2024 could be the year the PC finally dumps x86 for Arm, all thanks to Windows 12 and Qualcomm's new chip

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨L4s@lemmy.world [bot]⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.pcgamer.com/2024-could-be-the-year-the-pc-finally-dumps-x86-for-arm-all-thanks-to-windows-12-and-qualcomms-new-chip/

2024 could be the year the PC finally dumps x86 for Arm, all thanks to Windows 12 and Qualcomm’s new chip::We’ve already reported on Qualcomm’s new 12-core Arm uberchip, the Snapdragon X Elite, and its claims of x86-beating performance and efficiency. But it takes two to tango when it comes a maj

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the_q@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Is Microsoft working on a compatibility layer like Apple did? If no then 2024 is just another x86_64 year filled with bullshit news and hype train conductors.

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- hansl@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There’s already a compatibility layer. Microsoft had one before Rosetta 2 was available. You can test it yourself with many windows on arm dev builds that exists, or with a Mac running windows in a VM.
  
  Verdict; not as good as Apple (not sure how it compares with the one from Linux) but good enough. …pages.dev/…/apple-s-rosetta-2-vs-windows-x86-emu…
  
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  - the_q@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ah right! I forgot about Windows on ARM.
    
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  - QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It isn’t as good because Rosetta 2 exploits some custom features built into the their M processors. Specifically, there is a special mode that strengthens the memory model, which is critical for both performance and correctness when it comes to executing multithreaded x86 programs on ARM.
    
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fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Having used an ARM Mac, and the pains of countless utilities and apps that are x86/x64 only, as well as the pains of virtualising x86/x64 operating systems, I’m not a fan. I can virtualise ARM just fine on x64 but not the other way around.

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- simple@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  People probably said the same thing when Apple dropped PowerPC for x86, there’s going to be an awkward transition period but when it becomes a standard you’ll feel differently.
  
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  - originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    yeah, but were not talkin some niche audience like apple powerpc products. lets not pretend apple had actual marketshare.
    
    this is messing with legacy windows products that are deeply ingrained the world over. it will be far messier than that apple crap
    
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  - bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Apple yes, windows? Not so sure, in windows there’s alot of x86 games and everything, people just won’t drop that you know? And with Linux gaining traction in gaming community x86 going to live at least another decade, ONLY way people going to drop x86 if you can launch x86 apps on arm without terrible drop off performance, while apple have that, others don’t, so until then except mobile devices only apple and niche laptops gonna be on arm, because gaming and other legacy software people not gonna drop until you can launch it on arm without terrible drops of performance
    
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  - ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Apple is a pretty closed system made for graphics designers and people who don’t like choices. It isn’t as simple to make it happen for the pc market.
    
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  - cybervseas@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Also 68k for PPC 🙂
    
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- mr_tyler_durden@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m confused, my M1 MBP had like 1-2 things max that were x86 still that I needed and those ran fine on Rosetta.
  
  I know docker is a bit more annoying but it’s not that bad IMHO.
  
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  - 8ender@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Came in to say the same, and I run all sorts of weird shit. Rosetta is so seamless the only way I know it’s an x86 thing is that it takes a while to launch the first time.
    
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  - time_lord@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s because macs don’t have games. They’ve had 3 iterations of ARM processors and I still can’t download steam natively. If I could, most of my steam library wouldn’t run natively.
    
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- kemsat@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m guessing the ARM version will be for regular people that just go to the main websites. Maybe the x64 version will become enterprise only.
  
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Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They’re going to have to get the emulation working better for x86/x64 software. And they’re going to have to get the driver situation sorted – which likely means requiring ARM drivers alongside x86/x64 drivers in order to meet certification for having a Windows sticker or WHQL certification to gradually build up the list of supported hardware.

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spacemanspiffy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not a chance. We have several more years of x86 dominance.

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- sebinspace@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t know what the author was smoking, but nobody that knows what x86 and ARM are would reasonably say x86 is anywhere near its end. I want it to be, fuck I want it to be, but I’m also not stupid enough to think it’s happening even remotely soon.
  
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  - Disaster@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m rather hoping RISC-V comes up and eats their lunch before it happens.
    
    My reasoning for this is that I’ve lost too many hours trying to kludge finnicky ARM boards into supporting proper mainline video acceleration. It’s awful. It’s horrible. It’s a waste of time.
    
    The silly x86 SBC I got worked out of the box with OneAPI with no complaints at all.
    
    The ARM boards ran the gamut from gibberish/garbage rendering, dropped frames, washed out images because of cheap tricks to up performance.
    
    I know this is more down to the weak (and proprietary) video cores included on these boards… but after spending a significant amount of time playing with them, I’m going to say “No, thank you.”
    
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downhomechunk@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
How can it be both the year of ARM and the year of the linux desktop?

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- cbarrick@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Linux runs great on ARM 😉
  
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  - downhomechunk@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Armbian is a really cool project. So is batocera. I have a few SBCs to play with.
    
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- itsnotits@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Linux and ARM are not mutually exclusive.
  
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- Sethayy@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Nearly everything on linux is FOSS, so no translation layer needed 1
  
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9point6@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Nope, I’ll never run windows on anything other than x86.

I’m very happy with my ARM MBP for work, but I occasionally pull up software written decades ago (either music production plugins or games typically) on windows and it still runs, some of the companies that wrote that software no longer exist, so no first party patches will be coming.

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- ultra@feddit.ro ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ll never run Windows.
  
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  - OrangeCorvus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ll never run
    
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  - 9point6@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Fair play, if you don’t need the compatibility with Windows drivers and software, there’s no real reason to choose it in 2023.
    
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- sugartits@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Windows 11 on ARM will probably that software without modification.
  
  Assuming it runs on Windows 11 at all…
  
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Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t care as long as desktops remain modular.

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- isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ampère makes some ARM CPUs that go with modular boards, where you can socket your own CPU, DDR5 RAM, NVMe drives and PCIe accessories.
  
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- lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  yeah, least thing I would want is my PC becoming another use and throw mobile phone(it’s already happening with mac and hp’s elitebook).
  
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Crafter72@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Tell me you never used Arm based system for daily drive without telling me you never used Arm based system. General software compatibility is not there and PC is not only on Windows or Mac. Sure on Mac they have enterprise support for their user. By having more power (bruteforcing) to run the emulation simply does not mean the software run flawless.

As someone who have Raspberry Pi 4 and Orange Pi 5, the situation is a bit different. Raspberry Pi have a well supported system by communities and the devs, meanwhile on Orange Pi 5 some drivers are not released by the Orange Pi/left to the dust if there are no maintainer, not to mention if you want specific build of binary which not covered by repo/ppa, you have to build yourself from source, and the GPU driver situation for OPi5 which not yet have Vulkan support and sub par performance on Linux meanwhile on RPi5 they have Vulkan support 2 weeks after release.

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banneryear1868@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For all the informed technical analysis and debates about this, the vast majority of consumers don’t care about any of this stuff, and they’re the ones who will decide this “year of the whatever.” The worse option technically speaking has won out many times in the past.

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- JTskulk@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Consumers will choose more battery life, all else being equal.
  
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Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
All the top posts here are people saying it won’t happen.

I was at the store over the weekend and saw a full display of chromebooks. Someone purchased one right in front of me.

I’m sure there’s a market for both technologies to exist at the same time.

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- circuscritic@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They’re purchasing the OS, not the architecture.
  
  Microsoft doesn’t have the same loyalty that Apple does, and they can’t afford to release an ARM OS that isn’t already supported by all major software applications, and majority support for normal x86 apps, with assistance and roadmap to completely bridge the gap.
  
  When the transition is seamless, or 90% seamless, the architecture won’t matter.
  
  If they release ARM hardware that doubles battery life and performance, but doesn’t offer a seamless transition, it’ll flop. Just like their last attempt did.
  
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  - emax_gomax@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Microsoft doesn’t have loyalty? They have practical market dominance. I say this as a Linux user but ain’t no way Microsoft can do anything to drive away their user base. If their users buy a laptop and find half their software doesn’t run on it or runs sh*ttily due to emulation, I’m pretty sure they’ll blame the laptop manufacturers before Microsoft or demand the laptops have a x86 variant and even that’s a long way before moving to another os.
    
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  - BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Exactly.
    
    This quote reveals the lack of understanding about how MS works:
    
    Thus far, there’s little doubt that Microsoft’s efforts with Windows on Arm have been half hearted.
    
    Half-hearted? I bet MS research developed a plan for ARM before the public knew ARM existed. They have a massive research department.
    
    They don’t need to support ARM until it’s well-established at a performance point that can supplant x86 even under emulation. Their major clients are business, and frankly laptop battery life is more than good enough for business users today (I can run almost all day on battery, and I do a lot of file management with a 3 year old, midrange business laptop).
    
    Now what’s compelling for big business is power consumption in data centers or even office buildings. But those systems aren’t running Windows directly on iron - it’s all virtualized. So even there I’m not sure ARM competes yet. Maybe for desktops in the office, call centers, etc. But those already use Mini PCs.
    
    Gonna be interesting to see how it all works out. Will we really see dramatically better battery life on a Windows ARM laptop? Will this also be the return of Windows Phone/Tablet (does this change the tablet definition if it can run Windows/Linux?)
    
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- visor841@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There are tons of x86 Chromebooks.
  
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  - YerbaYerba@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah I bought a $300 amd Chromebook and run Linux on it. Had to flash a new efi firmware to make it fully usable though. Worst part of it is the soldered 8gb of RAM but it works for my usage.
    
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deathmetal27@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Don’t care what Windows does. What’s going on on Linux here.

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LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Lololol no.

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pastabatman@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There’s a lot of focus on Windows for these types of chips, but Chromebooks are probably the best use case for them right now. ChromeOS runs great on ARM and there’s no legacy software to worry about, but they feel kind of slow because the ARM chips they’ve used have been slow. I’d love an ARM Chromebook that actually rips.

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jacktherippah@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve used an ARM Mac for the past 3 years on both macOS and Linux. I would like more options for a fast, battery efficient and most importantly fanless laptop, so I’m looking forward to this.

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RanchOnPancakes@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah, no. Still got a huge software issue there.

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ApatheticCactus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Could we have a future where we have an arm main CPU, gaming GPU, and also an x86 card?

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carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The main advantage of ARM right now is that there are low power cores available. The actual instruction set is unrelated to this advantage. If Intel or AMD put more serious effort into power efficiency most of the advantages go out the window.

As for instruction set changes impacting what software you can run I think that is still a big issue. Yes porting to ARM is straitforward in more modern programming environments but most software actively developed at the moment has a lot of old cruft that won’t easily port if the engineers can even be convinced to touch it. Most businesses are dependent on old software not all of which is still maintained. Most gamers are even more tied to old software that is not going to get ported and often has annoying anti-virtualization checks (see games breaking on systems with enabled intel e-cores).

I am not sure how large the modern non gaming personal pc market is (tablets, phones, works computers, and chromebooks probably took a chunk out of it) but that could be in play.

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- WindowsEnjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Steam. Almost all games would be impacted. On Linux we already use translation layer (Windows -> Linux), but I am not sure if it’s a good idea to emulate X86_64 on top of translation layer.
  
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  - carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Getting anti-cheat that technically already works enabled on Linux has been a lot of work and Epic still won’t enable it. Piracy protection systems will also be an issue. Most EA games inspect your CPU to see if they like it on startup (I think this is using vmprotect and some non-OS x86 calls but don’t quote me on that). These kinds on anti virtualization checks are really common (not just in games ProctorU and lock down browser do them too). I don’t think valve running an open virtualization layer will be well received by companies and they will probably ban it from running games. MMOs (due to botting) and anything with anticheat will look particularly askance at this. I also suspect Valve won’t want to try hiding the VM signatures as it borders on violating DMCA.
    
    Newer games will probably get ported if a large part of the market buys into ARM.
    
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- ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Gaming is already a solved issue. Any console manufacturer managed to get games developed regardless of processor instruction set. All it takes is investment and a market.
  
  Xbox and PlayStation are currently x86, but they’ve used different processors in the past. But Nintendo manages uses arm and gets great price/performance. For the PC market Valve could use it’s marketplace to make arm and Linux work for gaming. They’ve made good progress but they could be more aggressive. If they lowered their rates for Linux and/or arm support the gaming industry would move. They could also use the stick as well as the carrot. If they refused to list new games that don’t support Linux and arm the industry would move even faster.
  
  I don’t think gamers will move the market much either way. Apple is the biggest computer manufacturer in the world and their users don’t buy their products for PC gaming. I imagine the rest of the market is similar. People are buying PCs for productive web browsing and office apps. If arm Windows and Linux machines can get half the battery performance macbooks get, they slowly displace x86 in the market for new machines. But half the problem is software optimisation for battery life. Intel macbooks got better battery life, as long as you were using safari rather than a chromium browser.
  
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  - carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    In new games sure. I was referring to old titles
    
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chakan2@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think this is likely. After dealing with how bad W11 is, MS realized they don’t need working software or backwards compatibility to sell units.

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tabular@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Silly bot, windows go on the walls.

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melroy@kbin.melroy.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I really hope so. Everything is better than x86. Arm or even risk-v.

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- sugartits@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  m68k > *
  
  I will die on this hill.
  
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dukatos@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wake me up when they make faster ARM than my 5900x

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heartfelthumburger@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m all for it, just don’t leave out the DIY market. I would love a socketable ARM platform. Risc-V would be even better.

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brenno@lemmy.brennoflavio.com.br ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
2024 will be the year of ARM on desktops!

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tigerjerusalem@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
A Galaxy Book 360 that runs cold and has great battery life would be perfect. I need photoshop and illustrator on a Windows machine that runs as well as a Macbook, I don’t care about gaming with an ultrabook.

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Mio@feddit.nu ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
These new are highend. So expensive, powerhungry and not hugly better than x86 CPUs on their tasks. Must have something that makes it a nobrainer so that it is much better on every aspect.

Apple just had 100% control of all Apples products so they basically forced them over when their new product was just better in most cases.

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verdantbanana@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
learn.microsoft.com/…/apps-on-arm-x86-emulation

xda-developers.com/how-x86-translation-work-windo…

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