It's absurd to be selling a desktop PC that's weaker than a phone.
Right now, the biggest driver for Windows ARM adoption is, ironically, Apple's M1 and onwards because of people running it as a guest OS through Parallels.
Also, frankly, I'm okay with Microsoft failing at projects like this. We don't need another Apple-like presence on the market.
Personally I’m not ok with being locked out of potential computing power by platform so I can’t get excited as MS struggles to keep up.
It’s either MS keeps up or the future ahead is dark.
Don't we?
Consumer targeted arm chips power most phones and tablets. Many of them are more than a handful for i5 and i3 class Intel chips and draw a lot less power. When you are talking about a $599 price point, you aren't talking about top-shelf Intel, anyway.
> But there is some sense to trying to lay the groundwork for future ARM SoCs running Windows
Now that ARM has grown up to be a viable alternative to Intel, this makes a ton of sense.
They've been doing exactly that since Windows 8, if not earlier. Perhaps the Year of Windows on ARM is somewhere around the corner from the Year of the Linux Desktop
I think we are on the ... third? ... attention cycle for this? Because they were trying pretty hard when W10 dropped too
X-Box would beg to differ since 2002.
An ARM based Windows computer isn't a bad idea, I just question if Microsoft is able to deliver on it. Picking the same manufacturer, who repeatably failed to deliver usable ARM processors for desktop and laptops seem like a obvious mistake. This isn't their first attempt either, so why would I trust that this won't fail, like the last time? Apple had done this before an architecture transition before, Microsoft haven't, and I doubt they have the will to ensure that it will succeed. They are too tied up in the x86 world, too busy with Azure and they don't have the attention of the consumer market.
In terms of price, it's really close to the Mac mini. Factor in performance, then this thing is a bad deal.
The form factor is right for many uses, but I don't get who the potential buyers are.
Microsoft has already executed and brutally failed with ARM in the form of the disastrous Surface RT/Windows RT.
But, and more importantly.
Two people with unlimited resources are running a race car race.
One starts a year or two before the other. Even with unlimited resources; the other racer/team has unlimited resources, too.
So let’s say they can both reach a maximum of the speed of sound.
Apple’s already been going the speed of sound for a couple years now; they also have the advantage that their vehicle in the race has software and hardware that are married.
Microsoft is not only nowhere near the speed of sound, but even though they also have unlimited resources; they are severely hampered by separate hardware and software, with the exclusion of their surface tablets, whose previous incarnation of this race car model crashed and burned on the race track.
This isn’t a race where MS can or will catch up. They’re already years behind. Not that I encourage anyone to use an OS with built-in ads anyway. Just use Linux at that point.
By the way When the fuck did 32GB become an entry requirement, I am so saddened by the crappy software and stacks that treats memory like an infinite resource
I'd hope some one have already or will write thesis on correlation between Rise of Javascript stack and narcissism in software industry.
However, given that it took Microsoft more than a decade to decide to port their own Visual Studio to ARM Windows, I'm not sure why they think third parties are chomping at the bit.
If Microsoft wants to copy Apple, they need to copy the decision to immediately port all their first party software.
At 700€ price tag what a gift! It's 3-400€ too expensive for a very dispensable toy, especially given that the managed stack (.net) of Microsoft development tools can be tested on Raspberry Pi or M1, which are both very popular with developers.
I admit I'm disappointed in the showing, and I think that Microsoft not loosing out on this market is important to them. I'd be willing to be bet 2nd gen of this will likely be produced by a 3rd party vendor.
Since then the A15 came out with some efficiency and performance improvements, it's in the M2 IPad and M2 MBA and presumably several future apple products.
The A16 has some efficiency and perfomance tweaks and is what's in the recently released iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.
So sure, the M1 in the M1 mac mini might have more power, cooling, and cores than the iPhone 14 pro, but the cores are actually slower at the same clock. Sure a phone will hit thermal limits sooner than a SFF PC.
You don't need top shelf performance for browsing the web, checking your emails or writing some docs.
DIDN’T
Until electron
But most people only need a browser and maybe a few simple products anyway. A phone SoC is probably enough.
> To boost performance, we have added vendor-specific optimizations so your apps run well on a variety of Arm hardware. We have several runtime improvements to targeting server throughput (RPS) and latency.
Seems largely focused on .NET 7 though[2].
[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/10/24/availa...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33319535
[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/arm64-performance-impr...
Just looked over the energy report and it's averaging 0.18kWh daily (so the average power draw is 7.5W) - that's with a 3.5in SATA HDD. Better power use than my Raspberry Pi 4 with an external USB HDD!
If low power consumption is your main motivator, I'd say you can do a lot better with one of those instead.
I made off with a i3-8100T (about 3/4s as powerful, 35W TDP), with 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD in an ultra-small-form-factor case for less than $150. For $600, it makes absolutely no sense against anything used. Let's say it drew 50W vs 20W total use at 10 cents per KWh. It would take 5 years to save $130, if you ran it 24/7/365. A $450 used Intel small-form-factor system would run circles around it in performance (especially after any emulation / code conversion) and you'd break even.
Now let's say in Europe, just one of them was called "The United Kingdom", where after a recent (temporary) energy price cap, electricity prices rose to _only_ 36p/kWh (41 cents US at current rates), and further rise are expected, and the cap had an end, bringing us potentially to double the current uni rate, then do the maths again and see why it might be a "crucial" component for many.
Running old, cheap hardware with high power usage has been impractical here and many other parts of the world for quite some time and that was before recent disastrous rises.
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...
Anything power hungry gets really expensive quickly for home use, these days.
If this gains traction then we should start seeing support for windows laptops on ARM. As a dev who prefers windows but has a m1 MacBook b/c of the battery life I really hope this works out.
I am beyond impressed at it. Windows 11 on it - while, yes, it's Windows 11 with its own concerns and issues - runs flawlessly. I've been able to run my traditional x86 and x64 workloads - even things like arm64 Tailscale without issues, and I get amazing battery life.
I am 100% for this thing. It's value for money in the high-performance ARM Windows rig market. It benches similarly to a ~11th gen i5 and runs the part.
This thing is basically the most performant ARM soc on the market with a lot of memory, fast storage and good connectivity. Not bad at all for the price. Not to mention there's a good chance this might be the first cost-effective ARM Linux workstation.
Can you comment about the battery life and the "traditional x86" workloads? Does it use a just-in-time compilation? (I haven't looked at the details yet)
Can you dual boot to a Linux arm64 distribution?
Having a decent devkit may help bring more native ARM software, which may make these underpowered machines struggle less with speed and compatibility.
I’d love Windows on ARM to work. I love my M1 and would like something comparable.
But Apple had the M1 and the ARM PCs seem to be based on iPhone 7 level chips (perceptually).
“You can have Intel or ARM. No one buys ARM so there is little software. Windows was ruined on ARM for a long time. Your ARM laptop will be way slower, but it will be cheap because the only ones you can buy are ultra-low spec with terrible components like eMMC storage.”
There is absolutely no compelling reason to buy one for any reason and they’re not fixing it.
The first MacBook Air was a horrible computer in many ways, but it really excelled in one that mattered to people.
These don’t have that one thing that matters. They’re just ‘meh’ computers that don’t run much. MS can’t fix it (without their own chip) and Qualcomm seemingly wont either.
It's not clear what you're quoting from. But it's out of date, now. The last generation (or two?) of windows ARM laptops certainly have NVMe storage. And they're not generally cheap (in cost nor components).
> MS can’t fix it (without their own chip) and Qualcomm seemingly wont either.
Well, launching these laptops without a native Chrome build was a bit of a blunder IMO. That was ~2-3 generations ago and while Google might not ship Chrome for windows-arm64 (last I checked), you can download native binaries of Chromium.
IIRC MS does somehow co-brand w/Qualcomm for the SoCs used on the ARM Surface. But I kinda doubt Microsoft will start designing their own.
Now for 12"/13"/14" laptops, yes I agree that extended dev work isn't the most practical, but then again I spend most of my day with IDEs and simulators — it's probably a different story for someone who lives in a terminal or spends most of their time writing prose.
MS released Windows on ARM with Windows 8. It them abandoned it and the users.
Chip design that's easier to put things like memory into an SOC.
Windows on ARM can only be good for computing.
There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.)
Seems like a truly decent machine (ordered one) but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific development. After years and years of development platform missteps and PC usage pattern changes, I fear web (electron, etc.) has become good enough for Windows users.
[1] https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/windows-on-snapdrago...
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/ecs-liva-mini-box-qc710-de...
> There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.)
Azure cloud instances are also an option.
> but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific development
I think that there is. If there isn't, Windows has bigger problems...
Additionally they don’t have a system like Rosetta 2 to help with translation, a LOT of windows apps are x32/64 based, and there has to be an incentive for devs to make the switch, Apple faced this issue when moving from PPC, they used I believe Carbon to help, and over time took carbon off and forced devs to update to apples current architecture at the time.
Electron unfortunately does seem like the potential way forward for apps, not just because of Windows and their handling of ARM, but it’s also potentially cheaper to develop against as its multi platform, 1Password is a prime example of this, and outside of the hardcore audience like us, they won’t notice the increased resource use of electron.
Microsoft has proven however electron can be good, see Visual Studio Code, plus with the advent of chrome os gaining traction, it’s likely we may head into a web first world, outside a niche subset of users.
4 GB of RAM and eMMC would never be comfortable for Windows development. I have a very small laptop like that and I'd never think of using it to do .NET development on it. OTOH, for Python-backed web apps and API-based services, it's quite sufficient.
I couldn’t find ARM with windows, can you help?
Feel free to ask questions!
Anyone who is still interested can buy one on eBay straight from Microsoft's eBay Outlet (which surprisingly exists):
What about Surface Pro X? Not desktop enough?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-arm-ap...
I mean.....video games are still huge?
You seem to be talking without regard to the actual facts. Plenty of programming languages offer first class Windows support, including:
Go, Rust, Zig, D, Nim, Python, PHP, Ruby, and others.
If you want a "good" small computer and you already have a screen (or want to buy cheap ones) then these systems are fantastic.
Performance is completely fine for moderate-to-heavy workloads (assuming the heavy workloads are bursty) for the Mac mini, and hopefully this.
Both systems are what you would get if you didn't need a display or keyboard already, they're desktop replacements with a small footprint, and fantastic for the majority of computer workloads including a lot of development ones.
This is probably closer to the Mac Mini with M1 that they shipped to kick-start the Apple Silicon transition for desktop apps.
Because if I was a windows programmer for today's customers, I can't really build things on a "Windows on Arm" device like this.
Like Apple before, I hope this is just the first salvo against the Windows+Intel, before we all switch to Arm chips (including Intel fabs).
AMD releases 32-core + ARM APUs
And benchmarks continue to show: https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/1584350796233117696
And you know they have faster processors too.
It’s so weird to me. The A series is kind of “that doesn’t count” because the competition can’t get close. The M series wowed people and then we all went back to normal AMD/Intel stuff like nothing happened.
If I want a new PC laptop, it just won’t compare because no reasonable part is available for the heat/battery life I could have gotten.
(I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)
The main advantage of the M-series if for laptops on battery. Desktops, gaming, and software development is still significantly better on Intel-compatible desktops. E.g.: I can run Windows 11 with WSL 2 and Docker. That lets me develop using multiple huge ecosystems of tools seamlessly. With Apple, you get immediately relegated to a tiny corner of "optimised for M1" software, and have to either emulate or use cloud-hosting for everything else.
Then you wouldn't be stuck paying way more for much less capable hardware.
Or maybe, in some twisted logic they want to sabotage their own ARM products in favor of Intel
But probably crack
“The Volterra devices are neat and powerful, ideal for us to test our market-leading anti-piracy and anti-cheat game security technologies. They’re also very quiet, and they just work out of the box.” – Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by IrdetoI just thought the same, but not WPF native on arm?, but an emulation layer?, still looks very promising.
* https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102341/0400/WPF-and-...
* https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/1817
* https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-july-2021/#windows...
> Windows Forms and WPF are now supported on Windows Arm64. We added support for Windows Arm64 with .NET 6 Preview 1 and have since backported it to .NET 5 (with 5.0.8). Windows Forms and WPF work the same on Arm64 as they do on x64. You could already use x86 emulation to run Windows Forms and WPF apps on Arm64, however, there was a performance cost to doing so. With this release, you can your apps natively with full performance.
Launch a 500$ category laptop, say 3 gens old. That would soon be M1. Won't be very profitable, but a direct competitor to the typical crappy Windows low-end laptop.
Yet it's so much better in performance, security, battery life, total lifespan, etc. Double down on making it idiot-proof. Optimize the onboarding experience for ex-Windows users, including prominent placement of alternatives for popular W32 software. Make sure Office works well, and so on.
I would admit that it would take many years to make a dent, but there's no rush to it. Windows seems a sitting duck. Nobody, including Microsoft, seems to care about it.
Edit: oh yes, forgot about gaming.
Microsoft are too busy making money on Azure and M365 subscriptions for the hundreds of thousands of companies heavily invested in Microsoft apps. Windows is just one platform to get users to those apps. Microsoft are pushing Intune/MEM so organisations can push Microsoft apps to all devices including Apple ones. They don't care about the OS because it's not important.
Microsoft has enough partners and regional offices because Office365 and Azure are the only worthy products for us in "shithole countries".
If Microsoft isn't intending on selling a lot of these devices, the cost of adding 1 or 2 African countries would be relatively small compared to the revenue they make from our regions.
I mean, expensive Macs came out, costing twice the shitty HP/Lenovo/Dell enterprise offerings with poor thermals and battery life. We bought them.
I would buy this device if it was for sale in my market, I see a benefit in testing my work on Windows ARM64.
All South American, most Asian and most European countries are excluded. That sucks, too.
1. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/proj...
I have never seen an ARM windows machine in the wild.
In fact I barely even see any windows 11 machines.
From 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783924
> Oddly, what I'd really like to see is ARM enter the NUC space. Maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like be able to pay $200-400 for a small, low power usage, decently performant machine. The 8th generation Intel NUC are good, but 28W TDP and it'd be nice to get it much, much lower than that. I know these are a small fraction of the overall market but personally I think it'd be cool.
Once you want something more powerful than Raspberry Pi or a board based on a mobile SoC your options whittle down considerably. There are "mini/micro" PCs but they don't touch the lack of power consumption.
Has that changed? Otherwise it's nonviable at $DAYJOB,
It doesn't have to be super fast, just work well enough.
It's probably nowhere near as good as Apple's emulation. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-on-arm-this-is-...
Yes, but not for drivers (so device manufacturers have to write drivers specifically for ARM)
There is nothing for people to believe or not believe. MS cannot cannot discontinue x86 overnight because their OS is used by a much larger proportion of the world.
Fundamentally, ARM Holdings is what Antitrust legislation was supposed to break down. They own the "ARM" name and control who can license the ARM IP and most importantly, how.
Ampere, the folks behind a lot of ARM servers, are by contract barred from getting into the market of making ARM chips for phones, desktops, or otherwise. That's the form of their license: Server-grade 96-core behemoths running at 3+Ghz and with the thermal output of a small space heater.
ARM holdings sets all sorts of weird restrictions and forces market segmentation to make sure that nobody "Accidentally" makes something that they don't immediately approve of. Qualcomm is basically locked into making phone SoCs for all eternity until they renegotiate their license with ARM holdings. They're in a shit situation because they have competition all over the place (Allwinner, Rockchip, a legacy Intel series, NXP, and Samsung to name a few), letting ARMHoldings bully them into not making something that rocks the boat too hard.
Apple pulled a massive show of force in making ARM license them desktop grade chips. You see, Apple has been a license holder for ARM for a bit now (with the Ax series chips) and makes up, ballpark, 15% of worldwide phones and now >50% of US phones. Apple had already idly said "we could... you know, not use an integrated solution" when they fiddled with Intel's radio baseband.
For ARM to try and sue Apple for breach of contract for developing the Mx series of desktop class ARM processors and get away with it, they'd be putting their market share dominance in four different major markets at risk. Qualcomm can't do that.
So that leaves Microsoft, who does not want to get into the processor fabrication business and who is still reeling over the antitrust lawsuit 20 years ago (which, I'll point out, was mostly over a shared text mangling library, for what it's worth) out in the dust looking for options, and the option they get is "Whatever Qualcomm will ship them."
People would have mostly wanted it anyway.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with this hardware.
With most of the important Microsoft software already compiled to ARM, and with those kits available to developers to do compile theirs at a competitive price, I won't doubt that future could be possible.
Just wondering the performance when running it on the dev kit they sell now.
edit: I forgot about the A in ARM.
Because Microsoft says it's the future? Microsoft is the worst at these promises. That's what they said about Windows 8, then Windows RT, the Windows Phone, the Windows Phone 8 platform, Windows 10 Mobile, UWP in General, the Windows Store, the relaunched Windows Store, Windows on ARM years ago, Project Reunion with XAML islands, Windows 10 S, Windows 10 X, Desktop Converter Bridge, the iOS Converter Bridge... I suppose they kept their promises with DirectX and that kind of thing. Right now, developer apathy for Windows is nearly insurmountable, and has been for the last decade, and Microsoft's constant changing of directions does not instill confidence.
https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-intel-...
Yes, they might have dropped the ball on more than one thing. You're especially right about Windows app ecosystem today, but it's not like Microsoft is constantly failing. They're doing phenomenal job on many fronts. They're certainly not that easy to write off.
It speaks volumes that Visual Studio wasn't even available as an ARM version until now.
(And let’s set aside the how they’d possibly be able to compete with the scale, market penetration, marketing spend, and mature app ecosystems of iOS/Android and Apple/Samsung.)
Privacy? Lack of advertising? Respect for the user’s choices? From the company that brought you Windows 11? Why does the world sorely need another closed-source operating system full of telemetry?
New/extended platforms:
- Added support for Ampere Altra
- Added support for Apple M2
- Added support for Lenovo ThinkPad
x13s and other machines using
the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3
(SC8280XP) SoC.Anandtech about the cpu: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17127/qualcomms-8cx-gen-3-for...
Some info about the ARMv8.2-A Architecture (2017): https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...
Seems like this is a sign of things to come in Windows platforms too, since Microsoft are including an NPU in this devkit. The PC of the future may well end up being CPU+GPU+NPU as standard, much as it is CPU+GPU today.
I can't remember their name for the life of me, but they demo'd it at VMWorld a few years back.
The economics versus boring pizzabox or compact blade systems probably never worked out in their favor, hence why I'm having so much trouble tracking them down again.
Edit: found them. I guess they're still alive. Hivecell: https://hivecell.com/
Probably because the device is not available in my country, but then at least show a page explaining I can't purchase the device based on my IP or whatever. This was a really bad experience.
Given it’s a dev kit companies won’t care about cost, but I can’t see many being sold to independent/small developers, the excitement just isn’t there.
Neither the Verge piccies nor the marketing movie are clear on this.
Support for the Qualcomm chip did land in v6.0 of the Kernel - https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b6a6535b339776d32fa...
I just had mine arrive today, which I wanted to enroll as an ARM64 build agent (with Firecracker) for self-actuated ( https://docs.actuated.dev ) - this does actually work with Asahi Linux and the Mac Mini M1, but that was double the price for half the RAM.
So far, it's not looking good, with Ubuntu Server 22.04 and 22.10 both crashing after the Grub menu. I'm sharing progress here:
https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1585562359254421504?s...
FWIW the M1 is a little more than twice as fast on GeekBench, but also uses twice the power (TDP). So sort of similar speed score per watt, so possibly they can be within the same ballpark as Apple in the next couple years.
I'm sure this won't be M1-levels of performance, but I'm glad to see Microsoft move towards ARM. I can totally see in a few years more manufacturers building ARM-based SoCs to run on laptops, desktops, etc.
Makes me happy I TA'd a course on ARM programming 10 years ago.I'm extremely bullish on ARM's future.
With macOS on ARM, Apple said they'd stop making Intel machines and they launched a compelling new experience. If you were a developer, you knew you needed to get on board or be left behind. If you were a user, you probably wanted one of the shiny new M1 machines, but even if you didn't you were going to be moving to ARM the next time you upgraded a few years down the line. Users also knew that software would be ported to ARM because it was the only way forward for the Mac.
Microsoft isn't abandoning x86. So why should developers care about Windows on ARM? Why should users choose Windows on ARM when developer support is poor - Microsoft just got Visual Studio on ARM. Why should users choose Windows on ARM when the ARM processors being offered are way behind what Apple/Intel/AMD are offering for processors? With developers and users unenthusiastic about ARM, why should chip companies want to invest in laptop/desktop ARM chips? Why should a hardware company start making ARM machines that just incur losses for a few generations as they manufacture things users aren't interested in?
There are certainly reasons to care, but it's a lot harder to justify. Maybe Qualcomm thinks it can create a new laptop/desktop chip business to rival Intel/AMD. That's certainly a good incentive, but I'm sure they've had meetings where they've talked about Microsofts lukewarm support for ARM, how to get users to buy an inferior product in the meantime (eg. until they create better chip designs and until devs port things to ARM), how to get devs to port things to ARM despite little user demand, and how to get hardware companies to want their laptop/desktop chips despite all this.
I'm not saying that Windows on ARM won't happen. I think we're in a time when CPU-independence is a lot easier and there's a lot of money to be made. However, it won't happen nearly as quickly as Apple's transition - because people have a choice in the matter. Intel/AMD CPUs are likely to be significantly better (than non-Apple ARM CPUs) for years to come. If Intel is able to get back on track in terms of process, it'll be even harder for Qualcomm and others to match. And Microsoft is likely playing a harder game when it comes to translating x86 software. Apple mirrored Intel's memory guarantees in their ARM chips, but the ARM spec doesn't require that. That makes translating a lot easier/faster, but if Windows for ARM is going to work with weaker guarantees, that makes it a harder sell. With Intel and AMD doing decently well at the moment, there's less reason for users.
Again, I'm not saying it won't happen. Hardware manufacturers will like having additional suppliers (even if the new ARM machines are partly just to get some leverage with Intel/AMD). Microsoft will want to make sure that Windows doesn't suffer if Intel/AMD stumble in the future. It's just going to be a long slog convincing developers and users that it's worth their time and money. Over a long enough time frame, I think new apps will be ARM/x86 and users will be fine with them at the right price/performance point, but it's not going to be like Apple's transition where people were enthusiastic.
Lots of people have Macs already.
That's what decades are poor management gets you, you late to the party with expired food
Apple was smarter when they came up with their M1; with an aggressive pricing and excellent performance/watt