on ARM, the Windows 10 native port to ARM64 (ARMv8). At release, practically the only native development tool was WinDbg -- neither Visual Studio nor Windows Performance Analyzer had been ported. You could install Visual Studio in x86 emulation mode but it wouldn't run reliably as the toolchain would keep throwing heap errors, so cross-compilation was required and debugging was harder. There was basically zero information about what was and wasn't supported -- you'd just start porting and run into something like there being no OpenGL acceleration support. Or even more fun, that there was no ARM64 version of the Visual C++ Redistributable published, so you couldn't distribute a program that was dynamically linked to the CRT -- and the Visual Studio support staff didn't even know what ARM64 was and pointed to the x64 redist. This didn't start getting ironed out until around three months after Windows on ARM machines had started shipping. And assuming you got past these problems, Windows has no universal binary system, so it's your job to figure out how to properly get the right platform executable installed and launched without any support from the OS. This was really bad in the early days of x64, where XP would just say "invalid executable" when trying to launch a x64 program on x86; these days it displays a slightly less cryptic "Machine Type Mismatch" error dialog with no further help. Microsoft is trying to fix these problems now, but they're years late and the amount of software available as native ARM64 is still very low. Oh, and they already dropped support for the early gen Snapdragon 835 and 850 devices in Windows 11, which means no x64 emulation or ARM64EC support, and an even tinier effective market. In contrast, Apple managed the ARM transition much, much better -- they had native tooling, documentation, and development systems lined up in advance and a much more polished user experience on day one.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Are you sure regarding ARM64EC? I doubt that they are dropping it any time soon, specially when they just announced the Arm Advisory Service.
  - ack_complete 3y ago
    They aren't dropping ARM64EC, it's still fully supported and how Visual Studio and Office run native. It is based on x64 emulation support, however, so it requires Windows 11. Snapdragon 835 is officially unsupported by Windows 11; 850 is conditionally supported, but IIRC at one point it didn't support hardware 3D acceleration in x64 apps.
pjmlp 3y ago
That is not the issue, rather convincing the Windows developer community to actually care about ARM. Traditionally Microsoft isn't like the others (Apple/Google), "take this or go away", which is why they became so big for enterprises in first place.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. The entire NT stuff has gone down the drain. The last non-x86 platforms were dropped around 2000 [1] until ARM entered the picture in 2012, but the latter was mostly used for Windows Phone for many years which itself got discontinued around 2017. All these many thousand human-years of experience have long ago retired or went to other companies, their institutional knowledge is effectively lost for Microsoft. And that is the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms

dboreham 3y ago
Cutler is still there :)
- pjmlp 3y ago
  As per his last interview, nowadays busy porting GNU/Linux into XBox running on Azure, for AI workloads when they are idle. Somehow there is a certain irony on that.
Kwpolska 3y ago
Windows 2000 shipped with x86 support only. But just one year later, Windows XP had an Itanic port at launch.

hakfoo 3y ago

The problem isn't even building NT for ARM/RISC-V/SH-4 or whatever, it's being able to reproduce enough of the surrounding universe that Windows on x86-64 has. Apple has more leverage over devs; they can say "No more x86-64 in N years" and the developers basically have to move to ARM or abandon MacOS. This bootstraps the market; people who want MacOS have to suck it in and buy ARM because it's the only new hardware we'll be seeing in the future. Microsoft doesn't control the hardware sector to put a hard deadline on new x86-64 products, and it would be suicidal to cut off the x86-64 software support at any time in the near future. This means we'll see new x86-64 Windows machines in the store, and all the third-party apps supporting x86-64 Windows, for years to come. So as a consumer, why would I want an ARM-Windows machine? It has little exclusive software, is likely buggier and less mature, and probably runs the vast majority of x86-64 software in an emulation penalty box.

dzonga 3y ago
yeah, I wouldn't count microsoft or intel out. arm cpu performance advantages at low power are great. i'm typing this on an m2. but i'm sure intel will figure out how to have great cpu's at low power draws that perform well. amd already did. so i'm sure intel will.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
> Apple has more leverage over devs; they can say "No more x86-64 in N years" and the developers basically have to move to ARM or abandon MacOS. I think Microsoft could do the same thing as far as devs go. If Apple can exert that influence over devs with their extreme minority market share, I think MS could too. The problem for MS is their customers. Apple customers will buy whatever Apple puts out, because they're extremely loyal to the brand. The same isn't true for Microsoft, and I imagine that pressure would cause them to fold on any major changes.
- xxs 3y ago
  >I think Microsoft could do the same thing as far as devs go That's absolutely unrealistic. The main Windows part is the backward compatibility + the corporates. Nowadays Microsoft develops stuff written in Javascript, not their own frameworks, even.

ack_complete 3y ago

They do have lots of experience porting Windows to multiple platforms. They don't have very good experience managing the user experience of Windows transitioning between platforms. I was one of the early adopters of Windows on ARM, the Windows 10 native port to ARM64 (ARMv8). At release, practically the only native development tool was WinDbg -- neither Visual Studio nor Windows Performance Analyzer had been ported. You could install Visual Studio in x86 emulation mode but it wouldn't run reliably as the toolchain would keep throwing heap errors, so cross-compilation was required and debugging was harder. There was basically zero information about what was and wasn't supported -- you'd just start porting and run into something like there being no OpenGL acceleration support. Or even more fun, that there was no ARM64 version of the Visual C++ Redistributable published, so you couldn't distribute a program that was dynamically linked to the CRT -- and the Visual Studio support staff didn't even know what ARM64 was and pointed to the x64 redist. This didn't start getting ironed out until around three months after Windows on ARM machines had started shipping. And assuming you got past these problems, Windows has no universal binary system, so it's your job to figure out how to properly get the right platform executable installed and launched without any support from the OS. This was really bad in the early days of x64, where XP would just say "invalid executable" when trying to launch a x64 program on x86; these days it displays a slightly less cryptic "Machine Type Mismatch" error dialog with no further help. Microsoft is trying to fix these problems now, but they're years late and the amount of software available as native ARM64 is still very low. Oh, and they already dropped support for the early gen Snapdragon 835 and 850 devices in Windows 11, which means no x64 emulation or ARM64EC support, and an even tinier effective market. In contrast, Apple managed the ARM transition much, much better -- they had native tooling, documentation, and development systems lined up in advance and a much more polished user experience on day one.

pjmlp 3y ago
Are you sure regarding ARM64EC? I doubt that they are dropping it any time soon, specially when they just announced the Arm Advisory Service.
- ack_complete 3y ago
  They aren't dropping ARM64EC, it's still fully supported and how Visual Studio and Office run native. It is based on x64 emulation support, however, so it requires Windows 11. Snapdragon 835 is officially unsupported by Windows 11; 850 is conditionally supported, but IIRC at one point it didn't support hardware 3D acceleration in x64 apps.

pjmlp 3y ago

That is not the issue, rather convincing the Windows developer community to actually care about ARM. Traditionally Microsoft isn't like the others (Apple/Google), "take this or go away", which is why they became so big for enterprises in first place.