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Windows 10 on ARM

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151–160 of 290 posts

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#151

Can someone explain how they are achieving high execution speed? I would have expected the speeds (or at least the start-up times, if we have dynamic recompilation) for x86 on ARM to be outright abysmal.

There's a reason their demo apps were pre-installed. The initial recompilation is cached so that running it the second time will be much quicker than the first.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#152
Odd thought: the existence of an ARM Windows, makes it much simpler for Apple to ship ARM PCs.

The macOS development stack has been re-tooled to output LLVM bitcode within its "fat" binaries for a good while now. It'd be very simple for Apple to throw the switch on a compile farm ala the one Google has for Android APKs, and suddenly have ARM downloads for everything on the Mac App Store (without requiring any re-submissions.) Which means it wouldn't be hard at all for Apple to ship a "functional" ARM macOS computer... just, until now, such a machine wouldn't have had a very good Windows story. No Boot Camp, no cheap virtualization, etc.

Suddenly, that story is a solved problem.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#153
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A phone form factor device that can run a full desktop OS, or something close to it. Canonical was getting close with Ubuntu Touch but that's essentially dead now. I don't want a gimped version of Windows like I'd get with Continuum, I don't want a "desktop-like" version of Android like Samsung is doing, I want a full version of Linux or Windows that can run desktop applications.

Ah ok; I actually want something similar; a tablet that can act like a phone but only on WiFi so I don't have a phone bill. Basically; an iPad but w/ real integration & iMessages etc via a free or cheap VoIP number w/o data

You might want to look into Google Voice. Free number for texting, calls over data. I receive and send texts and calls from a browser too.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#154

For any Microsoft insiders with knowledge about this, a few questions: 1. In the talk they claim that they get "near native" speed from the translation. Can we have some real number of what can be expected? What about warm up time? 2. Is the x86 translation layer only available in user space, or can x86 drivers be loaded for hardware that doesn't have arm drivers yet (or the manufacturer doesn't care about making the…

As to #1: they say you _can_ get near-native speed, not that you _will_ get it. Applications that spend lots of time inside Windows APIs will be faster than those that don't.

I think that Office version already is native, and that they gamble/expect that the likes of Photoshop and Mathematica will soon ship real native versions (rightfully so, as that is what happened when Apple jumped PC architectures, too, with the exception of Quark Express, which consequently got eaten by InDesign.)

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#155
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is, sadly, discontinued. It's still available for download though but the latest OS is 6.0 and many versions missing.

They pressured google. That was the point. Google does not give a flying fuck about developer experience. I am not saying that is wrong or right. I am saying this was the case for Google for many years. They just didn't give fuck about the experience. But look at the timing. Everyone was nagging on google for years about slow emulator. They didn't do shit for years. Microsoft released an emulator, which was superior…

How many platforms does that Microsoft emulator work on? One? Unlike Microsoft, Google supports 3 development platforms and so their new emulator also had to support 3 platforms. Also, the new emulator was written from scratch and that takes time.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#157

I'm out of the loop on ARM. Can somebody explain the significance of it?

It's the processor architecture that in the past was used primarily on servers. Now it's almost universally used in mobile devices, too. It's ubiquity has caused a much larger technological demand for cross-platform development, which is one of the reasons why technologies like JavaScript and Rust have become so popular. Additionally, it's lower power and lower heat compared to it's x86 cousins.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#158
post #57
post #35

I am seriously impressed with Microsoft. I haven't used windows in years but they are releasing tons of useful things. VSCode is great on Ubuntu and every version of OS X I have run it on. Plus tons of other cool things like bash on win; etc. Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

> Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS I actually disagree with this pretty strongly. The Azure UI seems flashy for the sake of being flashy. The AWS UI is much easier to navigate and use for me. Azure's UI is more unified though. There are some random AWS services (e.g. sqs) that have a totally different UI theme going on. Edit : the Azure UI is only more unified if you ignore the f…

The way I read parent's comment is: "Azure's UI is not as good as AWS, but the instance is better". I may be wrong but I think parent meant that you get more resources for the money.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#159
post #152

Odd thought: the existence of an ARM Windows, makes it much simpler for Apple to ship ARM PCs. The macOS development stack has been re-tooled to output LLVM bitcode within its "fat" binaries for a good while now. It'd be very simple for Apple to throw the switch on a compile farm ala the one Google has for Android APKs, and suddenly have ARM downloads for everything on the Mac App Store (without requiring any re-subm…

This idea keeps popping up. LLVM bitcode is way too architecture specific to allow that to happen. Chris Lattner has stated it himself.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#160
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pressured google. That was the point. Google does not give a flying fuck about developer experience. I am not saying that is wrong or right. I am saying this was the case for Google for many years. They just didn't give fuck about the experience. But look at the timing. Everyone was nagging on google for years about slow emulator. They didn't do shit for years. Microsoft released an emulator, which was superior…

How many platforms does that Microsoft emulator work on? One? Unlike Microsoft, Google supports 3 development platforms and so their new emulator also had to support 3 platforms. Also, the new emulator was written from scratch and that takes time.

> Unlike Microsoft, Google supports 3 development platforms and so their new emulator also had to support 3 platforms

No it didn't. If platform specific solutions make sense then we should use platform specific solutions. Not everything has to be cross platform and 100% identical across all platforms.

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