Windows Arm Laptops

[joshfrog]

Hi All

 

So i made a post a few days ago talking about how the "AI" copilot stuff will be made into windows and if it will be useful or not.

But I'm now curious what people think about arm chips for windows.

I understand that without much context it will be all guess work given windows on arm failed the last time they tried this.

I'm just curious what people think about the chips being used and supported in windows.

 

Thanks

[whispous]

ARM computerss are not only on their way, they're already here with M-series from Apple.

 

It's make or break for Microsoft, because if the transition for users and administrators is painful, they may as well jump ship to Apple where it works better.

 

Microsoft's translation layer needs to be truly invisible or there's no point in sticking with Windows.

Microsoft's sole card they've ever been able to play is compatibility and familiarity. If that goes, they're toast.

[joshfrog]

15 minutes ago, whispous said:

ARM computerss are not only on their way, they're already here with M-series from Apple.

 

It's make or break for Microsoft, because if the transition for users and administrators is painful, they may as well jump ship to Apple where it works better.

 

Microsoft's translation layer needs to be truly invisible or there's no point in sticking with Windows.

Microsoft's sole card they've ever been able to play is compatibility and familiarity. If that goes, they're toast.

I would agree, the biggest thing however is so many admins and company's use old software, drivers or tools that work on x86 and have for a long long time so if the arm devices cant use these software's it will kill it for many admins and company's.

 

I think if Qualcomm is the only company aloud to make chips for use in arm windows devices this could also kill it.

 

[adm0n]

56 minutes ago, joshfrog said:

I understand that without much context it will be all guess work given windows on arm failed the last time they tried this.

I'm just curious what people think about the chips being used and supported in windows.

From what I can tell, it never failed out right. The only thing, that (understandably) failed, was the emulation of x86 applications. It wasn't ready and the ARM chips they used were basically phone SoCs, so they were kinda slow to begin with.

 

Apple did everything right, by actually creating powerful chips and having the Rosetta translation layer for their old programs.

 

But if you'd want to use windows on ARM, a lot of programs are already natively supported and run well enough (according to some testimonies). Depending on your use case, you might never need to run any non native apps.

 

What they are now promising is x86 translation on par with that of apples and actually powerful chips. And if it works as well as they are claiming, then I don't see any reason for users to even know what is happening, except maybe them wondering why the battery is depleting faster if they run some programs compared to others.

 

If they mess it up and a lot of programs end up not working or only kinda working, the general population will not care about windows on ARM and it will end up being shelved like it was last time.

[Kilrah]

Will depend a lot on the price/performance ratio, previous times were "you paid more for garbage tier performance", obviously nobody wants that.

If it can do similar perf as low/mid range intel AND is cheaper, might start being enticing but if not then just why even bother.

 

Also while the software side is pretty much sorted and most people don't need much external hardware anymore drivers will probably be a problem for those who and do I'm pretty sure if I got one then half of the USB devices I plugged in wouldn't work because there won't be any ARM drivers for them.

 

[Issac Zachary]

I'm excited and scared at the same time.

 

My blah, blah, blah:

This is coming from me as an amateur radio operator. I long for an ultra efficient laptop or tablet. Digital signals are right now the best yet worst way to send radio signals. On the one hand, digital can be so power efficient. With some digital modes a 0.5W to 5W radio is all that is needed to get the signal through, whereas over that same distance and in the same conditions you'd need something with many times that power to get an analog signal thorugh. But the analog signal doesn't need a power sapping PC laptop hooked up to the tranceiver. So which is more power hungry? The 0.5W or 5W signal when transmitting with a power hungery PC that's on even when not transmitting, or the 50W or 500W signal that's only on at that power when transmitting?

 

I'm excited that these laptops are said to be much more power efficient than a traditional PC. But at the same time, the great majority of our amateur radio programs are written for x86. This is why owning an M series Mac is out of the question, as the way we used to get our programs to work on Mac was only possible when they were x86 based and we used Wine. The Mac translation layer works great for Apple approved apps, but does nothing for our custom programs, and so far zero of these programs have been written for Apple Silicon. I have no idea of what the translation layer experience will be on Windows with these new Snapdragon chips for those of us running these custom programs, some of which are pretty old and I don't see being updated to ARM any time soon.

 

Hardware compatibility is also important to me. I noticed some of these laptops don't even have an audio jack. While I've been using a USB audio card, there are those who connect their amateur radio rigs directly to the 3.5mm audio jack on their laptops by attenuating the mic inputs on both the rig-to-PC and PC-to-rig. You have to get audio into the radio for it to work. And it's nice having CAT controls to control the PTT, frequency and other functions on the tranceiver, which right now can be done through the USB and a driver on the PC.

 

The point:

As expected, if they really are power efficient and do the translation layer well at the same time, I'll be wanting one very badly. If they use more power than my Surface Go 2 or can't run my x86 programs correctly and efficienty, then no thank you.