261–270 of 567 posts
Microsoft's Apple envy continues - additionally hobbled by Qualcomm's indistinguished/2nd rate hardware and disinterested developers.
Or maybe, in some twisted logic they want to sabotage their own ARM products in favor of Intel
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i3/i5 12 and 13 gen? Outside m1/m2 there isn't any chip that can be compared to i5 intel 13 gen especially for PC space [that is in the same price bracket]. (maybe some arm chips can get close to i3 12100f but you can get it for 90 usd and get good single core performance so im not sure if in this price point is even any arm alternative)
what's the incentive for a chip manufacturer to put out a better ARM chip (eg comparable to the Apple M1)? I don't know that world well, so my best guess is that the margins go to the OS manufacturers, so unless you have guaranteed commitment from MSFT for a given volume, and some sharing of the margin, it's too risky to invest in the R&D to make a better ARM chip. The market for x86 chips is large and known, so for…
The vast majority of PCs are running 128 bit wide memory, with workstation CPUs like the threadripper (and pro) being the exception, but a VERY small fraction of the market.
The M1 has 128 bit wide 67GB/sec peak (that you'll never see) bandwidth, like most PCs. Upgrade to the Pro and you get 200GB/sec. Max will take you to 400GB/sec, and Ultra takes you to 800GB/sec.
On the Intel (i3, i5, i7, i9) or AMD (ryzen r3, r5, r7, r9) you get ... the same memory bandwidth. Check the 8 core vs 16 core scaling numbers and for most benchmarks you'll see poor scaling. Sure you can increase GPU performance by adding GPUs, which reduces (but not removes) the need for extra memory bandwidth. Sadly iGPUs (outside the XboxX and PS5) largely stink and are only good enough for non-GPU intensive workloads. Apple on the other hand does scale GPU performance, granted not to the levels that AMD and Nvidia do.
So why can't anyone in the PC space do more memory bandwidth and a decent iGPU, especially when for years the GPUs were in short supply and had exorbitant prices. I think it does come down to OS support, volume (which could be problematic if current GPU customers avoid you), and potentially reducing profits for AMD (who would have sold an expensive external GPU). Not to mention that fast/wide ram requires soldering chips on board or increasing size/cost with large banks of ram. Even servers with 8 memory channels (minimum 8 dimms) only get you to the M1 pro level (1/2 of the m1 max and 1/4th of the m1 ultra).
Apple can say we have X% of the market today, and all new customers will be on our new platform with 2 years, so the driver, OS, iGPU, memory bandwidth, etc will be amortized over substantial volumes. Additionally Apple gets a larger fraction of the revenue, since they aren't paying Nvidia or AMD for a GPU. Who is going to push a MBP or Apple studio competitor that could ship the same volumes?
Seems like this is a sign of things to come in Windows platforms too, since Microsoft are including an NPU in this devkit. The PC of the future may well end up being CPU+GPU+NPU as standard, much as it is CPU+GPU today.
The difference here is that the M1 in the M1 mac mini is faster than Apple's phone SoC (the A16). The Qualcomm 8cx gen 3 (what a terrible name) in this machine is NOT faster than even Qualcomm's phone SoC (the 8 gen 1), let alone Apple's phone SoC. It's absurd to be selling a desktop PC that's weaker than a phone.
I admit I'm disappointed in the showing, and I think that Microsoft not loosing out on this market is important to them. I'd be willing to be bet 2nd gen of this will likely be produced by a 3rd party vendor.
The most interesting part to me was the quote from Denuvo, presumably testing out pluton: “The Volterra devices are neat and powerful, ideal for us to test our market-leading anti-piracy and anti-cheat game security technologies. They’re also very quiet, and they just work out of the box.” – Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by Irdeto
I just thought the same, but not WPF native on arm?, but an emulation layer?, still looks very promising.
Haven’t bought a Windows machine in a few years. It seems like this would likely be useful as a general purpose development machine because there is probably no crapware installed. Do you think this is a plausible argument to buy one or are they now all infested no matter what?
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I doubt this is going to feel slow in actual use. You've got 8 big arm cores with a lot of memory, fast storage, and active cooling.
I learned this lesson the hard way during the AMD Phenom era. Core count are not a good representation of performance because the 8 "big" cores could be blazing fast or be secretly powered by a hamster on a wheel. What is the actual benchmark performance on real applications you might use? Thats what matters at the end of the day.
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>> An ARM based Windows computer isn't a bad idea, I just question if Microsoft is able to deliver on it. Microsoft has already executed and brutally failed with ARM in the form of the disastrous Surface RT/Windows RT. But, and more importantly. Two people with unlimited resources are running a race car race. One starts a year or two before the other. Even with unlimited resources; the other racer/team has unlimited…
If MS showed up with a backward compatibility layer as good as Apple’s Rosetta, they’d instantly be a strong competitor. Maybe not for gaming systems or high-end workstations — at least not immediately — but in the huge space of people who want a battery sipping laptop with access to a vast amount of software they’re already using.
For an "acceptable" laptop, the price point is already pretty close to $1000, and before I would have a tentative recommendation of MacBooks/Macbook Airs because of the learning curve of MacOS. With M1/M2 and how much better it is than anything else on the consumer market, I openly recommend it to anyone in the market for a new consumer machine. Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine.
I was discussing this with a colleague last night, but the M1/M2 chips and complimentary hardware let Apple do some amazing stuff out of the box without adjustment that Windows simply has no answer for. The integration of the complimentary hardware with the M1/M2 chips is so strong that I stumbled onto features I completely missed announcements on, and it legitimately "wow'd" me.
- Live Text caught me off-guard while drag/drop-ing an image to a chat app. I couldn't stop testing its limits and reading the dev docs
- I took surprise calls from really crowded + noisy places and was in disbelief that my call partners couldn't hear anything but my voice in crystal clear quality
- I ran games and software that just weren't possible on Intel Macs through Rosetta at pretty fine FPS/quality without incident
- I didn't need to change a single program from my workflow
Microsoft can likely do the same but they need to put the legwork in to make it happen. Personally I understand they have no interest in this and it makes sense -- they want you on Azure with your server workloads and this keeps the lights on at Microsoft, and as best I know the consumer market (not considering gaming) still favors Windows. But I guess that's why projects like this confuse me a lot since it must be a pretty substantial RND and manufacturing cost, neverminding advertising, but Microsoft doesn't seem to have their heart in it.
It's not about backwards compatibility - consumers don't need to keep Windows 3.0 apps running, not a statistically significant portion anyways, they just need modern apps to run fast and well, long battery life on portable devices, quiet machines, and that's it, but seems that this just isn't something Microsoft is interested in taking over.
I really can't think of Windows features in decades that "wow" so much as you just know what you get with Windows regardless of the version in terms of basic features; what worked on Windows XP probably works on Windows 11, but even that is starting to erode in a slow and painful way. There are quite a few programs on Windows I get the impression that Microsoft just doesn't want me to be running, but things like the Windows Store, Windows' implementation of security for unsigned apps, etc, these all feel like Microsoft isn't confident enough to fully invest into these new features or to drop them in order to advance.
Microsoft definitely has the talent and cash reserves to pursue a strong consumer laptop to compete with Apple; for whatever reason, they don't seem to have the interest though for consumer devices. Probably the simplest reason is the server market is theirs and this is plenty of money, but I just can't get why they continue with such forays then.
Edit: just elaborated on price point for consumer laptops and recommending machines.
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Personally I find Windows 11 fine although the decision to make the start bar only icons instead of icon + text is a bit bizarre in today’s trend towards (ultra)wide monitors.
I despise the fact that there is no right-click/context menu on the task bar. I use that frequently.
Explorer Patcher can fix it all but you shouldn’t be obliged to fight the OS to feel productive.