Today is an exciting day for Windows 10 on ARM. With the official release of Visual Studio 15.9, developers now have the officially supported SDK and tools for creating 64-bit ARM (ARM64) apps. In addition, the Microsoft Store is now officially accepting submissions for apps built for the ARM64 architecture.
Let’s see how long Microsoft sticks with this attempt.
Well… kinect? are you there? It’s me! WinARM64! Where are you? I am coming!
Kinect was a different problem, European, and Japanese homes in particular, simply didn’t have the floor space to make the kinect effective for the masses. Certainly in the UK, it was simple impractical in the homes of many/most normal families.
The promise of ARM bases computers is to put the price down. Currently available laptops are at least $1000, we can have more powerfull x64 based for that.
Isn’t there a place between $40 Raspberry and $1000 ARM64 laptops? I mean, some ATX mobo or $500 basic laptops for example?
Not this again!
The promise of ARM based computers is to be more mobile, not to be cheaper!
More mobile means for example:
* System-On-Chip to allow smaller “motherboards”, less interconnects, better design
* Instant-On/Off aimed at many short sessions instead of 1 daily long session
* Better power-efficiency leading to longer batterylife
* (optional) integration of modem in the SOC for Always-Connected feature.
ARM64 chips have been quite common in ChromeBooks that are often available for 300-500 Euro already. For Windows they didn’t make sense yet because the OS didn’t support them in 64bit mode until the just rereleased 1809. Now they have enough power to run native ARM/ARM64 software and emulated x86 (x64 probably coming in the future)
ARM64 with Windows is not meant to replace your high-end workstation. It is also not meant to replace your IOT device. But it should now be okay for all laptops in the range from 300 to 1300. Let’s see if people are interested in buying them when they don’t support x64 software
http://www.osnews.com/thread?665024
I don’t know what you are trying to say with your comment because all of the links in your link seem to be non-Microsoft Windows specific. ARM64 for Windows is not meant for iOT although technically speaking it could now be supported that is clearly not where Microsoft is going with this post. Windows-on-IOT is its own version and as you can see from the reference images that isn’t really aimed at the Snapdragon 850: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot-core/release-notes/curr…
I was referring to the parent comment : http://www.osnews.com/thread?664876
ARM got powerful enough to support full featured operating systems, not just embedded/limiter ones.
Not only the power and energy efficiency are there, but the price is also good. Put that in a laptop form factor and there you go.
Edited 2018-11-16 12:39 UTC
Okay, that explains my confusion. Hitting the “reply” button on the wrong level comment is easy enough.
Most of the links you provided were for IOT-like devices though, not for general laptop CPU’s and surely not for “i5 quadcore and up” replacements. Even Apple is not yet ready to put their A12X(++) in even their “ultramobile” Macbook. Part of that is hardware, but software-support also seems an important issue.
micro-controllers: ?
iOT: probably ARM, but other architectures as well
Phone/Tablet: Definitely ARM
ChromeBook: ARM64 or x64
Laptops: x64
Desktops: x64
Servers: x64
ARM is climbing up this “performance ladder”, but hasn’t really reached the Laptop level yet. Intels way down the “power-efficiency ladder” has also basically stopped at the laptop/chromebook step.
Intel is trying to hold off ARM from climbing up by raising performance considerably while not decreasing power-efficiency. ARM is trying the same. Because people are not really requiring more performance anymore I expect ARM to breach the laptop level in another 2 major generations. Not because they are faster than Intel but because they will be fast enough while being more mobile.
Kochise,
That’s my comment, haha.
I’ve bought some ARM SOCs before…
Orange Pi 2
ODROID-XU4
They’re both fairly powerful processors with decent cores/memory. Certainly they run full desktop operating systems. The SBC form factor allows them to mount it in a tiny box, which may be compelling for some, but I’ve found it’s also their biggest weakness: they overheat. I bought a monster heat sink for the Orange Pi, way bigger than stock. It runs fine if you don’t push it to the max, but if you do (as I was intending to), then it becomes unstable.
So I purchased this one next, thinking finally I’d found one that runs faster than the Raspberry Pi without crashing due to heat. But once again despite that monster heat sink it still overheats and crashes in the summer when pushed hard.
https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc2
I’m currently running it now very stably, but I had to gerry-rig a fan to it and it’s completely awkward.
This is why in my post I wanted ARM versions of desktop PCs. It’s not operating systems holding me back, but rather the SBC form factor. With ARM on linux, it’s pretty much the exact same software I’d be using on x86. I literally want the ARM equivalent of a desktop PC though, not a SBC! Your links were all of SBCs, and although they may be pretty cool for what they are, I’m done trying to get that form factor to fit my requirements.
I’d really really like to see highly expandable high performance ARM servers with lots of networking and SATA ports. Another big issue is that nearly all of these ARM solutions have completely useless unaccelerated proprietary GPUs that can’t be replaced. With PCs I can just choose an OpenCL capable PCI graphics card and plug it in. Most ARM manufacturers will only provide proprietary GPU drivers for android, which doesn’t help me at all.
Everything I ask for is certainly possible, but I have yet to find anything like this that is as affordable as commodity intel solutions and isn’t a custom build. I’m very eager to use ARM systems, but so long as they’re more expensive, more proprietary, and less functional, it makes ARM a no-go for my own requirements. I hope this changes in the future. Or maybe it exists and I just haven’t found it yet? It so, let me know!
Edited 2018-11-16 15:07 UTC
The Adreno and Mali GPU families are being supported by the Freedreno and Bifrost KMS/Mesa stacks, respectively. They should be mainlined in less than a year. Broadcom is also working on an official FOSS driver for their new ARM GPU, the VC5 driver, that is already mainlined. Once that work is production ready then it’s just a matter of supporting bootloaders and Device Tree files for all the random boards, or finding UEFI ARM64 systems with unlocked bootloaders.
On the server space, Softiron has some good options for that.
So bad Microsoft don’t talk about that option. If I remember well, we can’t just put whatever OS on any ARM based computer like we do in the x86 world. Windows on an iPad would be fun.
ARM devices often have locked bootloaders or proprietary drivers. Just have a look at the Android modding community to see how much work it takes to make a newer Android work properly on a device. Windows on ARM isn’t something that anyone seems interested in buying a retail version, only hardware+OEM bundles
Agreed, would be nice to see some of the existing Chromebook hardware at lower price points sold with Windows. Mass adoption just doesn’t seem likely beyond the 1000 Euro point, as much as I actually want ARM to succeed.
The other thing necessary IMHO is x64 support. I have no idea how much work it is to implement, but it just seems simpler to tell a consumer “it runs any Windows software you can throw at it” as opposed to “it runs any Windows software, as long as you pay extra attention to the architecture”.
I agree when we are talking about mass adoption for the exact same reason you mention: To avoid confusion with consumers. In reality you are not likely to run software that requires x64 emulated on an ARM64 laptop. You should either find a modern compiled ARM64 version of that software or use the emulated x86 version of an older piece of software if ARM64 isn’t available
Do you mean more power per $? I mean, there are 64 bit laptops out there (not very god ones but *meh* what works works) for 150 quid.
How much lower does the price need to get?
Yet there are gaming Laptops costing £4000+ that still have a 1080p screen.
Are there still cheapo laptops with 1366×768 screens on sale as new these days?
That’s the area that I find so frustrating about laptops. I can remember a Dell Inspiron 8100 circa 1982 or thereabouts with a 1600×1200 screen.
That’s where progress has been pitiful IMHO.
Don’t even get me started on HD Sizes. Shipping anything with 128Gb of SSD in later 2018 is criminal.
Sure a lower power consumption device would be nice but there is more to a ‘total’ system than the CPU.
Wait, what!?
Sorry 2004. Doesn’t time fly eh?
Edited 2018-11-17 19:01 UTC
You can get a 14″ 1080p screen for $500.
https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/NX.GY1AA.001
For quite a few people, a laptop is almost exclusively www terminal …for such usage, 128 GiB is fine (even 64 will do)
Edited 2018-11-20 19:36 UTC
You can buy $150 Intel laptops. They get pretty decent at around the $300-500 mark.
The headline “Official support for Windows 10 on ARM development” is already a bit misleading because it is missing the “64” part. Developing for ARM has been officialy supported for a while. But since this was the title from the MS-blog that isn’t too weird.
What IS weird though is the “Let’s see how long Microsoft sticks with this attempt.”. It seems pretty clear that Microsoft and the entire industry is gearing up for a non-Intel-only future and having proper Windows-on-ARM64 seems more like a future necessity than a temporary attempt by Microsoft.
Maybe people got so negative because of the Windows RT debacle from the past, but Windows-on-ARM has nothing to do with that. We are not talking about just running very limited store-apps on very limited hardware this time, but a proper supported OS-version including x86 emulation (with x64 emulation probably being added sooner rather than later)
Windows RT was not the first multiplatform attempt. Windows NT 3-4 supported MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha. These platforms never took off, and the issue was software. All these platforms could run x86 software via built-in emulation, but the demand wasn’t there. The emulation was good/fast enough, but obviously not native speeds. What happened was that nobody saw the point in buying systems of a different architecture when all the software was x86, so they were effectively simply slower. The Alpha hung on for a while in some niches because of its being 64-bit. ARM does not have any performance/usefulness advantages like that over x64. Battery life might do it, but you’re going to lose a lot of that if you’re wasting cycles for emulation with every app you use. I want to see ARM succeed outside phones/tablets, but I’m with Thom here.
As I wrote in another thread, ARM does have many other advantages beside batterylife, all of them coming down to “more mobile”, which is a really great benefit with most pc’s actually being laptops. ARM is also still developing greatly and performance is reaching the “good enough” limit. ARM for laptops (and more) is coming and it won’t take 10 years or die before it is ready