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Introducing Copilot+ PCs

blogs.microsoft.com

101–110 of 614 posts

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#102

I suspect that there will be a LOT of TPU e-waste in about 3-5 years. One can call me reactionary, but I see a greater benefit in providing SIMD primitives for known bottlenecks, co-processing for known inner loops, than to continually jump through the hoop of committing passing trends to hardware. I suspect thst Microsoft will implement brilliantly on a bad idea, but that it still won't gain much traction, as Co-pil…

LLMs aside I would guess we may see more modest use cases for TPU/NPUs on PC. Phones have been coming with them for several years now - granted with stronger use cases around AR, photo retouching, and voice assistants. Maybe you are right though.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#104
post #73
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first iteration of Windows ARM didn't have any x86 emulation layer, so that one was doomed from the start. The second iteration did, but it initially couldn't run 64bit apps and the performance was poor. They do have 64bit support now and it sounds like the emulation performance has come a long way.

Here is my question though, comparing how this works on Mac. Will Windows have the opposite? ARM running on x86? I continue to wonder how Microsoft expects to work long term. Are they expecting that every developer is just going to keep x86 and ARM based app perpetually or users be stuck always using that emulation layer if they are running ARM? Microsoft won't be able to 100% transition to ARM like Mac did. At some…

I think the idea is to all apps and developers gradually transition and develop with ARM support - after all even the mobile devices will be running on ARM sooner or later so future apps, games will be developed with ARM in mind anyway. x86 apps will be supported - with some paid support for example.

But it all depends on the market share of ARM at one point. But you can run DOS apps still so with emulation layer - and the increasing performance of ARM - one way or another old apps will be able to run on ARM. For those who will need to those.

Unlike Mac, Microsoft just can't drop past generations and call it a day.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#105
post #83
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is my question though, comparing how this works on Mac. Will Windows have the opposite? ARM running on x86? I continue to wonder how Microsoft expects to work long term. Are they expecting that every developer is just going to keep x86 and ARM based app perpetually or users be stuck always using that emulation layer if they are running ARM? Microsoft won't be able to 100% transition to ARM like Mac did. At some…

I think the official line from Microsoft would be that most software should be using .NET anyway, and in that case the same binary should Just Work on either architecture. In reality there is still a lot of native software though, so who knows how that will play out. Games in particular will always be native.

If it's like their previous ARM Windows attempt, existing native software won't work in any event because the entire platform is locked down.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#109
post #91

Looking at the landing page for the new Surface devices ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface ) the top third of the page looks really amateurish in terms of web design. Clicking one of the "Meet the new" buttons really drives it home.

Looks like they're relying on system fonts instead of serving them over the web. It uses Segoe UI (a Windows font) by default. I tried accessing the page via Fedora and iOS and neither load the font correctly.
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