PC Tech ARM is coming for Windows (Again)

[TwinIon]

After the phenomenal success of Apple silicon and the complete transition of the Mac line to ARM chips, it's seemed inevitable that eventually Windows PCs would follow suit. Which isn't to say that there haven't been attempts. While Apple's transition was seamless, Windows machines have had a harder go at it. The existing Windows on ARM machines have dramatically trailed both Apple's machines and their Intel based counterparts. 

 

At Microsoft's Surface event today, the expectation is that we'll be seeing something of a rebirth for Windows on ARM thanks to new Qualcomm chips. That expectation is bolstered by the recent leaks of new ARM based machines by Dell, Samsung, and Lenovo. 

 

While I'd love to believe the promises of thin and powerful laptops, easily running a wide range of Windows software with few compatibility issues and exceptional battery life, I'm not holding my breath. Still, maybe the third time will be the charm.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

 

 

Here Are The First 'Copilot+' PCs Powered By Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Series Chips

WWW.THURROTT.COM

---

Microsoft, Qualcomm, and their PC partners are revealing today the first “Copilot+ PCs” powered by the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips.

 

Quote

 

Microsoft, Qualcomm, and their PC partners are revealing today the first devices powered by Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips. These new Snapdragon-powered PCs are branded “Copilot+ PCs,” and this first wave of devices will bring over 20 models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Microsoft.

 

Just like Intel came up with the “ultrabook” marketing term for ultrathin laptops competing with Apple’s MacBook Air, the new “Copilot+” brand of AI PCs has been created to promote a new category of mobile PCs delivering multiple days of battery life and unique AI experiences. And Qualcomm claims that its new Snapdragon X Series chip delivers unparalleled performance per watt and the world’s fastest neural processing unit (NPU) for laptops.

 

 

[TwinIon]

Looks like we have to wait until the middle of next month before these will start shipping, but I'm cautiously optimistic that some real performance gains have been made here. The biggest indication of that is there are finally a bunch of OEMs that were willing to jump in from the get go, though it's possible that they're signing on because of the AI features and not the general performance of the new Snapdragon processors themselves.

 

Ars points out that the 40 TOPS NPU requirement to be a "Copilot+ PC" is rather embarrassing for AMD and INTEL, since most of their products don't even have a NPU, and the ones that do max out at 16 and 10 TOPS respectively. 

 

Personally, my laptop requirements have gone down over the years, and I would love all the promises made today to be true. If I could get a nice machine that can run Lightroom, Office, and a desktop web browser really well, and can run emulated x86 apps via Prism well enough to not worry about it, I could be sold on all this. Especially since a few of these new PCs are coming out with nice OLED displays.

[Ghost_MH]

On 5/20/2024 at 3:52 PM, TwinIon said:

Personally, my laptop requirements have gone down over the years, and I would love all the promises made today to be true. If I could get a nice machine that can run Lightroom, Office, and a desktop web browser really well, and can run emulated x86 apps via Prism well enough to not worry about it, I could be sold on all this. Especially since a few of these new PCs are coming out with nice OLED displays.

 

Windows on ARM is pretty much already there. I think reviewers, especially YouTube reviewers, were expecting too much out of Windows on ARM. All the stuff you're talking about runs perfectly fine on my Surface Pro X with is 5 year old SQ1. The biggest problem that tablet had was that it was WAY too expensive for the performance. However, at the time, there wasn't a whole lot that was as thin with as good a battery, so I can't blame it too much. I didn't find the SQ2 to be a compelling upgrade.

 

I also think the Microsoft Volterra with a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 runs great. There's still no ARM version of Opera and it's the only browser I use and it runs perfectly fine with dozens of tabs open on the Snapdragon CPU.

 

The issue with all of these is price, not performance. At release, the Volterra was $600 for what felt like a $400-500 PC. Not that I would recommend anyone buy a Volterra for everyday use. I like mine, but it's a dev kit and driver support is not great.

 

They don't perform as well as AMD or Intel silicon for CPU heavy tasks like video editing or compiling code, but they're perfectly serviceable for simple photo manipulation, Office, browsing the web, and whatever else you might agree that is good for 90% of PC users outside of gaming. Once pricing is more compelling, these devices should be fine. 

 

For comparison's sake, I also have a lot of experience on Apple's M1 and M2. Apple's x86 emulation is a lot better, but I don't find the M2 that much better than the 8cx Gen3. For all the hullabaloo Apple's silicon gets, I find it chokes on high bitrate 4k video more than the Snapdragon did. Either that or VLC x86 runs better on Windows 11 on ARM than ARM native VLC on the M2. However, the M2 also chokes on 4k video in a browser if you have a second browser window open with a bunch of tabs in it. That all, however, is likely just a RAM issue.

 

Apple's silicon is really held back by the lack of RAM no matter how much Apple tries to claim their RAM is worth double its capacity. This might be why my every day experience with Apple's ARM offerings aren't as rosy as those of tech reviewers. They're benchmarking a single app at a time to compare performance of the CPU, alone, but if I'm in Lightroom I'm not only in Lightroom as I probably also have a browser window open with dozens of tabs and a 4K YouTube video playing on a second monitor. Once you take the cost of Apple RAM upgrades into account, I don't think the Windows for ARM devices are all that bad or overly expensive.

[TwinIon]

@Ghost_MH Thanks for sharing your experience. I knew that Windows on ARM has been around for a while now, but there really haven't been any compelling devices, so it seems like few people have actually played with it.

 

I've been looking to replace my laptop for a while, and I'm pretty set on getting one of the new Surface Pros if the reviews hold up. Seems like it would be perfect for my use cases. It doesn't have a material impact on my decision, but how have you found the Pro X works as a tablet? Are there any worthwhile apps that actually feel nice to use?

[Ghost_MH]

2 hours ago, TwinIon said:

@Ghost_MH Thanks for sharing your experience. I knew that Windows on ARM has been around for a while now, but there really haven't been any compelling devices, so it seems like few people have actually played with it.

 

I've been looking to replace my laptop for a while, and I'm pretty set on getting one of the new Surface Pros if the reviews hold up. Seems like it would be perfect for my use cases. It doesn't have a material impact on my decision, but how have you found the Pro X works as a tablet? Are there any worthwhile apps that actually feel nice to use?

 

The keyboard and placement of the stylus is really slick and I've used it as my around the home tablet for years now. I've also done a bunch of remote Steam and Moonlight gaming on my Pro X for those times I want a tiny 13" screen to game on and that's worked perfectly. I've not gamed on it natively as I've assumed it would be terrible. As far as Jesus consumption goes, it's fantastic and all the Windows App Store apps work perfectly on it. 

 

That all said, it has been used less and less since I got my Galaxy Z Fold 5. Who'd a thunk that having a tablet readily available in your pocket, even as limited as it is, makes you lazy about carrying around a 13" tablet; especially when I pair it up with a Gamesir for remote play.

[TwinIon]

The first CoPilot+ PCs have begun to arrive, though it seems few machines shipped early to reviewers. Microsoft delayed shipping devices because of the security mess surrounding Recall. Asus seems to have gotten their 15" Vivobook out to a number of folks though, so some first impressions are starting to come through.

 

It does seem like native ARM performance is pretty close to an M3 Macbook Pro, which is very encouraging. The early reports I've been seeing about battery life is that it's a marked improvement over Intel chips, but probably still not as good as they claimed and not to Macbook level.

 

Toms has a liveblog of their initial testing, and it's been interesting. Some quick points:

• First boot takes a while and there are a ton of horrible ads to the point it's kind of shameful.
• Paint's image creator requires an internet connection, even though it uses the local NPU. It also just doesn't seem very good.
• Benchmarks seem to heavily depend on if they're native ARM.
• They've been having lots of trouble running custom code. Attempts to run local stable diffusion or custom battery test programs have not worked at all.

I've been seeing some mixed reports in general about compatibility. Often it seems better than expected, sometimes it's still pretty bad, and sometimes things don't work at all, even with Prism.

 

I'm still quite interested in the new Surface Pro, and I keep almost buying one, but I'm trying to hold off until we get some real world testing. I've been looking through the software that I use and it seems most of it has ARM native builds. So far the ones that don't are Arc Browser, Anytype, and Signal. It seems likely that Arc and Signal are coming soon though.

[CitizenVectron]

For consumers, I think Windows 11 on ARM is already fine. The big hurdle, however, is that ARM is still not supported for Enterprise deployment/applications. Until/unless that transition happens, I think it's effectively dead.

[TwinIon]

When Microsoft and Adobe announced how Lightroom and Photoshop would be ARM native, I didn't realize that they only announced the cloud version of Lightroom (formerly CC) and did NOT include Lightroom Classic as part of that announcement. Even worse, Lightroom Classic isn't even listed as one of the native ARM apps coming soon, despite having native Apple Silicon versions.

 

 

I've seen mixed reports that Lightroom Classic will even install on Windows ARM devices. It does seem to work under emulation, but users have been copying the install directory from an x86 PC over in order to get it working. Dealing with Lightroom Classic is one of my primary use cases, so I'm not willing to jump through unsupported hoops to get it working, since I'm not confident it would continue working or update well.

 

I'm really annoyed that this is the case. Just this weekend I went away on a short trip and was running directly into the limitations of the iPad Pro as a travel "computer." The iPad doesn't have a native RAW converter that can handle compressed RAW from my Nikon, so it's impossible to view photos without importing them first in lightroom. Considering I was shooting the Indycar Race at Laguna Seca and had thousands of photos totaling hundreds of gigs, I wasn't going to import them all just to see what was working and what wasn't. I also used the iPad to watch some shows on the hotel TV, and while some apps (Max, Youtube TV) work fine, a bunch of them won't expand to full screen on an external monitor (Peacock, Amazon Prime?).

 

Thankfully I'm not desperate for a new laptop, but unless Adobe changes course, I'm going to be waiting until September to see if Lunar Lake delivers on its promises. It's a shame because I was really compelled by the tablet form factor with an OLED display in the Surface Pro, but I can't justify a new PC that can't even install my most used software.