lol it’s already out there on tens of millions of laptops, but I guess hubris is the way to go
A more recent example:
“Nobody needs more than 4 cores for personal use!”
I don’t know who said this, but my bet would be Intel. Without AMD, we would probably still stuck on 4 cores.
Apple already did though. Even specifically replacing Intel chips because Intel’s offering was dogshit that was destroying their ability to offer the design they wanted with their stupid power draw.
The rest of ARM is behind, and Windows has done a shit job of ARM support, but that doesn’t mean that’s forever.
Windows also seems more concerned with going all in on cloud computing, the whole “you will own nothing and like it” paradigm. So making a faster and more efficient mobile platform isn’t probably a high priority for them.
Them trying to force control away from users is bad.
But arm’s efficiency make it a damn good option for a thin client.
Yah, I’m really not enthused with the idea of having to pay monthly rent for my computers ability to function.
I wonder if intel just values their existing experience with 86 more than any potential efficiency gains since the efficiency matters a lot less when the whole system is just a glorified screen and antenna.
Them taking control away from me makes me not use them. Not a problem at all.
Especially when it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Windows isn’t the future. Windows has maintained dominance because it is great at backwards compatibility. ARM erodes that advantage because of architectural differences, coupled with the difficulty and drawbacks of emulating x86 on ARM. Mobile is eating more and more market share, and devs aren’t making enterprise software for Windows like they use to.
No one working on a greenfield project says “let’s develop our systems on Windows server” unless they already were doing that. Windows as a service is the more likely future, funneled by Azure.
Even some shops working with Windows Server are asking “wait, why are we paying for these licenses?”
Then it comes down to whether it’s cheaper to rewrite legacy applications or continue to pay for licenses.
The rest of ARM is behind
That might change with Snapdragon X. It isn’t out yet but competition to the top will hopefully start getting the prices down.
The problem with ARM laptops is all of the x86 windows software that will never get ARM support and all of the users that will complain about poor performance if an emulator is used to run the x86 software.
Most Linux software already supports ARM natively. I would love to have an ARM laptop as long as it has a decent GPU with good open source drivers. It would need full OpenGL and Vulkan support and not that OpenGL ES crap though.
Windows has nothing to do with it. They are talking about software applications that were made for x86. Stuff like Adobe CC, etc.
Windows runs on ARM (and has for a decade) and the apps available in the Windows app store run on ARM.
Apple has shown that the market could be willing to adapt.
But then again, they’ve always had more leverage than the Wintel-crowd.
But what people seem to ignore is that there is another option as well: hardware emulation.
IIRC correctly old AMD CPU’s, notably the K6, was actually a RISC core with a translation layer turning X86 instructions into the necessary chain of RISC instructions.
That could also be a potential approach to swapping outright. If 80% of your code runs natively and then 20% passes this hardware layer where the energy loss is bigger than the performance loss you might have a compelling product.
Except software applications like Adobe CC have supported ARM for nearly 5 years now. As do most software because mobile exists (and mobile is exclusively ARM) and these days, apps need to cover desktop and mobile and web. ARM has essentially been forced on everyone because of mobile. Whether they like it or not, ARM is here to stay.
But none of this is a technical limitation. It’s a political one. Companies like MS don’t care about the technology, they just care about moving in a way that gives them control so they can maintain and expand their monopoly through licensing and other restrictions.
Modern ARM GPUs already support OpenGL and Vulkan, that’s not a problem. Just some platforms chose to go mobile APIs due to running Android.
The trick with emulation that Apple did was to add custom instructions to the CPU that are used by the emulation layer to efficiently run x86_64 code. Nothing is stopping other CPU manufacturers from doing the same, the only issue is that they have to collaborate with the emulation developer.
The driver situation is less than ideal. Mesa got support for Mali but that’s not the only GPU that comes with ARM chips and you get bonkers situations. E.g. with my rk3399-based NanoPC, a couple of years ago (haven’t checked in a while and yes it’s a Mali) rockchip’s blob supported vulkan for android but only gles for linux as rockchip never paid ARM the licensing fees for that.
And honestly ARM is on the way down: Chip producers are antsy about the whole Qualcomm thing and Qualcomm itself is definitely moving away from ARM, as such my bets for the long and even mid-term are firmly on RISC-V. Still lack desktop performance but with mobile players getting into the game laptops aren’t far off.
Doesn’t Microsoft have something similar to Apple’s Rosetta 2 JIT x86 -> ARM code translation kajigger? I could swear I’ve seen something like that mentioned
Edit: not sure whether it was WOW64 that I read about, that seems to only work for running 32 bit intel code on ARM (although I have no idea if that’s actually a problem or not when running modern Windows binaries, the last Windows I ran was Vista)
They have, and in my experience it works nicer than Rosetta.
Windows 10 had it limited to 32bit binaries (but Windows 10 on ARM is generally very broken). Windows 11 can handle both 32 and 64bit emulation.
Yeah I recall it somehow being better designed than Rosetta but I can’t dig up where I read about this
I love my ARMed Mac because battery life. I almost never use the power cable outside.
And it’s really responsive even on battery. It’s actually a little bad because I can have too many windows open and can’t find anything.
MacOS doesn’t throttle performance on battery like many Windows power plans do, that’s why
MacOS doesn’t need to throttle performance because ARM and other RISC architectures are naturally very power efficient
If only I could get wifi to work on a linux partition, it would be the perfect linux machine.
This sounds very familiar to when Steve Ballmer wasn’t worried about the iPhone at all.
