Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

thurrott.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 121 posts

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#111

Post by xorxornop »

Osiris wrote: post #36
skrebbel wrote: post #19

Download my great free Windows program now! Please choose: EXE installer 32-bit x86 64-bit x64 32-bit ARM 64-bit ARM MSI installer 32-bit x86 64-bit x64 32-bit ARM 64-bit ARM Portable Zip 32-bit x86 64-bit x64 32-bit ARM 64-bit ARM (Download my great free macOS program now! Click here ) This is already a usability problem, and adding 2 more target chipsets makes it worse. Given both bandwidth and smart programmers, c…

Wasn't one of the points of the .NET Framework to make architecture independent apps? The CLR is compiled to the native instruction set, but apps are only compiled to IL and thus are dynamically recompiled to the native instruction set. So, ideally, you'd just have one download.

And this is exactly how it works with Windows Store apps. You upload .NET bytecode, and the Store delivers the correct compiled-to-native code for the user's architecture.

You can also make fat packages, if you don't wanna distribute through the store.

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#112

Post by xorxornop »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #35
Eridrus wrote: post #26

Even assuming they can hit performance targets with this, which sounds hard but not impossible, what's the major use case? Continuum? Windows laptops with better battery life? Most win32 software is going to suck on a touch screen, so I'm not really seeing this help them in mobile.

>"Windows laptops with better battery life?" Not going to happen. There's a performance hit that almost certainly comes along with emulation. Battery life is likely to get worse with x86 Windows emulation on ARM. Also, by the time Intel stopped pushing x86 in mobile devices they were producing chips that were competitive with ARM chips when it came to power draw.

Maybe, though their partnering with Qualcomm is suggestive: perhaps they're doing hardware-accelerated binary translation? That _might_ be fast and power efficient, who knows...

In any case, many users may just be wanting to run older enterprise apps, and so even then, with the translation penalty, they'll probably be quite snappy.

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#113

Post by xorxornop »

9erdelta wrote: post #67

For me it is more like hell no. I am having a hard time getting over stuff like, you know, waking up one day and Chrome is no longer my default browser.

How the hell does this happen. Seriously, I've ran Windows for like over 10 years now. It's happened a grand total of 3 times, ever, and 2 of those were back in the Windows 9x days, and the last one was between W8 and 8.1 (a major service pack).

Never since then. Oh, I'm even in the fast update pool. What do you people _do_?

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#114

Post by xorxornop »

protomyth wrote: post #101
cm2187 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. But it is a big deal. If the CLR is ported to ARM then any c#/vb code will run very efficiently on ARM without even needing to be recompiled or making use of the x86 emulation. That's a big deal for a corporate environment.

I just have a tough time imagining that Microsoft wouldn't (or hasn't given RT) the CLR to ARM. It would be news if it wasn't ported.

It has been, I'm running one such example on my Raspberry Pi 2 right now. It's just a DynDNS updater. Written in UWP.

I have tried it in CLR and native (machine code via .NET Native) modes. Both work great.

I'm pretty sure my Pi runs on an ARM chip, anyway

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#115

Post by xorxornop »

dragonbonheur wrote: post #33

An interesting development, but it is a shame that this will require a new chip from Qualcomm, while there have been full desktop Linux distributions for several ARM chips and boards for quite a while now. Microsoft's software is really full of bloat.

It probably doesn't require the chip... I'm thinking they are using some form of hardware accelerated binary translation.

Re: Windows on ARM, I run Windows IoT on a Raspberry Pi. Shows they have a good lot of it running, eg the full UWP UI system, kernel etc. Imagine it's the translation part that's deleted things.

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#116

Post by skrebbel »

WorldMaker wrote: post #91
skrebbel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still confused. Why are they run in a virtualized environment then? Can a Windows Store win32 app change system display gamma settings? Monitor all network traffic?

From what I've seen, most of the virtualization that remains is filesystem/registry virtualization, primarily with the goal to insure clean install/uninstall. Security is handled in most of the usual Win32 manners (user token privileges, UAC, et al). From your examples, I believe gamma settings would be accessible, but every tool I've seen that reliably monitors all network traffic uses a kernel-level driver and I do…

Awesome. This makes me wrong and my entire rant flawed. Thanks!

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#117

Post by ZenoArrow »

Eridrus wrote: post #88
ZenoArrow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Windows laptops with better battery life?" Not going to happen. There's a performance hit that almost certainly comes along with emulation. Battery life is likely to get worse with x86 Windows emulation on ARM. Also, by the time Intel stopped pushing x86 in mobile devices they were producing chips that were competitive with ARM chips when it came to power draw.

Does your comment still stand for the cheap end of things? If Intel struggles to compete on price, then low end ARM may have better perf characteristics. From what I read, doing binary translation from x86 to ARM is actually not that hard since ARM has many more registers, so I'm sort of hopeful they get decent perf from it.

> "If Intel struggles to compete on price, then low end ARM may have better perf characteristics."

I'd suggest it has more to do with the size of the silicon wafer rather than the performance.

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#118

Post by ZenoArrow »

xorxornop wrote: post #112
ZenoArrow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Windows laptops with better battery life?" Not going to happen. There's a performance hit that almost certainly comes along with emulation. Battery life is likely to get worse with x86 Windows emulation on ARM. Also, by the time Intel stopped pushing x86 in mobile devices they were producing chips that were competitive with ARM chips when it came to power draw.

Maybe, though their partnering with Qualcomm is suggestive: perhaps they're doing hardware-accelerated binary translation? That _might_ be fast and power efficient, who knows... In any case, many users may just be wanting to run older enterprise apps, and so even then, with the translation penalty, they'll probably be quite snappy.

> "That _might_ be fast and power efficient"

My argument is that it's not going to be as power efficient as using x86 natively. There's no getting around that.

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#119

Post by scholia »

RandomOpinion wrote: post #109
scholia wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. The apps were being developed for Windows Runtime. You shouldn't confuse that with the old Win32 API used by traditional Windows software. The only advantage of having an Intel processor would be for the old-style traditional apps, and if you allow those, you have all sorts of problems. They're not sandboxed like runtime apps, and you can't stop them from eating your battery. It's actually better to run t…

>" The only advantage of having an Intel processor would be for the old-style traditional apps, and if you allow those, you have all sorts of problems. " That's precisely what MS is allowing. From Thurott's article: " Even better, Windows 10 on ARM will supply a long-rumored feature: The ability to run 32-bit Win32/x86 desktop applications—Apple iTunes, Adobe Photoshop, Google Chrome, whatever—directly on the system,…

You appear to have overlooked the fact that OEMs can already make Intel-based smartphones and tablets, using Windows 10 for free. One smartphone example is the Asus ZenPhone, and there are plenty of tablets.

How many have you bought? How many has anyone bought?

> The ability to run 32-bit Win32/x86 desktop applications—Apple iTunes, Adobe Photoshop, Google Chrome, whatever—directly on the system, unchanged."

True, but they're in an emulator. Pretty sure they don't have access to the whole system, which they would on a standard Windows 10 device.

Re: ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes

#120

Post by 9erdelta »

xorxornop wrote: post #113
9erdelta wrote: post #67

For me it is more like hell no. I am having a hard time getting over stuff like, you know, waking up one day and Chrome is no longer my default browser.

How the hell does this happen. Seriously, I've ran Windows for like over 10 years now. It's happened a grand total of 3 times, ever, and 2 of those were back in the Windows 9x days, and the last one was between W8 and 8.1 (a major service pack). Never since then. Oh, I'm even in the fast update pool. What do you people _do_?

It happens after every Windows update. I'll log in, and have a message about the update, then see that Edge is my browser and VLC is no longer my default music player. Maybe it is because I have so many of the "features" of Windows 10 turned off? I dunno, but some people seem to not have the same experience.
Post reply on HN