Microsoft Officially announces that Windows 10X is dead

LAwLz · May 20, 2021

15 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Its pretty clear to me. Microsoft has tried Windows on ARM multiple times. They REALLY want it to work. Great. Id love to have a Windows Computer that has mega battery life. The issue is like you said Qualcomm doesnt care. The only hope for Windows on ARM devices is probably in the hands of AMD or Nvidia. AMD is currently working on an ARM chip and they do have experience designing CPUs, so maybe they will be a bit more successful than if Microsoft does it. But to me Nvidia really could have an opportunity here. Seeing how the Tegra powers the Nintendo Switch. Plus Nvidia has boatloads of cash they could sink in to R&D. Plus they are a pretty innovative company. I just dont think Microsoft could pull this off. I mean Apple has a desktop class ARM chip now, which they spent 10 years perfecting with all their mobile devices. Microsoft doesnt have a decade to figure things out, they would need an SOC now in order to compete.

I agree.

But I also think Microsoft has more issues on their hands than just slow hardware. Windows on ARM was developed for the Snapdragon 820, and I do believe it even supports ARMv7. That means they wrote the software back before ARM even had things like good support for switching to the x86 memory architecture with next to no performance loss. You know that super-fast x86 to ARM translation Apple does in the M1 Macs? That's using standard ARM instructions from ARMv8.3-A. But no chip that supports Windows on ARM also supports ARMv8.3-A, so my guess is that none of the translation layers Microsoft has developed uses it. I doubt Microsoft has gone back and rewritten fundamental parts of their translation layer either. I think we would have heard about it if they had.

So their software is most likely pretty bad too compared to what would be possible if they rewrote the whole thing today, aimed at modern hardware. It's really sad that that's the case considering Windows on ARM is a pretty new product that barely anyone uses.

Microsoft were too quick with Windows on ARM and now they probably don't feel like reworking it for modern hardware since that would not only require breaking compatibility for older devices, but also a significant allocation of developer resources just to make a failure of a product (Windows on ARM) slightly better in some scenarios. Not to mention that the "modern hardware" I refer to doesn't really exist either, because of Qualcomm's laziness.

Apple is just way ahead in terms of hardware, which also means they can tailor their software for that hardware.

Microsoft meanwhile are stuck with crappy hardware, and as a result they have to write their software in very inefficient ways to even get it working, and I bet they will end up in a situation where they have to, or want to, support older hardware and therefore can't adopt these new hardware features either, thus ensuring that their software stays shitty.