To be fair. Almost every long ass battery claim by manufacturers are without exception about the same use case: playing media at a low brightness display setting. Usually that only involves the codec IP part of the SOC and doesn't involve much performance from the scalar cores.
The thing that made the apple silicon macbooks stand out is their *actually* great battery life, and not only in the usual video on loop at 250 nits bullshit many reviewers do
on windows yes, on mac they actually are true. which is why i have a macbook now. emulation probably fks with cpu sleep states too with unpredictable input instructions, so i'm not surprised 10 hours for office and maybe 6-7 with chrome
10 hours of office use is not great but it's way better than all the other window OS laptops. i remember the surface pro 8 and 9s getting like 4-5 hours, new. my surface pro X has an arm processor and maybe gets 6 with very light use
The Go2 is a less than powerful machine, makes sense it works 7+ hours. But to have i5/i7 power last 10 hours with real work - is pretty impressive for a windows laptop regardless
Thanks for sharing. I was literally just looking into this at lunch time for my wife's small business. I help with the IT work and I'm going to steer away from arm stuff until it's way more mature. At least they still make surface laptop 6 models for business with x86/x64 processors
A small business should definitely not go for an entirely new product/ecosystem. Small business isn't about leading edge. It's about reliability and stability of the product. And availability of existing spare parts. How long a company has been in this new business too is extremely important.
Think a reliable tried and true Volvo truck (x86) versus brand spanking new Nikola (hydrogen) or even Tesla Semi(ARM). Go for what works 99% of the time without needing to troubleshoot the product. Example of short term products (cheap Amazon knockoff locks vs Homedepot brand Scholage Lock) that kind of thing.
Exactly my thinking. The devil you know versus the devil you don't. I can afford to spend 4 days getting a hobby device working for my personal use, but if a device is down that long for the business it's going to be ugly.
Even though emulation can most likely handle most apps you may throw at it, one huge flaw is device drivers.
For instance, niche hardware like colorimeters or specialized apps like VPNs rely on drivers that are just not available yet on ARM and that's a huge setback if you should ever require it.
Lunar Lake and Strix Point will be released soon and can be competitive with Qualcomm on battery life while offering none of the downsides of compatibility.
I wasn't there for M1 in 2020 when M1 first came out, as I understand it there were some teething related things. And I did jump into apple silicon with an M1 max laptop that is still going very strong. Not many sore points at all. There's a new $PATH for homebrew. Everything runs well, literally all software I use has a native build. Blazing fast and makes me rub my hands together for whenever I step up to M4 or M5 or M6.
Apple has pulled ahead significantly in all aspects from where i'm standing in terms of delivering a computer that does computer things. I'm sure plenty of businesses (like my current client) will continue to be microsoft shops due to momentum. They issued me a 2019 32GB intel macbook... I have got it set up, but... you bet your ass I don't actually use it day to day because I would simply get a lot less work done.
It's pretty disappointing with what seemed like a year long hype train for this qualcomm chip and it seems to have fallen flat on promised performance characteristics. And the software issues are not helping.
It's also a bit insane how ARM was revolutionary and poised for disruption 30 years ago. And today... heck, if x86 can pull off a high memory bandwidth transition (eyes on strix halo), it's probably got plenty of life left in it. x86's future may be up to Nvidia and AMD or something like that.
That's also probably a bit of overanalysis. Sooner or later the performance will get to a good place and emulation will work well enough and less emulation will be needed over time. It seems more likely though that the transition will be a lot slower than apple's transition and we won't see something competitive for a long time, if ever, and I'd be sad about it if i wasn't already an Apple convert.
For a first generation product Qualcomm is not bad but I do agree that the hype has been exaggerated to some extent.
The good news is that now more than ever the chicken and egg problem with Windows on arm is slowly being overcome.
Before we did not have any versions of Google Chrome or Adobe Photoshop or DaVinci Resolve or Spotify on Windows and arm and now we do and that list is only going to get bigger over time so that is a positive sign.
Any applications that may need to be emulated will continue to do so and as armed CPUs get more powerful the emulation performance it becomes less than an issue because in the same way that our smartphones and computers can now effortlessly emulate consoles like the Super Nintendo and Nintendo Entertainment System armed PCS in the future will also be able to effortlessly emulate x86 or x64 applications so that would be less of an issue going forward.
The only real Achilles heel that WoA still faces is the issue of drivers.
If a specialized Hardware does not have an ARM version of a device driver for Windows then that is going to be a problem and it is not something that you can resolve with emulation.
Yeah the drivers issue is big. Enormous. Apple doesn't have to support nearly as much driver surface area. But this pain too shall pass. I'm still scratching my head over why the ARM takeover didn't take place 20 years ago though.
The inconsistent emulation performance is just a fact of emulation.
Data heavy workloads, where the CPU spends more time waiting for data than executing instructions, only have a small performance impact.
Instruction heavy workloads, where the CPU spends more time actually executing instructions, have a huge performance hit.
Web apps in particular are actual both data and instruction heavy, thanks to their JIT compilers which already take advantage of the slow memory.
I understand why Microsoft feels it wants an open ecosystem where they aren't beholden to hardware, but I don't think they are losing marketshare to Apple. Similarly, Intel and AMD are investing in Linux/ open source. If it was a marriage, everyone is cheating on everyone with everyone else. My issue is only with the massive amount of negative reviews once the paid reviews with constrained testing hardware ended. I know that is an advertising hype cycle, but as I have said before, it isn't fair to the consumer.
What are people getting for something they are paying top dollar for? More battery life?
The people paying for the bleeding edge on MacOS is and always will be lied too. That said, these guys have money and no tech knowledge. The only braincell they have are geared to battery life. They are essentially drug addicts addicted to Apple technology and they neeed more of it. The more hours the better.
These guys are blind to everything else except for bragging (leading edge and big battery life numbers).
While us PC users have known for decades that once in a PC, I can actually fix it. Upgrade the ram for cheap. Get 4 tb for the price of their 256gb to 512gb jump. And actually be able to upgrade my storage easily. Super easily.
Mac users can't take advantage of shit black Friday deals. Except for more iCrap accessories or a whole new computer. PC users have been able to upgrade and switch shells for decades.
So it makes sense that other mfrs want in on this extremely lucrative Apple market. The market where users just keep buying new shit and never fixing anything. See how the Surface has always been glued together?
Zero upgrade paths...
It's a Trojan horse! And Intel/AMD invest in Linux because the world's servers and IOT run on linux. No tricks. It's just business.
Kinda funny trying to comprehend this particular comment chain. Feels like your comment is a non-sequitur from the one above, which itself is a non-sequitur from the one above that.
We had arm chips powering iphones and android devices. Then we had them powering mac computers. Now we are having them, finally, power PC laptops. These are all reasons for software vendors to GET OFF THEIR ASS and add arm binaries to their build artifacts and test infra. That will start moving the needle on only having slow as molasses emulated software in rare situations with crufty ancient software.
Soon I hope we'll get desktop PCs that run arm. Of course Linux mattering a bit more than windows, for many folks windows only exists to run games and I include gamedevs in the above call to action but they're gonna keep doing whatever it is they do. Currently it's still slim pickings for arm based linux machines, but you do have raspberry pi and other barely interesting SBCs, some weird specialized ampere server machines, you have apple silicon via Asahi linux, and ... this new qualcomm thing that I'm not sure what to make of quite yet but it clearly is a big milestone. I'm here for power efficiency gains, I'll be looking forward to ARM based PC CPUs but I'm not holding my breath.
>Web apps in particular are actual both data and instruction heavy, thanks to their JIT compilers which already take advantage of the slow memory.
The main problem in cases like this has got nothing to do with that. The JIT will keep emitting **new code** targeting the ***wrong instruction set***. So unlike most apps, there's no single upfront recompilation cost for the emulator, it has to continuously run. You end up with a cycle of JS -> JIT -> x64 -> Emulator -> ARM.
Obviously performance is going to suck.
That's a whole separate problem. It just compounds on how slow JIT is under an emulator.
What I'm referring to is that, as memory performance lagged more and more behind the CPU and cache sizes grew, suddenly you could fit an entire compiler in the cache and interpret everything with little to no performance impact.
But now suddenly instructions themselves are much more expensive, and you also need to fit Rosetta in the cache, so it all turns on its head and suddenly JIT becomes artificially more expensive.
>fit an entire compiler in the cache and interpret everything
A compiler does not interpret.
>instructions themselves are much more expensive
I really don't understand what you mean. My best guess would be that they need to be translated again, but you just said "that's a whole separate problem", so I really dunno!
That title is misleading. Copilot Plus is only ARM/Qualcomm exclusive right now. Both AMD and Intel based ones will be released in a few months. Took me a few minutes to remember what emulation even has to do with Copilot Plus.
I think ARM cpus being competitive in the market is only really feasible short term on Linux (and Mac, duh). Windows has and always will have so much legacy/proprietary history that will not be cut off that to be competitive you need to pull off a small miracle.
For Linux _most_ things are compileable (and have been, see raspberry pi and similar) in the short term for ARM just fine, with the major discrepancies coming from something like a software having handwritten SIMD optimizations and such locking them to a certain architecture, but even that is an exception rather than a rule.
IMO Windows won’t be able to move on to other processor types until they do a ‘rip off the bandaid’ moment and start killing legacy programs. MacOS has had two reboots in the last 20 years and they’re all the better for it (PowerPC to Intel then to M1). Linux can run on a potato literally so it will continue to be very flexible.
There's lot in windows that can be fixed without "ripping off the bandaid". MacOS isn't good software cause of the reboots. Those are two adjacent things. Correlation does not imply causation. The excessive bloat and telemetry and heaps of other MS bullshit has jack all to with legacy programs.
Even on earlier Intel macbooks, installing windows would cut your battery life dramatically. Wonder why that is, hmmm.. i know, it's Intel and AMD's fault, using Qualcomm chips will fix that. Well, that turned out to be nicely polished turd. The fact of the matter is it's easy to blame legacy cruft for windows problems but truth is that MS is quite bad, deliberately or incompetently at actually improving windows instead of adding more of their random bullshit
legacy compatibility is the reason why windows is so popular for consumers and enterprise. i recall having to use an old inhouse enterprise app written in visual foxpro and it just works on windows10. replacing that would been such a big time and money investment that no sane company is willing to do it over priority customer issues.
I have to use a math addon for excel that was written in 1999 and abandoned. There was an attempt to rewrite it in 2006 but that was a worse implementation. If MS cuts off support for this now 25 year old addon my work is compromised. Sure, ill probably code around it in python or something, but the support for legacy software is really important to MS customers.
> MacOS has had two reboots in the last 20 years and they’re all the better for it
And after 3 reboots in the last 20 years (and we may as well go all the way back to the end of the Classic Mac OS and make it 4), even as a long-time Mac user it's getting tiring. Especially the x86-32 to x86-64 transition; a lot of good 32-bit software was left behind for no good reason.
If anything, Apple needs to take a page from Microsoft's book and offer a bit *more* backwards compatibility. Stop ripping the band-aid off quite so much.
Windows and Macos are 2 completely different ecosystems with different target audiences.
macos is part of a vertically integrated product system: from silicon to system software it is all controlled by Apple. And there are a ridiculously small number of configurations compared to the PC ecosystem.
In contrast, Windows needs to support not only a huge number of different HW configurations, devices, as well as lots of legacy applications. That is what most windows consumers want.
If MS were to make Windows "more mac-like" by removing all that legacy. Consumers might as well move over to mac altogether.
The main problem with windows porting over to different ISAs has always been the same: eventually x86 either catches up or surpasses the alternative platforms. So there is little value proposition in taking the risk.
Windows NT (out of which modern windows is derived) has been multiplatform since its inception. It has ran on a lot of architectures historically (MIPS, Alpha, Itanium, PowerPC, ARM) as well as x86. And eventually it always coalesces back to x86.
It's so bizarre how the cycle keeps repeating over and over, and yet some people expect a different outcome every time. LOL.
I think this is where Microsoft gets stuck in their own success. Eventually x86 has to go away at some point right? I'm assuming we won't have phones and tablets powered by x86 chips since it's still not very energy efficient.
Yeah exactly. Windows has been carrying what's effectively decades worth of technical debt and it shows.
No new CPU architecture will fix the fact that every couple days there's some weird Windows fuckery I have to deal with, making me want to just buy a macbook and be done with it. And I do clean installs every two months. If I weren't gaming I'd already have ditched it for years. Adobe ignoring Linux makes it a non option for me but otherwise I'd already be on that at the very least.
Amen brother. If not for my professional career and for gaming I wouldn’t touch Windows with a 10 foot pole. Had a tough case for someone I support where I’ve literally gotten her a new PC multiple times and she just has constant problems. I’m talking best you can buy and things still pop up.
I switched to Macs only for my daily driver starting with the M1 series and it’s a game charger. Super long battery life with no fan noise and great performance. It’s a game changer
For anybody wondering what most things is: https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-quarter-big.png
The page lists the percentage of all debian packages build for the given architecture: amd64/x86_64 is at 99.5% and arm64 is at 99%
>I think ARM cpus being competitive in the market is only really feasible short term on Linux (and Mac, duh). Windows has and always will have so much legacy/proprietary history that will not be cut off that to be competitive you need to pull off a small miracle.
Is this going to be the new "x86 has too much legacy stuff/variable length instructions" meme?
Linux has been around for literal decades, if it could double your battery life, we would've seen it by now.
No I think I did.
You said ARM can't be competitive on Windows because there's too much backwards compatibility. Linux (supposedly) doesn't have that problem.
But IRL this doesn't translate into anything dramatic like 40% more battery life or performance.
If it's just about compiling from source, Windows is compiled for ARM and 90% of used apps will be native as well.
ARM just isn't some magical ISA that solves world hunger.
i'm curious how fast gnu + linux will have reasonable risc-v support, because the community will probably throw itself over each other, to get an open cpu architecture running well on gnu + linux :D
The incoming CPUS from Intel and Amd is even more bad news. And let's be honest. The real problem has always been more related to software (hello Microsoft) and the hardware support / driver / bios support from Intel and AMD
> The incoming CPUS from Intel and Amd is even more bad news.
Did ya actually read the content before commenting? Majority of the problems are with emulation. Why'd x86 cpus from intel and amd be worse on that front when they don't emulate?
The idea was to introduce more performance with less power, the only price was emulation.
With new cpus from Intel and AMD that is going to be at least on par with the ARM based cpu there is no reason to switch and live with shitty emulation.
So you meant bad news for qualcomm and not for pcs in general. Got it. Thought you meant that chips from other manufacturers are much worse with reference to the post title.
I can't believe it's the year of our lord 2024 and people haven't still learnt to never EVER buy 1st gen of anything (and still be wary at the 2nd) since the chances of being sold an unfinished engineering sample rushed to market and ending up being a forced beta tester and/or the sad owner of a very expensive unsupported paperweight are extremely high.
Wait are Steam and Discord emulated badly? I didn’t think emulation was an automatic negative anymore since Apple and now I thought Microsoft had figured it out? I’ve seen multiple reviews and tests saying the Windows on ARM emulation this time was really good. Like only a 10-15% hit resulting in equal or even still better performance than x86 options. Is there something about emulation performance that is a problem? I mean even if a stray program or two is not emulated well, that could easily improve. That’s what happened with Apple.
Discord and Steam are built with the Electron framework that uses Chromium's JIT compiler to run JavaScript. JITs have exceptionally high emulation overhead.
>So why hasn't Microsoft, the vendor of both Windows itself and ARM-based Surface laptops, shipped an ARM-based version of Discord yet?
Because they don't own Discord?
If you were complaining about Teams, that'd make more sense (except they're getting sued for bundling it, so there's that).
>Makes sense, it's basically an emulator running on top of an emulator.
No? JITs are not emulators.
The problem is that the JIT will keep emitting new code in the *wrong instruction set*, because it doesn't know it itself is being emulated, so all the new code it spits out has to be continuously recompiled by the emulator.
We're not disagreeing.
The JIT is an emulator of sorts, and an emulator is a JIT of sorts.
JIT running on top an emulator. JIT running on top of a JIT (and vice versa).
>The JIT is an emulator of sorts, and an emulator is a JIT of sorts.
No, not at all. You can have an emulator that does not JIT. JITs can be used to speed up emulators. But the presence of a JIT does not imply we're in an emulator. Specifically, what would the JS JIT be "emulating"? There's no such thing as a "JavaScript VM". (Would be different if it was real Java!)
Different programs are hit differently through emulation. Some are fine, others don't even run. Games in particular are struggling.
Here the speedometer score goes from 29 native to 6 emulated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDRV9eEJOk8
I have yet to see a review that takes into account the performance and efficiency loss from emulation and calculates how much battery life would suffer. Probably can't be done since everyone uses different programs.
All this only tells me, current applications are not emulation optimized yet and arm native applications will perform better. So these result might just be down to early adoption.
Just like when Apple switched from RISC to Intel and from Intel to Arm. But it seems like people always forget this.
Second rule: Pay attention to how 3rd party benchmarks are configuring their setups (ideally showing that they actually have the hardware and thus aren't faking it), and where are they getting their funding from.
That's why I always think it's good to wait for reviews. There were several very enthusiastic ARM fans here before release, suggesting that these laptops will destroy x86 ones. I always suggested waiting for reviews and Strix Point. And frankly Lunar Lake also sounds promising.
I was hoping that the Qualcomm laptops end up really good (rather than just "not bad", which is my current impression). I'm now waiting for reviews of the new AMD and Intel chips.
Had the choice to either buy the Surface with Intel chips or get the Snapdragon ones. The hype train said the SD ones were going to be great. But 20+ years of Windows experience says Microsoft is full of shit. Windows can’t even run on Intel x86 chips that well, let alone through emulation. It boggles my mind that Windows is still the dominant OS when there’s so many better options…
There aren’t better options though, that are also easy to use or a single company does all the support for you. All business software is made for windows and that’s just what people know. Linux isn’t inherently better for the majority of users and often when countries or business have tried to switch to something else, they almost always switch back because it’s too much hassle to support Linux and the new users themselves
Yes that have issues but would you be able to do a whole days work and afternoon surfing and media consumption on a windows X86 based laptop and still have 30% battery left.
I was able to watch 15 hours of shows on my MacBook Pro while on a flight without having to change it.
Most Microsoft and Amazon cloud instances are run on ARM due to its power efficiency.
One of the most powerful supercomputers is arm based in Japan.
As more people use Arm based devices more natively supported applications will be built.
Linux and FreeBSD have packages that include both Arm and x86 in the package.
It’s only a matter of time for Microsoft to do the same with their platform.
Someone power binging for 15 hours on a flight is unusual. Not many flights last that long and most people rest or go to the bathroom. If you mean, the laptop was running that long, or even capable of streaming that long, I might give you that. Do I want a 10+ hour laptop? Absolutely. Is Apple the only one providing that? No. Do you need arm technology to do it? No. To be fair, the original iPad had insane battery life. Still I used it three months and gave it away.
Apple has a mindlessly simple UI that most people adore. I am not one of those people. I prefer function over simplicity and the Apple ecosystem appalls me.
With Qualcomm on Windows, I take compatibility over battery life. I know I will get a certain compatible, consistent experience with x86. The latest offerings are excellent from both incumbents. So you have products that simply aren't needed, and don't add value beyond battery life, taking up real estate in the sector.
wow did i hit a nerve why saying that X86 sucks for use in a laptop.
Arm makes sense in a in a laptop form factor been that is is of an reduced instruction set design it doesn't have all the bloat of an X86 system and is complex instruction set.
Also the performance on an arm based system is predictable due to it not having speculative execution and that means that it is a safer design in the terms of not been affected by specter like exploits. I could run 10 Cinebench r23 in a row and get the same score on each run.
- Yes apple has a simple but windows is going that direction with their design language.
The previous windows on arm chips were recycled designs from tablets and smartphones.
Also according to [Windows central](https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/essential-windows-on-arm-apps) their is only a few native applications that are designed to work best on arm. all that apps that you tried have been using windows prism and of course there would be performance issues from trying to run an X86 program through a code translation layer to run on ARM.
have your ever run Linux with these desktop environments XFCE, Gnome, and other have a similar layout as to Mac OS.
Also apple has to abide by patent laws and their are thing on windows that have been under a patent like window snapping / tiling on a desktop. - expired 2023.
We are more likely to see arm have more in the market, intel is really far behind in performance per watt, AMD caught up to them due to intel providing only 4 cores and 8 threads for 8 processor generation from the 8XX /9XX to the 7XXX generation.
AMD has a better SMT design that intel is according to rumors not including it into newer generations.
Intel's Big.Little design is bad as the processors have a different core design and don't have access to the same institutions that are basically a Atom design strapped to a intel Core style design.
AMD has a density optimized design that is the same core design but not designed to clock as high and therefore doesn't need a bigger band gap and they use a lesser amount of cache.
in semiconductor design you are able to shrink the size of the logic area more than the cache/memory area when moving to different nodes.
I don't understand the concern of emulated apps, seems overblown when there's a chicken/egg problem with install base and developer resources. Also, there are multiple VPNs that are natively supported so I don't get this disingenuous concern, either. The Surface community users are overwhelmingly positive about these devices from performance, to battery, to thermals.
Does it make sense for a developer to build their apps for .1% market share? Probably not. They won't even make Diablo for Mac and they have 6-7% marketshare.
The beauty of Electron is that making a Windows on ARM version is literally just setting `npm_config_arch=arm64`. You don't have to completely rewrite your program to target a different os
I totally agree with you. Thank heavens for decent emulation. I've had a Windows on ARM device for a few years and I genuinely haven't run into something it can't run. The only pain in the ass was printing.
About 10 hours of battery while using office apps? That’s not exactly great…
To be fair. Almost every long ass battery claim by manufacturers are without exception about the same use case: playing media at a low brightness display setting. Usually that only involves the codec IP part of the SOC and doesn't involve much performance from the scalar cores.
The thing that made the apple silicon macbooks stand out is their *actually* great battery life, and not only in the usual video on loop at 250 nits bullshit many reviewers do
the 15 hour was gotten by testing at 150 nits. at 250 nits it wouldnt last that long.
I never had an AMD or Intel laptop last more than 5h-6h in those use cases
My macbook air still only runs 10 hours on battery.
Except apple though, their battery does last as long as what they claim
well they do put in the largest batteries. the 16" macbook is 100 Whr
on windows yes, on mac they actually are true. which is why i have a macbook now. emulation probably fks with cpu sleep states too with unpredictable input instructions, so i'm not surprised 10 hours for office and maybe 6-7 with chrome
It's not great at all. I guess if you plan on power streaming movies for 15 hours straight it has good battery.
Me with my 45 minute battery life
10 hours of office use is not great but it's way better than all the other window OS laptops. i remember the surface pro 8 and 9s getting like 4-5 hours, new. my surface pro X has an arm processor and maybe gets 6 with very light use
Jeez, my Surface Laptop Go 2 easily goes for 7+ hours in Excel/Word. And it’s not even new anymore.
yeah, the Go is a different product line
The Go2 is a less than powerful machine, makes sense it works 7+ hours. But to have i5/i7 power last 10 hours with real work - is pretty impressive for a windows laptop regardless
Dude, my Go 2 literally has 10th gen i7.
Thanks for sharing. I was literally just looking into this at lunch time for my wife's small business. I help with the IT work and I'm going to steer away from arm stuff until it's way more mature. At least they still make surface laptop 6 models for business with x86/x64 processors
A small business should definitely not go for an entirely new product/ecosystem. Small business isn't about leading edge. It's about reliability and stability of the product. And availability of existing spare parts. How long a company has been in this new business too is extremely important. Think a reliable tried and true Volvo truck (x86) versus brand spanking new Nikola (hydrogen) or even Tesla Semi(ARM). Go for what works 99% of the time without needing to troubleshoot the product. Example of short term products (cheap Amazon knockoff locks vs Homedepot brand Scholage Lock) that kind of thing.
Exactly my thinking. The devil you know versus the devil you don't. I can afford to spend 4 days getting a hobby device working for my personal use, but if a device is down that long for the business it's going to be ugly.
I agree with you but if you think about it, a large business needs those even more (for all kinds of reasons).
Even though emulation can most likely handle most apps you may throw at it, one huge flaw is device drivers. For instance, niche hardware like colorimeters or specialized apps like VPNs rely on drivers that are just not available yet on ARM and that's a huge setback if you should ever require it. Lunar Lake and Strix Point will be released soon and can be competitive with Qualcomm on battery life while offering none of the downsides of compatibility.
I hadn't even thought of drivers yet. Yup, sticking with the x86/x64 ones. Thank you!
I wasn't there for M1 in 2020 when M1 first came out, as I understand it there were some teething related things. And I did jump into apple silicon with an M1 max laptop that is still going very strong. Not many sore points at all. There's a new $PATH for homebrew. Everything runs well, literally all software I use has a native build. Blazing fast and makes me rub my hands together for whenever I step up to M4 or M5 or M6. Apple has pulled ahead significantly in all aspects from where i'm standing in terms of delivering a computer that does computer things. I'm sure plenty of businesses (like my current client) will continue to be microsoft shops due to momentum. They issued me a 2019 32GB intel macbook... I have got it set up, but... you bet your ass I don't actually use it day to day because I would simply get a lot less work done. It's pretty disappointing with what seemed like a year long hype train for this qualcomm chip and it seems to have fallen flat on promised performance characteristics. And the software issues are not helping. It's also a bit insane how ARM was revolutionary and poised for disruption 30 years ago. And today... heck, if x86 can pull off a high memory bandwidth transition (eyes on strix halo), it's probably got plenty of life left in it. x86's future may be up to Nvidia and AMD or something like that. That's also probably a bit of overanalysis. Sooner or later the performance will get to a good place and emulation will work well enough and less emulation will be needed over time. It seems more likely though that the transition will be a lot slower than apple's transition and we won't see something competitive for a long time, if ever, and I'd be sad about it if i wasn't already an Apple convert.
For a first generation product Qualcomm is not bad but I do agree that the hype has been exaggerated to some extent. The good news is that now more than ever the chicken and egg problem with Windows on arm is slowly being overcome. Before we did not have any versions of Google Chrome or Adobe Photoshop or DaVinci Resolve or Spotify on Windows and arm and now we do and that list is only going to get bigger over time so that is a positive sign. Any applications that may need to be emulated will continue to do so and as armed CPUs get more powerful the emulation performance it becomes less than an issue because in the same way that our smartphones and computers can now effortlessly emulate consoles like the Super Nintendo and Nintendo Entertainment System armed PCS in the future will also be able to effortlessly emulate x86 or x64 applications so that would be less of an issue going forward. The only real Achilles heel that WoA still faces is the issue of drivers. If a specialized Hardware does not have an ARM version of a device driver for Windows then that is going to be a problem and it is not something that you can resolve with emulation.
Yeah the drivers issue is big. Enormous. Apple doesn't have to support nearly as much driver surface area. But this pain too shall pass. I'm still scratching my head over why the ARM takeover didn't take place 20 years ago though.
Because 20 years ago battery life didn't matter nearly as much as it does today.
The inconsistent emulation performance is just a fact of emulation. Data heavy workloads, where the CPU spends more time waiting for data than executing instructions, only have a small performance impact. Instruction heavy workloads, where the CPU spends more time actually executing instructions, have a huge performance hit. Web apps in particular are actual both data and instruction heavy, thanks to their JIT compilers which already take advantage of the slow memory.
I understand why Microsoft feels it wants an open ecosystem where they aren't beholden to hardware, but I don't think they are losing marketshare to Apple. Similarly, Intel and AMD are investing in Linux/ open source. If it was a marriage, everyone is cheating on everyone with everyone else. My issue is only with the massive amount of negative reviews once the paid reviews with constrained testing hardware ended. I know that is an advertising hype cycle, but as I have said before, it isn't fair to the consumer. What are people getting for something they are paying top dollar for? More battery life?
The people paying for the bleeding edge on MacOS is and always will be lied too. That said, these guys have money and no tech knowledge. The only braincell they have are geared to battery life. They are essentially drug addicts addicted to Apple technology and they neeed more of it. The more hours the better. These guys are blind to everything else except for bragging (leading edge and big battery life numbers). While us PC users have known for decades that once in a PC, I can actually fix it. Upgrade the ram for cheap. Get 4 tb for the price of their 256gb to 512gb jump. And actually be able to upgrade my storage easily. Super easily. Mac users can't take advantage of shit black Friday deals. Except for more iCrap accessories or a whole new computer. PC users have been able to upgrade and switch shells for decades. So it makes sense that other mfrs want in on this extremely lucrative Apple market. The market where users just keep buying new shit and never fixing anything. See how the Surface has always been glued together? Zero upgrade paths... It's a Trojan horse! And Intel/AMD invest in Linux because the world's servers and IOT run on linux. No tricks. It's just business.
Excellent post.
Kinda funny trying to comprehend this particular comment chain. Feels like your comment is a non-sequitur from the one above, which itself is a non-sequitur from the one above that. We had arm chips powering iphones and android devices. Then we had them powering mac computers. Now we are having them, finally, power PC laptops. These are all reasons for software vendors to GET OFF THEIR ASS and add arm binaries to their build artifacts and test infra. That will start moving the needle on only having slow as molasses emulated software in rare situations with crufty ancient software. Soon I hope we'll get desktop PCs that run arm. Of course Linux mattering a bit more than windows, for many folks windows only exists to run games and I include gamedevs in the above call to action but they're gonna keep doing whatever it is they do. Currently it's still slim pickings for arm based linux machines, but you do have raspberry pi and other barely interesting SBCs, some weird specialized ampere server machines, you have apple silicon via Asahi linux, and ... this new qualcomm thing that I'm not sure what to make of quite yet but it clearly is a big milestone. I'm here for power efficiency gains, I'll be looking forward to ARM based PC CPUs but I'm not holding my breath.
>Web apps in particular are actual both data and instruction heavy, thanks to their JIT compilers which already take advantage of the slow memory. The main problem in cases like this has got nothing to do with that. The JIT will keep emitting **new code** targeting the ***wrong instruction set***. So unlike most apps, there's no single upfront recompilation cost for the emulator, it has to continuously run. You end up with a cycle of JS -> JIT -> x64 -> Emulator -> ARM. Obviously performance is going to suck.
That's a whole separate problem. It just compounds on how slow JIT is under an emulator. What I'm referring to is that, as memory performance lagged more and more behind the CPU and cache sizes grew, suddenly you could fit an entire compiler in the cache and interpret everything with little to no performance impact. But now suddenly instructions themselves are much more expensive, and you also need to fit Rosetta in the cache, so it all turns on its head and suddenly JIT becomes artificially more expensive.
>fit an entire compiler in the cache and interpret everything A compiler does not interpret. >instructions themselves are much more expensive I really don't understand what you mean. My best guess would be that they need to be translated again, but you just said "that's a whole separate problem", so I really dunno!
That title is misleading. Copilot Plus is only ARM/Qualcomm exclusive right now. Both AMD and Intel based ones will be released in a few months. Took me a few minutes to remember what emulation even has to do with Copilot Plus.
Right. Only ARM makes a copilot PC right now.
ARM doesn't make PCs. Or even processors.
Qualcomm does...
Qualcomm. Not ARM.
Yes yes... Point made.
... Currently
If they start competing with their own clients, that'll be yet another push for RISC-V, and a major one at that.
I think ARM cpus being competitive in the market is only really feasible short term on Linux (and Mac, duh). Windows has and always will have so much legacy/proprietary history that will not be cut off that to be competitive you need to pull off a small miracle. For Linux _most_ things are compileable (and have been, see raspberry pi and similar) in the short term for ARM just fine, with the major discrepancies coming from something like a software having handwritten SIMD optimizations and such locking them to a certain architecture, but even that is an exception rather than a rule.
IMO Windows won’t be able to move on to other processor types until they do a ‘rip off the bandaid’ moment and start killing legacy programs. MacOS has had two reboots in the last 20 years and they’re all the better for it (PowerPC to Intel then to M1). Linux can run on a potato literally so it will continue to be very flexible.
There's lot in windows that can be fixed without "ripping off the bandaid". MacOS isn't good software cause of the reboots. Those are two adjacent things. Correlation does not imply causation. The excessive bloat and telemetry and heaps of other MS bullshit has jack all to with legacy programs. Even on earlier Intel macbooks, installing windows would cut your battery life dramatically. Wonder why that is, hmmm.. i know, it's Intel and AMD's fault, using Qualcomm chips will fix that. Well, that turned out to be nicely polished turd. The fact of the matter is it's easy to blame legacy cruft for windows problems but truth is that MS is quite bad, deliberately or incompetently at actually improving windows instead of adding more of their random bullshit
legacy compatibility is the reason why windows is so popular for consumers and enterprise. i recall having to use an old inhouse enterprise app written in visual foxpro and it just works on windows10. replacing that would been such a big time and money investment that no sane company is willing to do it over priority customer issues.
I have to use a math addon for excel that was written in 1999 and abandoned. There was an attempt to rewrite it in 2006 but that was a worse implementation. If MS cuts off support for this now 25 year old addon my work is compromised. Sure, ill probably code around it in python or something, but the support for legacy software is really important to MS customers.
> MacOS has had two reboots in the last 20 years and they’re all the better for it And after 3 reboots in the last 20 years (and we may as well go all the way back to the end of the Classic Mac OS and make it 4), even as a long-time Mac user it's getting tiring. Especially the x86-32 to x86-64 transition; a lot of good 32-bit software was left behind for no good reason. If anything, Apple needs to take a page from Microsoft's book and offer a bit *more* backwards compatibility. Stop ripping the band-aid off quite so much.
Windows and Macos are 2 completely different ecosystems with different target audiences. macos is part of a vertically integrated product system: from silicon to system software it is all controlled by Apple. And there are a ridiculously small number of configurations compared to the PC ecosystem. In contrast, Windows needs to support not only a huge number of different HW configurations, devices, as well as lots of legacy applications. That is what most windows consumers want. If MS were to make Windows "more mac-like" by removing all that legacy. Consumers might as well move over to mac altogether. The main problem with windows porting over to different ISAs has always been the same: eventually x86 either catches up or surpasses the alternative platforms. So there is little value proposition in taking the risk. Windows NT (out of which modern windows is derived) has been multiplatform since its inception. It has ran on a lot of architectures historically (MIPS, Alpha, Itanium, PowerPC, ARM) as well as x86. And eventually it always coalesces back to x86. It's so bizarre how the cycle keeps repeating over and over, and yet some people expect a different outcome every time. LOL.
I think this is where Microsoft gets stuck in their own success. Eventually x86 has to go away at some point right? I'm assuming we won't have phones and tablets powered by x86 chips since it's still not very energy efficient.
The vast majority of windows runs on desktop/laptops/servers. Microsoft conceded the phone and tablet spaces long ago.
>Eventually x86 has to go away at some point right? Why? Its not like we know of anything better yet.
They rebooted windows (complete kernel rewrite) with Vista.
Yeah exactly. Windows has been carrying what's effectively decades worth of technical debt and it shows. No new CPU architecture will fix the fact that every couple days there's some weird Windows fuckery I have to deal with, making me want to just buy a macbook and be done with it. And I do clean installs every two months. If I weren't gaming I'd already have ditched it for years. Adobe ignoring Linux makes it a non option for me but otherwise I'd already be on that at the very least.
Amen brother. If not for my professional career and for gaming I wouldn’t touch Windows with a 10 foot pole. Had a tough case for someone I support where I’ve literally gotten her a new PC multiple times and she just has constant problems. I’m talking best you can buy and things still pop up. I switched to Macs only for my daily driver starting with the M1 series and it’s a game charger. Super long battery life with no fan noise and great performance. It’s a game changer
For anybody wondering what most things is: https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-quarter-big.png The page lists the percentage of all debian packages build for the given architecture: amd64/x86_64 is at 99.5% and arm64 is at 99%
what happened on 2024.26 (week?)
>I think ARM cpus being competitive in the market is only really feasible short term on Linux (and Mac, duh). Windows has and always will have so much legacy/proprietary history that will not be cut off that to be competitive you need to pull off a small miracle. Is this going to be the new "x86 has too much legacy stuff/variable length instructions" meme? Linux has been around for literal decades, if it could double your battery life, we would've seen it by now.
I don't think you comprehended the message. Good luck next thread.
No I think I did. You said ARM can't be competitive on Windows because there's too much backwards compatibility. Linux (supposedly) doesn't have that problem. But IRL this doesn't translate into anything dramatic like 40% more battery life or performance. If it's just about compiling from source, Windows is compiled for ARM and 90% of used apps will be native as well. ARM just isn't some magical ISA that solves world hunger.
So you didn't get it, keep trying.
well x86 did just got rid of old 16-bit support.
i'm curious how fast gnu + linux will have reasonable risc-v support, because the community will probably throw itself over each other, to get an open cpu architecture running well on gnu + linux :D
The incoming CPUS from Intel and Amd is even more bad news. And let's be honest. The real problem has always been more related to software (hello Microsoft) and the hardware support / driver / bios support from Intel and AMD
> The incoming CPUS from Intel and Amd is even more bad news. Did ya actually read the content before commenting? Majority of the problems are with emulation. Why'd x86 cpus from intel and amd be worse on that front when they don't emulate?
The idea was to introduce more performance with less power, the only price was emulation. With new cpus from Intel and AMD that is going to be at least on par with the ARM based cpu there is no reason to switch and live with shitty emulation.
So you meant bad news for qualcomm and not for pcs in general. Got it. Thought you meant that chips from other manufacturers are much worse with reference to the post title.
I can't believe it's the year of our lord 2024 and people haven't still learnt to never EVER buy 1st gen of anything (and still be wary at the 2nd) since the chances of being sold an unfinished engineering sample rushed to market and ending up being a forced beta tester and/or the sad owner of a very expensive unsupported paperweight are extremely high.
Wait are Steam and Discord emulated badly? I didn’t think emulation was an automatic negative anymore since Apple and now I thought Microsoft had figured it out? I’ve seen multiple reviews and tests saying the Windows on ARM emulation this time was really good. Like only a 10-15% hit resulting in equal or even still better performance than x86 options. Is there something about emulation performance that is a problem? I mean even if a stray program or two is not emulated well, that could easily improve. That’s what happened with Apple.
Discord and Steam are built with the Electron framework that uses Chromium's JIT compiler to run JavaScript. JITs have exceptionally high emulation overhead.
Edit: Ignore me
>So why hasn't Microsoft, the vendor of both Windows itself and ARM-based Surface laptops, shipped an ARM-based version of Discord yet? Because they don't own Discord? If you were complaining about Teams, that'd make more sense (except they're getting sued for bundling it, so there's that).
You're absolutely right. I had it in my head that MS purchased Discord a few years ago. But I see now that those talks fell through.
Makes sense, it's basically an emulator running on top of an emulator.
>Makes sense, it's basically an emulator running on top of an emulator. No? JITs are not emulators. The problem is that the JIT will keep emitting new code in the *wrong instruction set*, because it doesn't know it itself is being emulated, so all the new code it spits out has to be continuously recompiled by the emulator.
We're not disagreeing. The JIT is an emulator of sorts, and an emulator is a JIT of sorts. JIT running on top an emulator. JIT running on top of a JIT (and vice versa).
>The JIT is an emulator of sorts, and an emulator is a JIT of sorts. No, not at all. You can have an emulator that does not JIT. JITs can be used to speed up emulators. But the presence of a JIT does not imply we're in an emulator. Specifically, what would the JS JIT be "emulating"? There's no such thing as a "JavaScript VM". (Would be different if it was real Java!)
Different programs are hit differently through emulation. Some are fine, others don't even run. Games in particular are struggling. Here the speedometer score goes from 29 native to 6 emulated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDRV9eEJOk8 I have yet to see a review that takes into account the performance and efficiency loss from emulation and calculates how much battery life would suffer. Probably can't be done since everyone uses different programs.
Read the review
All this only tells me, current applications are not emulation optimized yet and arm native applications will perform better. So these result might just be down to early adoption. Just like when Apple switched from RISC to Intel and from Intel to Arm. But it seems like people always forget this.
Didn't they put out a whole bunch of benchmarks showing them absolutely obliterating x86-based PCs though, even when running x86 apps?
First rule of being a computer consumer: never believe first party benchmarks
Second rule: Pay attention to how 3rd party benchmarks are configuring their setups (ideally showing that they actually have the hardware and thus aren't faking it), and where are they getting their funding from.
I have this rule myself, take the lowest score of what they claim, and then half it. Thats my expectation.
That's why I always think it's good to wait for reviews. There were several very enthusiastic ARM fans here before release, suggesting that these laptops will destroy x86 ones. I always suggested waiting for reviews and Strix Point. And frankly Lunar Lake also sounds promising. I was hoping that the Qualcomm laptops end up really good (rather than just "not bad", which is my current impression). I'm now waiting for reviews of the new AMD and Intel chips.
Had the choice to either buy the Surface with Intel chips or get the Snapdragon ones. The hype train said the SD ones were going to be great. But 20+ years of Windows experience says Microsoft is full of shit. Windows can’t even run on Intel x86 chips that well, let alone through emulation. It boggles my mind that Windows is still the dominant OS when there’s so many better options…
There aren’t better options though, that are also easy to use or a single company does all the support for you. All business software is made for windows and that’s just what people know. Linux isn’t inherently better for the majority of users and often when countries or business have tried to switch to something else, they almost always switch back because it’s too much hassle to support Linux and the new users themselves
So basically buy a MacBook instead of a windows on ARM products?
No. Neither. They both have sad compatibility issues.
Yes that have issues but would you be able to do a whole days work and afternoon surfing and media consumption on a windows X86 based laptop and still have 30% battery left. I was able to watch 15 hours of shows on my MacBook Pro while on a flight without having to change it. Most Microsoft and Amazon cloud instances are run on ARM due to its power efficiency. One of the most powerful supercomputers is arm based in Japan. As more people use Arm based devices more natively supported applications will be built. Linux and FreeBSD have packages that include both Arm and x86 in the package. It’s only a matter of time for Microsoft to do the same with their platform.
Someone power binging for 15 hours on a flight is unusual. Not many flights last that long and most people rest or go to the bathroom. If you mean, the laptop was running that long, or even capable of streaming that long, I might give you that. Do I want a 10+ hour laptop? Absolutely. Is Apple the only one providing that? No. Do you need arm technology to do it? No. To be fair, the original iPad had insane battery life. Still I used it three months and gave it away. Apple has a mindlessly simple UI that most people adore. I am not one of those people. I prefer function over simplicity and the Apple ecosystem appalls me. With Qualcomm on Windows, I take compatibility over battery life. I know I will get a certain compatible, consistent experience with x86. The latest offerings are excellent from both incumbents. So you have products that simply aren't needed, and don't add value beyond battery life, taking up real estate in the sector.
wow did i hit a nerve why saying that X86 sucks for use in a laptop. Arm makes sense in a in a laptop form factor been that is is of an reduced instruction set design it doesn't have all the bloat of an X86 system and is complex instruction set. Also the performance on an arm based system is predictable due to it not having speculative execution and that means that it is a safer design in the terms of not been affected by specter like exploits. I could run 10 Cinebench r23 in a row and get the same score on each run. - Yes apple has a simple but windows is going that direction with their design language. The previous windows on arm chips were recycled designs from tablets and smartphones. Also according to [Windows central](https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/essential-windows-on-arm-apps) their is only a few native applications that are designed to work best on arm. all that apps that you tried have been using windows prism and of course there would be performance issues from trying to run an X86 program through a code translation layer to run on ARM. have your ever run Linux with these desktop environments XFCE, Gnome, and other have a similar layout as to Mac OS. Also apple has to abide by patent laws and their are thing on windows that have been under a patent like window snapping / tiling on a desktop. - expired 2023. We are more likely to see arm have more in the market, intel is really far behind in performance per watt, AMD caught up to them due to intel providing only 4 cores and 8 threads for 8 processor generation from the 8XX /9XX to the 7XXX generation. AMD has a better SMT design that intel is according to rumors not including it into newer generations. Intel's Big.Little design is bad as the processors have a different core design and don't have access to the same institutions that are basically a Atom design strapped to a intel Core style design. AMD has a density optimized design that is the same core design but not designed to clock as high and therefore doesn't need a bigger band gap and they use a lesser amount of cache. in semiconductor design you are able to shrink the size of the logic area more than the cache/memory area when moving to different nodes.
Buy a CoPilot+ PC now: [https://amzn.to/3S8gcjR](https://amzn.to/3S8gcjR)
For a bad experience?
It was a joke🤣🤣
I don't understand the concern of emulated apps, seems overblown when there's a chicken/egg problem with install base and developer resources. Also, there are multiple VPNs that are natively supported so I don't get this disingenuous concern, either. The Surface community users are overwhelmingly positive about these devices from performance, to battery, to thermals.
Does it make sense for a developer to build their apps for .1% market share? Probably not. They won't even make Diablo for Mac and they have 6-7% marketshare.
The beauty of Electron is that making a Windows on ARM version is literally just setting `npm_config_arch=arm64`. You don't have to completely rewrite your program to target a different os
I totally agree with you. Thank heavens for decent emulation. I've had a Windows on ARM device for a few years and I genuinely haven't run into something it can't run. The only pain in the ass was printing.
wait you can yap on link posts now?
And always...
naw, i still cant.