Windows 10 now runs on ARM, MS demos Photoshop running on Snapdragon 820

[captain_to_fire]

3 hours ago, Kloaked said:

3 hours ago, RGProductions said:

maybe the Surface RT will actually be useful now.

Don't count on it. It's using an older chipset and Qualcomm doesn't like supporting anything over three years old.

The Surface RT used NVIDIA Tegra 3, I don't think Qualcomm would want to do anything with a competitor. Again, jailbreaking a Surface RT to run x86 apps was done already. Microsoft is just making it official. Here are instructions from XDA.

 

[Arri]

Very cool stuff. From what I understand, ARM is making leaps and bounds in terms of performance while x86 has been stagnant. I am ready for our low power ARM overlords to take over.

[DELTAprime]

But can it run Crysis?

[vorticalbox]

waits for this to come to Lumia

[LAwLz]

This is super cool but I think it's too late to use this to save Windows on smartphones. Like some other people have already pointed out, this will probably be used to push ARM laptops.

 

With a bit of luck, this will cause Intel to drop the pricing of their Atom chips.

[AlTech]

So this is what Microsoft wants as the answer to the Chromebook Problem?

 

Interesting . I thought they'd put Windows 10 Mobile with x86 or ARM chips on laptops and call it a day. But I guess not.

[matrix07012]

Now I kinda want to buy a Windows Phone.

What about emulation seption? Emulating x86 console emulator on a ARM CPU.

[Doobeedoo]

Well nice having integrated support in Windows for it. Not sure how it will live up to outside smartphone space vs x86 though. ARM advances more for it's space than x86 for it's though x86 still vastly better even though it moves so slowly. Maybe in time we may see x86 in smartphone though. Would be great.

[AlTech]

27 minutes ago, matrix07012 said:

Now I kinda want to buy a Windows Phone.

You'll most likely need a 64 Bit capable Windows Phone and the only 64 Bit Windows Phones on the market are the Lumia 950, Lumia 950XL, HP Elite X3 (but this one costs a damn fortune), Acer Jade Prime (Probably discontinued) or the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 4S for Windows.

 

[matrix07012]

45 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

You'll most likely need a 64 Bit capable Windows Phone and the only 64 Bit Windows Phones on the market are the Lumia 950, Lumia 950XL, HP Elite X3 (but this one costs a damn fortune), Acer Jade Prime (Probably discontinued) or the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 4S for Windows.

 

Well, this thing isn't even released yet so new phones might come out or the prices might drop by the time it's out.

[captain_to_fire]

6 hours ago, Arri said:

Very cool stuff. From what I understand, ARM is making leaps and bounds in terms of performance while x86 has been stagnant. I am ready for our low power ARM overlords to take over.

I really wish this gets discussed on the next WAN show by Linus and Luke. It really begs the question, how soon will Intel reach the limitations of Moore's Law? 

 

 

Edited December 8, 2016 by hey_yo_
Added the video of the full keynote

[Zodiark1593]

Emulation typically requires performance in the multiples of the architecture to be emulated. Suitable for low cost, but AAA gaming on ARM will be a long time. 

[Ryujin2003]

Microsoft already had W10 for Raspberry Pi, is this supposed to be different?

[AlexGoesHigh]

23 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

Microsoft already had W10 for Raspberry Pi, is this supposed to be different?

the pi version is ridiculously cut down and only runs uwp apps, its meant to be used for iot development, this is full desktop os and has emulation to support normal desktop apps like photoshop in the op video

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

The possibility to have the Windows Phone experience on the go and the Windows 10 desktop experience when docked? I'm totally in. If they do make it possible to sideload Android apps like in Blackberry OS, then that's going to be my next phone, no questions asked.

[goodtofufriday]

9 hours ago, hey_yo_ said:

The Surface RT used NVIDIA Tegra 3, I don't think Qualcomm would want to do anything with a competitor. Again, jailbreaking a Surface RT to run x86 apps was done already. Microsoft is just making it official. Here are instructions from XDA.

 

Hey. THANKS. i just got donated one of these.

[Hunter115]

Am i wrong or does the trailer playing lag

[Stefan1024]

11 hours ago, SamStrecker said:

I swear ARM is the future

ARM is a RISC processor and therefor the IPC is much lower than on a CISC one (e.g. x86). So if they can't push the clock significantly higher than a x86 CPUs (what is not realistic) they will always have a bad single core performance.

So they are terrible for a lot of applications.

 

I would prefer a VVIWP (very very long instruction word processor) but only if it have a genius compiler.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Emulation typically requires performance in the multiples of the architecture to be emulated. Suitable for low cost, but AAA gaming on ARM will be a long time. 

If you're using high level emulation, it doesn't. 1964 and Bleem! are examples of this that prove you don't need a machine many times more powerful than the original machine. Similarly the Xbox 360 emulation on the Xbox One.

 

The only thing holding back ARM is raw power, but if believe for a moment the GeekBench scores running on Apple's latest SoC and Intel's Core m series, then it's getting there.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, M.Yurizaki said:

1964 and Bleem! are examples of this that prove you don't need a machine many times more powerful than the original machine.

I don't think you understand how weak the N64 and PS1 were.

The Dreamcast, which Bleem ran on, was over 6 times as fast as the PS1 (which it was emulating).

 

1964 became popular early 2000, and at that point we had CPUs running at several GHz. The N64 which they were emulating ran at less than 100MHz. Even if we don't take the lower IPC of the N64 into consideration, the computers that ran 1964 were at least 20 times as fast.

 

 

1 hour ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The only thing holding back ARM is raw power, but if believe for a moment the GeekBench scores running on Apple's latest SoC and Intel's Core m series, then it's getting there.

Geekbench is shite for those kinds of comparisons. The encryption results (such as AES and SHA) are very heavily weighted, and because a lot of ARM devices has hardware-assisted (or fully hardware accelerated) crypto calculations they appear to stack up against x86 chips really well. For real world stuff though, a good x86 processor will run circles around an ARM chip.

[FPSwithaWacomTablet]

As much as this is nice, ARM is still a RISC-type CPU... ARM is designed to be power-constrained and efficient, while Windows is not (hence it being designed for x86).

 

Running QEMU on the damn thing is gonna eat up most of the resources like mad, ESPECIALLY for lower-end ARM chips. Though the use-case scenario of most apps is simple (hence why ARM dominates the mobile market), Windows is very hard to run; that's why only UWP gets the ARM version, not legacy Windows.

 

I have yet to see an ARM chip run ALL of Windows on bare metal. Essentially Windows RT all over again, but with better app support at least.

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

17 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't think you understand how weak the N64 and PS1 were.

The Dreamcast, which Bleem ran on, was over 6 times as fast as the PS1 (which it was emulating).

 

1964 became popular early 2000, and at that point we had CPUs running at several GHz. The N64 which they were emulating ran at less than 100MHz. Even if we don't take the lower IPC of the N64 into consideration, the computers that ran 1964 were at least 20 times as fast.

Maybe this needs to be more specific. The processor side of those consoles were indeed weak, but not the graphics side. The N64 at the time 1964 came out was more or less competitive with GPUs of the time. Or at least in the low end of the spectrum (but the N64 still had features that most GPUs at the time did not have). The PlayStation would've been a bit easier to emulate since the GPU wasn't as advanced as the N64's, but pure software emulation would've been impossible for machines at the time.

 

Also the fastest processor around 2000 was in the low 1.0GHz range. Not "several" GHz. The first 1.0GHz x86 processors were released in March 2000.

 

Either way, most emulators of systems made past 1995 don't emulate the hardware directly if they can get away with it. They mostly attempt something similar to a JIT system.

 

But to throw another stick in the mud in your argument, the Xbox One emulates the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360's processor was capable of 25.6 GFLOPS per core (going by what Wikipedia says about the PPE, which is what the Xbox 360's CPU is made out of). Since it's a three-core processor, that's about 76.8 GFLOPS. According to this reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/19d9yc/how_powerful_is_the_amd_jaguar_cpu_for_the_ps4/), the PS4's CPU is 102.4 GFLOPS. That's not a whole lot of extra power and yet it's emulating the 360.

 

The only reason why emulation needs a more "powerful" machine is because the people who make the most visible emulators have to do it from white-room reverse engineering and are going on what they can find about the system. They don't have intimate access to said system like Microsoft does when it comes to emulating the 360 on the XB1.

[Drak3]

14 hours ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

HP is/was making a phone to do this exact thing...

 

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/snapdragon/2016/10/07/hp-elite-x3-microsoft-continuum-and-snapdragon-820-worlds-first-3-1

 

http://store.hp.com/us/en/ContentView?storeId=10151&catalogId=10051&langId=-1&eSpotName=Elite-x3

That's a bit different (not to mention that Microsoft already did it with the Lumia 950 and 950XL before that), as it runs what is basically the Win 10 version of Windows RT. I've got a 950XL, and Continuum is all kinds of not good. It's nowhere close to a Celeron based laptop from 5 years ago.

[Curufinwe_wins]

4 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

That's a bit different (not to mention that Microsoft already did it with the Lumia 950 and 950XL before that), as it runs what is basically the Win 10 version of Windows RT. I've got a 950XL, and Continuum is all kinds of not good. It's nowhere close to a Celeron based laptop from 5 years ago.

That's what this is.... Windows 10 (as explicitly confirmed by the qualcomm release notes on this) is running EXPLICITLY in ARM, and separately EMULATING x86 programs through software in a manner transparent to the user.

 

It hasn't been released to the public for Lumia ofc. But there is only that device with the snap 820, and there is a reason the x3 got delayed for almost 8 months since its original announcement.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Maybe this needs to be more specific. The processor side of those consoles were indeed weak, but not the graphics side. The N64 at the time 1964 came out was more or less competitive with GPUs of the time. Or at least in the low end of the spectrum (but the N64 still had features that most GPUs at the time did not have). The PlayStation would've been a bit easier to emulate since the GPU wasn't as advanced as the N64's, but pure software emulation would've been impossible for machines at the time.

The N64 was released in 1996. At that time we were seeing a doubling in computational performance year over year. Even if the N64 was competitive with computers at the time of release, computers would have been much more powerful by the time 1964 was released (1999 according to Wikipedia, but didn't get very popular until a few years into 2000, peaking at 2004). In 2004 we had the Pentium 4 which ran at 3.46GHz and had hyper threading.

Emulating a <100MHz CPU, and a GPU not capable of outputting more than 320x240 (unless you bought additional hardware) is not exactly hard when you got 3.46GHz of high IPC CPU resources to play with. Hell, Unreal Tournament, which was released in 1999 and was far more resource intense than any N64 game, was designed to run on the CPU if you didn't have a graphics card. There were also CPUs like the Athlon 64 3200+ out.

 

I think you are overestimating how powerful the consoles that were being emulated were, and underestimating how powerful the hosts of the emulators were. The Dreamcast and PCs used to emulate were in fact several times more powerful than the consoles they were emulating.

 

 

2 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

But to throw another stick in the mud in your argument, the Xbox One emulates the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360's processor was capable of 25.6 GFLOPS per core (going by what Wikipedia says about the PPE, which is what the Xbox 360's CPU is made out of). Since it's a three-core processor, that's about 76.8 GFLOPS. According to this reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/19d9yc/how_powerful_is_the_amd_jaguar_cpu_for_the_ps4/), the PS4's CPU is 102.4 GFLOPS. That's not a whole lot of extra power and yet it's emulating the 360.

Most of the work on consoles today is done by the GPU. Wanna know the peak shader throughput of the Xbox 360? 0.24 TFLOPS. Wanna know what the Xbone is capable of? 1.23 TFLOPS. If we're just looking at FLOPS, then the Xbone is slightly over 5 times as powerful as the Xbox 360 (Microsof themselves have said that the Xbone is up to 8 times as powerful GPU wise).

If you're just looking at the CPU then yes, the Xbone is not that impressive (seriously, the CPU is complete garbage), but that's not what is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to gaming consoles.

 

2 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The only reason why emulation needs a more "powerful" machine is because the people who make the most visible emulators have to do it from white-room reverse engineering and are going on what they can find about the system. They don't have intimate access to said system like Microsoft does when it comes to emulating the 360 on the XB1.

I am not denying that. I totally agree that the biggest obstacle to high performance emulators is a lack of knowledge about how the hardware you are trying to emulate works. I just wanted to point out that your examples are not exactly proving your point...

I also doubt the performance of this will be all that great. One thing you have to remember is that emulating from a complex instruction set down to a more simple one is far easier than the reverse.

 

My guess is that this will be fast enough for casual users who just want a 200 dollar laptop that runs Windows, but not much else.