I sincerely hope RISV-V usurps this proprietary bullshit sometime soon. Simply paying the royalties to use the ARM spec costs tens of millions in licensing alone.
It took decades for ARM to start gaining desktop acceptance. It’s probably gonna be a while before RISC-V is more than a blip.
RISCV would definitely be nicer but it’s just a little early for it. Qualcomm have been using arm for ages so no doubt they’re going to be more comfortable using that architecture compared to something that still doesn’t have any support. It’s going to take a while.
The miracle wasnt apple silicon it was the software transition. A hardware comoany cant pull it off. Windows arm is shit and for some reason nobody even considers the existence of linux.
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Windows does actually have a Windows 11 version of ARM. The Thinkpad X13s for example does use it. It doesn’t seem to be widely available though, maybe because it’s experimental.
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They do. No one really wants it. More than the Surface is getting it.
Edit: like, check out this article: https://www.techradar.com/news/new-lenovo-thinkpad-x13s-may-be-the-first-windows-on-arm-laptop-we-want-to-buy
Even if they do, they’d still need a Rosetta-like translator. I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Microsoft holds a lot of things back. X86 also holds a lot of things back especially when the future is ARM.
No its not. They will exist side by side but calling it the future is purely wrong.
Guess we’ll see.
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Can you buy licenses?
I can’t, but OEMs can.
Why haven’t all manufacturers making and selling ARM tablets / laptops with Windows ARM then?
Because no one was buying them.
Microsoft was pushing to make this happen extra hard with Windows 8 or so. They’ve kept it alive since then. It’s revived a bit once they started seeing ChromeOS devices start taking over the low end of the market.
But the available ARM processors kinda sucked; the price difference at the low end wasn’t enough for consumers in most cases: low margins are a demotivator for manufacturers; Intel and AMD got better low-power, low-price options; app availability was/is a big problem, etc.
But you can buy Windows ARM laptops and things from Samsung, Lenovo, a few others right now. The others don’t care, mostly still for the reasons above.
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At least HP and Lenovo have arm64 notebooks with Windows.
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googles
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/lenovo-announces-the-first-arm-based-thinkpad/
https://www.xda-developers.com/hp-elite-folio-review/
I also recall reading a review of someone trying to get Linux going on the ARM-based Lenovo Thinkpad X13s mentioned above. It sounded like a kinda rough user experience.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad_x13s/
I do have a bunch of the HPs for work related projects - they are pretty nice, and the x86 emulation works pretty good (and at least feels better than the x86 emulation in MacOS) - but a lot of other stuff is problematic, like pretty much no support in Microsofts deployment/imaging tools. So far I haven’t managed to create answer files for unattended installation.
As for Linux - they do at least offer disabling secure boot, so you can boot other stuff. It’d have been nicer to be able to load custom keys, though. It is nice (yet still feeling a bit strange) to have an ARM system with UEFI. A lot of the bits required to make it working either have made it, or are on the way to upstream kernels, so I hope it’ll be usable soon.
Currently for the most stable setup I need to run it from an external SSD as that specific kernel does not have support for the internal NVME devices, and booting that thing is a bit annoying as I couldn’t get the grub on the SSD to play nice with UEFI, so I boot from a different grub, and then chainload the grub on SSD.
Why haven’t all manufacturers making and selling ARM tablets / laptops with Windows ARM then?
Nobody wants them. If they want a Laptop or desktop they’re going x86 because it’s so much faster running the software that exists. If they want a tablet then they’re buying an iPad. Windows on tablets sucks.
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Users don’t want to buy into a platform with no apps. Devs don’t want to make apps for a platform with no users. It’s a catch 22.
Everything windows does Android would do better, and android has apps. But Android tablets don’t even sell that well.
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I mean, Linux definitely does have ARM apps in that for the open-source stuff, you can just use an ARM build of the distro. So the transition for Linux is definitely easier from the standpoint of obtaining native binaries than it is for MacOS or Windows; a huge chunk of the software has the source publicly-available.
But if you want to play closed-source games on Linux – like, off Steam or GOG or whatever, some of which is Windows binaries – most if not all of that doesn’t have ARM available, and a lot of it will definitely never have ARM builds, because the stuff was written ages ago and the source was lost, even if the rightsholders were able and interested in getting an ARM build out. And ARM can’t really efficiently emulate x86.
CPUs aren’t that expensive. Maybe it’s possible to create some kind of ARM-based laptop with an x86 coprocessor that is only used when running x86 code, or something like that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Qualcomm’s annual “Snapdragon Summit” is coming up later this month, and the company appears ready to share more about its long-planned next-generation Arm processor for PCs.
The company hasn’t shared many specifics yet, but yesterday we finally got a name: “Snapdragon X,” which is coming in 2024, and it may finally do for Arm-powered Windows PCs what Apple Silicon chips did for Macs a few years ago (though it’s coming a bit later than Qualcomm had initially hoped).
But those chips have never quite been fast enough to challenge Intel’s Core or AMD’s Ryzen CPUs in mainstream laptops.
Any performance deficit is especially noticeable because many people will run at least a few apps designed for the x86 version of Windows, code that needs to be translated on the fly for Arm processors.
Even if Qualcomm delivers an Arm chip that’s significantly faster and more power-efficient than its current offerings, there are still software hurdles to overcome.
In other words, they were negotiated based on Nuvia’s then-stated focus on server CPUs, rather than high-volume processors for consumer PCs.
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