Windows 10 on ARM

[Koustav Guha]

Hello Guys,

                    From some days it's been trading that Microsoft is bringing "real" Windows 10 on ARM platform. I've seen their video. I came to know from various sources that the ARM PC can run all x86 apps through an x86 emulator. May be the PC will be light weight, fanless, more energy efficient. But there is one question, that is spinning in my head. That is, can it run medium to heavy loaded games? Will it deliver average FPS? I've i3 5005U laptop with 8 GB RAM. The straight forward question is the WIndows 10 ARM will over perform or below my laptop's performance? This question is whirling since Microsoft made the announcement. Can anyone help me? Thanks in advance.

[Billy_Mays]

It will work fine even on 64bit and I know for a fact I used a i3-5020u for over a year 

[YedZed]

Probably not until we get more powerful ARM processors, which may never happen because it would defeat the purpose.

As a rule, the ARM processor emulating x86/64 is not going to perform better than ARM running ARM. 

[GoodBytes]

Nope. Unless it is powered by Tegra chip (see Nintendo Switch and Nvidia Shield series devices).

Nvidia is the only ARM based SoC maker that implements a full powerful GPU, that fully support the latest versions of OpenGL, Vulkan, and DirectX (Windows is required for DirectX, of course). All other ARM based CPUs only support OpenES, a subset of OpenGL, which is fine for mobile gaming, but it won't run without major modifications and challenges for the devs PC games. Now Windows COULD do a translation, but we have to wait and see.

 

Also, remember that a translation from x86-64 to ARM is needed and that impacts performance also, and ARM chips aren't powerful already.

 

Microsoft targets Windows 10 for ARM deices as the low cost market. It aims to have a serious competitor to Chromebooks. Low price, long battery life, great performance,and have Win32 x86-64 apps support (gaming... we will see.. but Chromebooks doesn't non-mobile big games either)