7 ms·

The AI is the least interesting part of this announcement. Microsoft is giving ARM another try with a special branding that's supposed to guarantee some level o

The AI is the least interesting part of this announcement. Microsoft is giving ARM another try with a special branding that's supposed to guarantee some level of performance and quality. That's possibly huge news.

jsheard 2y ago
It's also notable that Qualcomm is officially upstreaming kernel support for the Snapdragon Elite platform that Microsoft is pushing, so those systems may actually not suck at running Linux.
- user_7832 2y ago
  In the past a few Snapdragon 8 Gen x chip dev kits have had Linux support if I recall correctly. I'd love to have built a device out of them but they seem quite expensive unfortunately for consumers ($800-1000, often from grey market sources). It's nonetheless good to see Linux support.
  - akr4s1a 2y ago
    Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip laptops are only just getting there. Last time I tried to daily it maybe 6 months ago, they didn't even have hardware rendering on the GPU, everything was rendered on the CPU. Ubuntu and Armbian have custom images for the x13s, no idea about the Volterra but it's much worse than the windows on ARM experience for that laptop and that's saying something.
    - user_7832 2y ago
      That's disappointing :(
- jwells89 2y ago
  Yeah, “ARM-based Linux laptop with 22h battery life” is much more interesting to me than “Windows 11 ARM-based AI PC”. If the TPU can eventually be utilized by open models under Linux that’s just a cherry on top.
  - estebarb 2y ago
    Personally agree. But let's be honest: the big shift to ARM in desktop will only happen with Windows.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Acorn tried very hard, but without a critical mass of software ported to the platform it was nearly impossible - Apple was the only other platform that survived. Now, with open source, it’s easier to open up a place for other architectures. Android and iOS took over a lot of space traditionally reserved to Windows and Microsoft is not oblivious to that fact.
  - akr4s1a 2y ago
    Lenovo claimed 28h on their last arm laptop, real world was more like 10 for light tasks and 2 to 4 for heavier work like development
    - tstrimple 2y ago
      Laptop battery life estimates outside of Apple are downright criminal. I'm still bitter over the time I bought a fully loaded Sony Vaio which had an advertised battery life of 11 hours. When in actuality, I only got less than three hours of battery life and complained, they explained to me that they meant it gets 11 hours of standby mode with the lid closed. I only made the mistake of buying a non-Apple laptop one more time with a fully loaded XPS which could barely manage 4 hours of battery life. I honestly have no idea how anyone can put up with non-Apple laptops. It's pure garbage out there.
    - daghamm 2y ago
      2-4 hours sounds wrong. Were you mining bitcoin in the background? "Battery life on the ThinkPad X13s will depend on your workload ... and while you might not get close to the 28 hours that Lenovo touts in its own testing, our testing with PCMark 10 got us an amazing 15 and a half hours..."
      - 2y ago
- pentagrama 2y ago
  Yes, and Lenovo is releasing a new Qualcomm-powered ThinkPad, which are known to be a Linux-friendly laptops. > The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is, of course, business-focused. It will have the same Snapdragon chip, storage capacity, and webcam but will support up to 64GB of memory and one of three 14-inch display options: an IPS with up to 400 nits of brightness; an IPS touch display; or an OLED that covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, also with 400 nits of brightness. >Lenovo expects the Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 to start at $1,199 and the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 to start at $1,699. Both will be available in June. Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160819/lenovo-qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-yoga-slim-thinkpad https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160819/lenovo-qualcomm-...
  - trelane 2y ago
    They might be "known" (recent experience may vary. mine sure did) but if you can't get support for the pre-installed Linux, you're just asking for pain.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      Hmm. The first thing I do when I buy any new machine is to format the hard drive so I can install my own OS on it. I don't really trust any manufacturer to get that right. So, if it's so hard to get Linux running that you need to have it preinstalled for you, then it's not really a good Linux machine in my view.
      - zamadatix 2y ago
        It's not as much "How do I install Linux?" as it is "The manufacturer supports these Linux images but my hardware isn't working right with it so I can call them and they're supposed to have an answer as to making it actually work". Otherwise you're just as good to buy any random laptop and try to make sure everything is supported yourself (not a horrible option, just not the premise of these kinds of laptops). I had decent luck with Dell (though it was an n=1 interaction so I'm not sure how it indicates overall) ~5 years back on this where there was some issue with the dual GPU nature of the 7730 where on this model you could actually completely bypass the iGPU (it wouldn't even show up as a PCIe device anymore) for the main screen but it was causing some sort of display desync after a few minutes on Linux but not Windows. Loaded up the official image, reproduced, opened a ticket, they sent a firmware patch, it worked.
- temac 2y ago
  I thought Microsoft requires UEFI + secure boot for Windows, and with no disabling option in the firmware setup, for Windows Arm PC? Or maybe it was "only" Microsoft Secure Boot and you can actually use a Linux distro? If this is the latter case, can you build and run the kernel you want or not?
  - spookie 2y ago
    You can use secure boot on select distros. Coincidentally, they're the better ones as well (Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, etc...)
    - superb_dev 2y ago
      You should also be able to enroll your own keys to boot any distro under secure boot
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        Yeah but then you need to resign every update, if the distro doesn't do it for you.
  - wmf 2y ago
    Secure boot can now be disabled on ARM.
dingle_thunk 2y ago
Microsoft has been consistently trying to give ARM a try since the surface RT. Consumers are not going to bite. marginal power saving is not meaningful.
- jsheard 2y ago
  The first iteration of Windows ARM didn't have any x86 emulation layer, so that one was doomed from the start. The second iteration did, but it initially couldn't run 64bit apps and the performance was poor. They do have 64bit support now and it sounds like the emulation performance has come a long way.
  - nerdjon 2y ago
    Here is my question though, comparing how this works on Mac. Will Windows have the opposite? ARM running on x86? I continue to wonder how Microsoft expects to work long term. Are they expecting that every developer is just going to keep x86 and ARM based app perpetually or users be stuck always using that emulation layer if they are running ARM? Microsoft won't be able to 100% transition to ARM like Mac did. At some point all Intel Mac's will be old enough to no longer get the latest version of Mac and for developers to stop targeting and they drop Intel support. I just don't see many developers bothering with an ARM native Windows version when doing so means they have to support both or risk annoying customers later.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      I think the official line from Microsoft would be that most software should be using .NET anyway, and in that case the same binary should Just Work on either architecture. In reality there is still a lot of native software though, so who knows how that will play out. Games in particular will always be native.
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        If it's like their previous ARM Windows attempt, existing native software won't work in any event because the entire platform is locked down.
neverokay 2y ago
Think it’s worth mentioning that their Qualcomm exclusive windows laptop deal ends soon and this should allow AMD and NVIDIA to ramp up (arm) windows laptop cpus soon within the next few years.
dr_ 2y ago
Really? The Recall feature is pretty interesting and potentially quite useful. I see their AI implementation as V 1.0 of bigger things to come.
chucke1992 2y ago
The huge news is indeed that this time vendors support Microsoft's ARM efforts.
Dalewyn 2y ago
Not quite. Hidden at the very end of Microsoft's blognouncement[1] is this tidbit (emphasis mine): > We look forward to expanding through deep partnerships with Intel and AMD, starting with Lunar Lake and Strix. We will bring new Copilot+ PC experiences at a later date. So it's less Microsoft pivoting to and giving ARM a try again but rather testing the waters and distributing the risks by introducing ARM into a line of laptops and tablets that will still be fundamentally x86. Arguably, the only reason ARM is first to store shelves is because Qualcomm released this generation first before Intel and AMD. This isn't as significant as Apple throwing Intel out to pasture and converting to ARM wholesale, not yet anyway. [1]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copilot-pcs/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copi...
- genewitch 2y ago
  apple never wanted to use intel hardware, they were forced to by motorola/IBM et al; whoever was selling them the PowerPC chips told them to pound sand because the xbox and playstation needed way more PPC chips than apple. Apple made a business decision to switch to intel, which caused a bit of a to-do in the community at the time. That apple switched off intel at their earliest possible chance - that which took time to "design" their own ARM cpu - doesn't really mean anything, in my opinion. I wonder how many people remember all of the hardware platforms that NT 3.51 and NT 4 ran on (Sparc, etc)
  - cyberax 2y ago
    IBM didn't want to design a power-efficient PowerPC chip. And then they switched from Intel once Intel stopped being able to design new power-efficient chips.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Well, that's not what the story was at the time. "You don't order enough" was the reasoning. Further, nearly contemporaneously after apple M chips debuted intel released chips with P and E cores. Furthermore, Intel made lots of chips that have TDP under 10W, even 5W - multicore, even. I still use them to run HA VMs for emergency communications internet gateways. "power-efficient" is a weird thing to claim, anyhow. What does it mean? PPC were much faster per socket than maybe even server class chips by intel, if you wanted power efficiency you could run them slower and get whatever FLOPS/J intel could give. I am very sure i remember Apple not having a choice.
CharlesW 2y ago
> Microsoft is giving ARM another try with a special branding that's supposed to guarantee some level of performance and quality. I hope so. I've been a happy Windows for Arm user (via Parallels on Apple Silicon) for a year+ and it's been good. Based on that, I think drivers are going to be the biggest PITA for ARM-based PC users for the first couple years — for example, Google Drive doesn't work for that reason.
- abdusco 2y ago
  I tried Windows on UTM (based on qemu, I believe) and the graphics were choppy. I attributed that to the lack of graphics acceleration. Is it also the same on Parallels?
  - temac 2y ago
    Parallels has excellent graphics acceleration.
    - rcarmo 2y ago
      Yep. Both Parallels and VMware have good graphics acceleration, but Parallels is better. I too have been running a Windows ARM VM for work for a year or so.
- ZeroWidthJoiner 2y ago
  > I think drivers are going to be the biggest PITA for ARM-based PC users for the first couple years — for example, Google Drive doesn't work for that reason. Google Drive does ship with Arm64 drivers, and patching the platform check out of the installer gets them installed just fine (40 84 f6 74 08 -> 40 84 f6 90 90). No idea why they're blocking the install.
joshuakogut 2y ago
'AI' is frequently the least interesting part of any announcement.
kyriakos 2y ago
Unfortunately announcement was very thin on actual details. For example is the new surface fanless? How's the battery etc?
- Marsymars 2y ago
  As a fan (heh) of fanless PCs, it's remarkably difficult to filter based on that info.
- dagmx 2y ago
  An interview with Satya and the WSJ indicates it is actively cooled. Joanna asks him whether you’ll be able to hear the fans and he says they’re quiet versus missing.
mmcnl 2y ago
Exactly. They're now aggressively competing with Apple with supposedly better performance and better battery life. That's huge. Apple was years ahead with the introduction of the M1 but it appears competition has finally caught up. All of this has to be proven in real life though, but so far all the newly announced ARM devices [0] look like impressive MacBook competitors on their own. [0] So far it seems this are the devices that have been announced. Microsoft: Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11 Dell: XPS 13, Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus, Latitude 5455, Latitude 7455 HP: OmniBook X and Elitebook X Lenovo: Yoga Slim 7 and ThinkPad 14s Gen 6. Samsung: Galaxy Book4 Edge Acer: Swift 14
- bdavbdav 2y ago
  AIUI the snapdragon x elite they’re based on benches between the M3 and M3 pro for CPU.
- wslh 2y ago
  I am excited on having an ARM on a PC with Linux support but I never see Windows as an OS optimized for batteries beyond if they use ARM or x86. The Apple advantage continues to be a complete control of the device from hardware to the operating system, while the bloatware of Microsoft Windows makes an arbitrary use of resources. This is not to say that Microsoft Windows is not an advanced OS, the problem is that it is not laser focus optimized.
  - mmcnl 2y ago
    I guess that's true but you can't make a leap like Apple did with their transition to ARM every few years. So it's good to see the competition catch up. And I'm perfectly happy with Windows laptops trailing Apple by a close margin instead of a 4 year gap.
- mhh__ 2y ago
  I'd bet a tenner that they've caught up with where apple was 3 years ago rather than 1 year ago, at best.
- dagmx 2y ago
  They do some sleight of hand when doing the comparisons during the release today. The Surface Laptop is physically a competitor to the actively cooled MacBook Pro (in fact it’s thicker). Their performance and battery metrics are against the slimmer and passively cooled MacBook Air. Their performance comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Elite when the M3 has throttled (their wording is sustained performance) Their battery comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Plus. That they interchange both freely is a strong tell that their devices don’t compete on all fronts like your comment suggests. The only area where I think the snapdragon X will compete is price, because they’re claiming it’s $200 lower than a comparable M3 MacBook Air (but don’t disclose the exact comparison). Still, a very strong showing from Qualcomm/Nuvia. However the sleight of hand leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
hulitu 2y ago
> Microsoft ... to guarantee some level of performance and quality.That's possibly huge news. Only when you lived on a remote island, with no access to news. /s
akr4s1a 2y ago
I still won't believe it until reviewers get hands on. In October 2022 I wanted an efficient laptop for web development but didn't want to grab a mac, so I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X13s with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which Qualcomm made similar promises about and it lived up to exactly 0% of them. The main draw, the battery life was worse than my old Blade 14 that ran Fedora, windows on ARM and their current emulation continues to suck, every so often core services would just not work. The Linux support is only just barely getting there, Ubuntu and Armbian have custom images, where a lot of stuff still doesn't work. The camera will never work because of proprietary blobs and the battery life is way worse than windows, no suspend, audio barely works, etc. And those aren't just problems of Lenovo or that thinkpad it stems from the platform. I ended up buying a macbook a few weeks ago and it was 2 years late, should have got it in the first place.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
201984 2y ago
Does anyone know if these chips will have SVE/SME?
- 201984 2y ago
  To answer my own question, it appears the Oryon CPUs do not according to this LLVM patch: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/8aebe46d7fdd15f02a9716718f53b03056ef0d19/llvm/lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64SchedOryon.td#L31-L35 https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/8aebe46d7fdd15f02a... There's a pretty good interpretation of it here: https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/05/15/qualcomms-oryon-llvm-patches/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/05/15/qualcomms-oryon-llvm-p...
pseudosavant 2y ago
Unfortunately, even though I wish I could get an M4 (or equivalent) ARM SoC in a PC, it is very unlikely that these chips are going to live up to the hype. Qualcomm has a bad track record of overstating and cherry-picking benchmarks. All of their claims so far have been both impressive, and very squishy. Microsoft's own messaging around performance and battery life for their Surface devices was also unusually squishy. And I am a huge Surface Pro fan that would love nothing more than a fanless AND fast ARM Surface Pro. I live in San Diego, and know countless Qualcomm employees, none of them give a shit about anything other than modems really. The rest of the SoC is just something to push 5G. They care as much about CPUs/SoCs as Intel did about 5G modems.

jsheard 2y ago

It's also notable that Qualcomm is officially upstreaming kernel support for the Snapdragon Elite platform that Microsoft is pushing, so those systems may actually not suck at running Linux.

user_7832 2y ago
In the past a few Snapdragon 8 Gen x chip dev kits have had Linux support if I recall correctly. I'd love to have built a device out of them but they seem quite expensive unfortunately for consumers ($800-1000, often from grey market sources). It's nonetheless good to see Linux support.
- akr4s1a 2y ago
  Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip laptops are only just getting there. Last time I tried to daily it maybe 6 months ago, they didn't even have hardware rendering on the GPU, everything was rendered on the CPU. Ubuntu and Armbian have custom images for the x13s, no idea about the Volterra but it's much worse than the windows on ARM experience for that laptop and that's saying something.
  - user_7832 2y ago
    That's disappointing :(
jwells89 2y ago
Yeah, “ARM-based Linux laptop with 22h battery life” is much more interesting to me than “Windows 11 ARM-based AI PC”. If the TPU can eventually be utilized by open models under Linux that’s just a cherry on top.
- estebarb 2y ago
  Personally agree. But let's be honest: the big shift to ARM in desktop will only happen with Windows.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Acorn tried very hard, but without a critical mass of software ported to the platform it was nearly impossible - Apple was the only other platform that survived. Now, with open source, it’s easier to open up a place for other architectures. Android and iOS took over a lot of space traditionally reserved to Windows and Microsoft is not oblivious to that fact.
- akr4s1a 2y ago
  Lenovo claimed 28h on their last arm laptop, real world was more like 10 for light tasks and 2 to 4 for heavier work like development
  - tstrimple 2y ago
    Laptop battery life estimates outside of Apple are downright criminal. I'm still bitter over the time I bought a fully loaded Sony Vaio which had an advertised battery life of 11 hours. When in actuality, I only got less than three hours of battery life and complained, they explained to me that they meant it gets 11 hours of standby mode with the lid closed. I only made the mistake of buying a non-Apple laptop one more time with a fully loaded XPS which could barely manage 4 hours of battery life. I honestly have no idea how anyone can put up with non-Apple laptops. It's pure garbage out there.
  - daghamm 2y ago
    2-4 hours sounds wrong. Were you mining bitcoin in the background? "Battery life on the ThinkPad X13s will depend on your workload ... and while you might not get close to the 28 hours that Lenovo touts in its own testing, our testing with PCMark 10 got us an amazing 15 and a half hours..."
    - 2y ago
pentagrama 2y ago
Yes, and Lenovo is releasing a new Qualcomm-powered ThinkPad, which are known to be a Linux-friendly laptops. > The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is, of course, business-focused. It will have the same Snapdragon chip, storage capacity, and webcam but will support up to 64GB of memory and one of three 14-inch display options: an IPS with up to 400 nits of brightness; an IPS touch display; or an OLED that covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, also with 400 nits of brightness. >Lenovo expects the Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 to start at $1,199 and the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 to start at $1,699. Both will be available in June. Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160819/lenovo-qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-yoga-slim-thinkpad https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160819/lenovo-qualcomm-...
- trelane 2y ago
  They might be "known" (recent experience may vary. mine sure did) but if you can't get support for the pre-installed Linux, you're just asking for pain.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    Hmm. The first thing I do when I buy any new machine is to format the hard drive so I can install my own OS on it. I don't really trust any manufacturer to get that right. So, if it's so hard to get Linux running that you need to have it preinstalled for you, then it's not really a good Linux machine in my view.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      It's not as much "How do I install Linux?" as it is "The manufacturer supports these Linux images but my hardware isn't working right with it so I can call them and they're supposed to have an answer as to making it actually work". Otherwise you're just as good to buy any random laptop and try to make sure everything is supported yourself (not a horrible option, just not the premise of these kinds of laptops). I had decent luck with Dell (though it was an n=1 interaction so I'm not sure how it indicates overall) ~5 years back on this where there was some issue with the dual GPU nature of the 7730 where on this model you could actually completely bypass the iGPU (it wouldn't even show up as a PCIe device anymore) for the main screen but it was causing some sort of display desync after a few minutes on Linux but not Windows. Loaded up the official image, reproduced, opened a ticket, they sent a firmware patch, it worked.
temac 2y ago
I thought Microsoft requires UEFI + secure boot for Windows, and with no disabling option in the firmware setup, for Windows Arm PC? Or maybe it was "only" Microsoft Secure Boot and you can actually use a Linux distro? If this is the latter case, can you build and run the kernel you want or not?
- spookie 2y ago
  You can use secure boot on select distros. Coincidentally, they're the better ones as well (Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, etc...)
  - superb_dev 2y ago
    You should also be able to enroll your own keys to boot any distro under secure boot
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Yeah but then you need to resign every update, if the distro doesn't do it for you.
- wmf 2y ago
  Secure boot can now be disabled on ARM.

dingle_thunk 2y ago

Microsoft has been consistently trying to give ARM a try since the surface RT. Consumers are not going to bite. marginal power saving is not meaningful.

jsheard 2y ago
The first iteration of Windows ARM didn't have any x86 emulation layer, so that one was doomed from the start. The second iteration did, but it initially couldn't run 64bit apps and the performance was poor. They do have 64bit support now and it sounds like the emulation performance has come a long way.
- nerdjon 2y ago
  Here is my question though, comparing how this works on Mac. Will Windows have the opposite? ARM running on x86? I continue to wonder how Microsoft expects to work long term. Are they expecting that every developer is just going to keep x86 and ARM based app perpetually or users be stuck always using that emulation layer if they are running ARM? Microsoft won't be able to 100% transition to ARM like Mac did. At some point all Intel Mac's will be old enough to no longer get the latest version of Mac and for developers to stop targeting and they drop Intel support. I just don't see many developers bothering with an ARM native Windows version when doing so means they have to support both or risk annoying customers later.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I think the official line from Microsoft would be that most software should be using .NET anyway, and in that case the same binary should Just Work on either architecture. In reality there is still a lot of native software though, so who knows how that will play out. Games in particular will always be native.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      If it's like their previous ARM Windows attempt, existing native software won't work in any event because the entire platform is locked down.

neverokay 2y ago

Think it’s worth mentioning that their Qualcomm exclusive windows laptop deal ends soon and this should allow AMD and NVIDIA to ramp up (arm) windows laptop cpus soon within the next few years.

dr_ 2y ago

Really? The Recall feature is pretty interesting and potentially quite useful. I see their AI implementation as V 1.0 of bigger things to come.

chucke1992 2y ago

The huge news is indeed that this time vendors support Microsoft's ARM efforts.

Dalewyn 2y ago

Not quite. Hidden at the very end of Microsoft's blognouncement[1] is this tidbit (emphasis mine): > We look forward to expanding through deep partnerships with Intel and AMD, starting with Lunar Lake and Strix. We will bring new Copilot+ PC experiences at a later date. So it's less Microsoft pivoting to and giving ARM a try again but rather testing the waters and distributing the risks by introducing ARM into a line of laptops and tablets that will still be fundamentally x86. Arguably, the only reason ARM is first to store shelves is because Qualcomm released this generation first before Intel and AMD. This isn't as significant as Apple throwing Intel out to pasture and converting to ARM wholesale, not yet anyway. [1]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copilot-pcs/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copi...

genewitch 2y ago
apple never wanted to use intel hardware, they were forced to by motorola/IBM et al; whoever was selling them the PowerPC chips told them to pound sand because the xbox and playstation needed way more PPC chips than apple. Apple made a business decision to switch to intel, which caused a bit of a to-do in the community at the time. That apple switched off intel at their earliest possible chance - that which took time to "design" their own ARM cpu - doesn't really mean anything, in my opinion. I wonder how many people remember all of the hardware platforms that NT 3.51 and NT 4 ran on (Sparc, etc)
- cyberax 2y ago
  IBM didn't want to design a power-efficient PowerPC chip. And then they switched from Intel once Intel stopped being able to design new power-efficient chips.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Well, that's not what the story was at the time. "You don't order enough" was the reasoning. Further, nearly contemporaneously after apple M chips debuted intel released chips with P and E cores. Furthermore, Intel made lots of chips that have TDP under 10W, even 5W - multicore, even. I still use them to run HA VMs for emergency communications internet gateways. "power-efficient" is a weird thing to claim, anyhow. What does it mean? PPC were much faster per socket than maybe even server class chips by intel, if you wanted power efficiency you could run them slower and get whatever FLOPS/J intel could give. I am very sure i remember Apple not having a choice.

CharlesW 2y ago

> Microsoft is giving ARM another try with a special branding that's supposed to guarantee some level of performance and quality. I hope so. I've been a happy Windows for Arm user (via Parallels on Apple Silicon) for a year+ and it's been good. Based on that, I think drivers are going to be the biggest PITA for ARM-based PC users for the first couple years — for example, Google Drive doesn't work for that reason.

abdusco 2y ago
I tried Windows on UTM (based on qemu, I believe) and the graphics were choppy. I attributed that to the lack of graphics acceleration. Is it also the same on Parallels?
- temac 2y ago
  Parallels has excellent graphics acceleration.
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Yep. Both Parallels and VMware have good graphics acceleration, but Parallels is better. I too have been running a Windows ARM VM for work for a year or so.
ZeroWidthJoiner 2y ago
> I think drivers are going to be the biggest PITA for ARM-based PC users for the first couple years — for example, Google Drive doesn't work for that reason. Google Drive does ship with Arm64 drivers, and patching the platform check out of the installer gets them installed just fine (40 84 f6 74 08 -> 40 84 f6 90 90). No idea why they're blocking the install.

joshuakogut 2y ago

'AI' is frequently the least interesting part of any announcement.

kyriakos 2y ago

Unfortunately announcement was very thin on actual details. For example is the new surface fanless? How's the battery etc?

Marsymars 2y ago
As a fan (heh) of fanless PCs, it's remarkably difficult to filter based on that info.
dagmx 2y ago
An interview with Satya and the WSJ indicates it is actively cooled. Joanna asks him whether you’ll be able to hear the fans and he says they’re quiet versus missing.

mmcnl 2y ago

Exactly. They're now aggressively competing with Apple with supposedly better performance and better battery life. That's huge. Apple was years ahead with the introduction of the M1 but it appears competition has finally caught up. All of this has to be proven in real life though, but so far all the newly announced ARM devices [0] look like impressive MacBook competitors on their own. [0] So far it seems this are the devices that have been announced. Microsoft: Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11 Dell: XPS 13, Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus, Latitude 5455, Latitude 7455 HP: OmniBook X and Elitebook X Lenovo: Yoga Slim 7 and ThinkPad 14s Gen 6. Samsung: Galaxy Book4 Edge Acer: Swift 14

bdavbdav 2y ago
AIUI the snapdragon x elite they’re based on benches between the M3 and M3 pro for CPU.
wslh 2y ago
I am excited on having an ARM on a PC with Linux support but I never see Windows as an OS optimized for batteries beyond if they use ARM or x86. The Apple advantage continues to be a complete control of the device from hardware to the operating system, while the bloatware of Microsoft Windows makes an arbitrary use of resources. This is not to say that Microsoft Windows is not an advanced OS, the problem is that it is not laser focus optimized.
- mmcnl 2y ago
  I guess that's true but you can't make a leap like Apple did with their transition to ARM every few years. So it's good to see the competition catch up. And I'm perfectly happy with Windows laptops trailing Apple by a close margin instead of a 4 year gap.
mhh__ 2y ago
I'd bet a tenner that they've caught up with where apple was 3 years ago rather than 1 year ago, at best.
dagmx 2y ago
They do some sleight of hand when doing the comparisons during the release today. The Surface Laptop is physically a competitor to the actively cooled MacBook Pro (in fact it’s thicker). Their performance and battery metrics are against the slimmer and passively cooled MacBook Air. Their performance comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Elite when the M3 has throttled (their wording is sustained performance) Their battery comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Plus. That they interchange both freely is a strong tell that their devices don’t compete on all fronts like your comment suggests. The only area where I think the snapdragon X will compete is price, because they’re claiming it’s $200 lower than a comparable M3 MacBook Air (but don’t disclose the exact comparison). Still, a very strong showing from Qualcomm/Nuvia. However the sleight of hand leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

hulitu 2y ago

> Microsoft ... to guarantee some level of performance and quality.That's possibly huge news. Only when you lived on a remote island, with no access to news. /s

akr4s1a 2y ago

I still won't believe it until reviewers get hands on. In October 2022 I wanted an efficient laptop for web development but didn't want to grab a mac, so I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X13s with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which Qualcomm made similar promises about and it lived up to exactly 0% of them. The main draw, the battery life was worse than my old Blade 14 that ran Fedora, windows on ARM and their current emulation continues to suck, every so often core services would just not work. The Linux support is only just barely getting there, Ubuntu and Armbian have custom images, where a lot of stuff still doesn't work. The camera will never work because of proprietary blobs and the battery life is way worse than windows, no suspend, audio barely works, etc. And those aren't just problems of Lenovo or that thinkpad it stems from the platform. I ended up buying a macbook a few weeks ago and it was 2 years late, should have got it in the first place.

deleted 2y ago

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201984 2y ago

Does anyone know if these chips will have SVE/SME?

201984 2y ago
To answer my own question, it appears the Oryon CPUs do not according to this LLVM patch: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/8aebe46d7fdd15f02a9716718f53b03056ef0d19/llvm/lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64SchedOryon.td#L31-L35 https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/8aebe46d7fdd15f02a... There's a pretty good interpretation of it here: https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/05/15/qualcomms-oryon-llvm-patches/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/05/15/qualcomms-oryon-llvm-p...

pseudosavant 2y ago

Unfortunately, even though I wish I could get an M4 (or equivalent) ARM SoC in a PC, it is very unlikely that these chips are going to live up to the hype. Qualcomm has a bad track record of overstating and cherry-picking benchmarks. All of their claims so far have been both impressive, and very squishy. Microsoft's own messaging around performance and battery life for their Surface devices was also unusually squishy. And I am a huge Surface Pro fan that would love nothing more than a fanless AND fast ARM Surface Pro. I live in San Diego, and know countless Qualcomm employees, none of them give a shit about anything other than modems really. The rest of the SoC is just something to push 5G. They care as much about CPUs/SoCs as Intel did about 5G modems.