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Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#401

Post by fxtentacle »

jstimpfle wrote: post #119
fxtentacle wrote: post #50

Sorry Microsoft, you lost me with Windows 11. I'll wait until you release a worthy successor to Windows 10, just like when I skipped Vista.

Is there a list of things that are worse with 11? I had it pushed on one of my less frequently used devices and so far all that has been annoying has been the Explorer context menu which hides "less used" items (some of which I frequently need, of course) behind a "More" entry.

They basically tried to remove everything that needs a 2nd mouse button. Plus many keyboard shortcuts are gone. It looks and feels like an iPad to me, not like an environment to be productive in.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#402

Post by fxtentacle »

DeathArrow wrote: post #88
fxtentacle wrote: post #50

Sorry Microsoft, you lost me with Windows 11. I'll wait until you release a worthy successor to Windows 10, just like when I skipped Vista.

I also skipped Windows Millennium and Windows 8.

Yeah ME was awful, too. I thought 8.1 was actually OK.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#403

Post by chaostheory »

karmelapple wrote: post #322
MBCook wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone had a battery life test for phones. The iPhones beat the android phones in nearly every test by hours. And they only had 60-70% of the raw battery capacity. And you know they have faster processors too. It’s so weird to me. The A series is kind of “that doesn’t count” because the competition can’t get close. The M series wowed people and then we all went back to normal AMD/Intel stuff like nothing happened. I…

Who went back to AMD/Intel stuff? Any Apple user is far away from that, and comparing the performance, heat, noise, and battery differences between my Intel and Apple Silicon computers, I have no desire to regularly use an Intel machine until they make some stratospheric leap. (I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)

For VR and games, Apple doesn’t compare to PCs for now until Apple Reality is released. Apple tolerates video games now because of the revenue, but they still don’t like them. The M2 is the most amazing Apple upgrade that I’ve ever had, but it’s an ecosystem that doesn’t garner enough support for non-mobile, non-iOS video games.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#404

Post by MBCook »

eklitzke wrote: post #280
pge wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Long term there is a huge market for server-oriented CPUs that can compete with Intel Xeon, which currently has a near monopoly in the server market. Note that a lot of companies are already working on this: Ampere (ARM), Amazon (Graviton3, etc.), and likely Nvidia, Rivos (RISC-V), etc. The best of market ARM designs don't really compete head-to-head with Xeon right now, but there are still a ton of server applicatio…

Performance is irrelevant depending on metrics.

If my new zCPU chip is 60% as fast as a Xeon at your task, that’s a problem.

If it can do it at 40% of the Xeon’s power, things get interesting.

I could use twice as many zCPUs, be 20% faster, and use 20% less power. That also means less cooling capacity in my DC.

Some tasks will always need the absolute best single threaded performance. But a lot don’t. And the Xeon’s power requirements leave a large opening we’re starting to see other companies poke at with things like Graviton.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#405

Post by MBCook »

Damogran6 wrote: post #236
Sakos wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a chicken or the egg dilemma. Non-Apple ARM is too slow, so nobody wants Windows ARM, and nobody wants Windows ARM, so nobody is seriously working on consumer-targeted ARM. It will probably fail because Microsoft is generally bad at managing and marketing their hardware projects and coordinating with manufacturers and retail partners. Also, yeah, the pricing and performance is abysmal. But there is some sense to…

In a way, it's not much different than when they were porting Windows NT to Dec ALPHA. (But I suspect ARM has legs, where Alpha didn't)

Didn’t NT actually start on the Alpha and end up with x86 becoming a co-platform (and later main platform) during development?

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#406

Post by judge2020 »

MBCook wrote: post #309
Nican wrote: post #260

Jeff Atwood 5 years ago: "the Qualcomm hardware people told Google internally they were 5 years behind Apple on hardware. This was about 1.5 years ago, but I believe that's about right." ( https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1050538041796788225 ) And benchmarks continue to show: https://twitter.com/slightlylate/status/1584350796233117696

Someone had a battery life test for phones. The iPhones beat the android phones in nearly every test by hours. And they only had 60-70% of the raw battery capacity. And you know they have faster processors too. It’s so weird to me. The A series is kind of “that doesn’t count” because the competition can’t get close. The M series wowed people and then we all went back to normal AMD/Intel stuff like nothing happened. I…

Apple's decision to keep the A15 in the lower-tier 14 models shows that they did not expect everyone else (Qualcomm) to stop innovating on performance.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#407

Post by MBCook »

josephg wrote: post #363
karmelapple wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who went back to AMD/Intel stuff? Any Apple user is far away from that, and comparing the performance, heat, noise, and battery differences between my Intel and Apple Silicon computers, I have no desire to regularly use an Intel machine until they make some stratospheric leap. (I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)

I did. I moved over to linux mint for at-the-desk programming (though I still use a macbook while traveling). My linux desktop idles at 0% CPU, which is something macos hasn't been able to deliver for 5+ years at this point. Current generation Intel / AMD desktop CPUs have similar performance to apple's M1/M2 chips. They just consume a lot more power. (Though apparently applying a slight underclock makes a huge diffe…

> They just consume a lot more power

This is the thing I’m stuck on. Computers are all roughly the same speed, for the point of this discussion.

But there is no contest in power. If you’re in the Windows world you have no good choices. Fast and hot to very slow and cool.

Where is the “pretty fast and nicely cool” choice? Someone proved it can exist.

But it’s not there and people don’t seem to be very upset about that. And I’m surprised.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#408

Post by neogodless »

sylens wrote: post #358
MBCook wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone had a battery life test for phones. The iPhones beat the android phones in nearly every test by hours. And they only had 60-70% of the raw battery capacity. And you know they have faster processors too. It’s so weird to me. The A series is kind of “that doesn’t count” because the competition can’t get close. The M series wowed people and then we all went back to normal AMD/Intel stuff like nothing happened. I…

It is astonishing to me that people are out there buying Intel PC laptops when the M1 MBA can be had for <$1000

Comments like this astonish me, a little. First that Apple is so good at advertising. Well done! Second, that a Macbook Air is the only form factor anyone could conceivably need? Or that macOS covers all use cases?

My (largely useless in this context) personal anecdote is that I spent $1029 for a gaming laptop. AMD Ryzen 7 4800H (8-cores, 16 threads), 16GB, 1TB, RTX 2060 6GB. Gets about 4-5 hours of battery doing normal stuff. Plugged in for gaming. (Yes, it runs all of my Steam collection!) It's very fast for everything I use it for. (I mostly work on my desktop, but I've used it for various development, etc. - Visual Studio Community, SQL Server Management Studio, VS Code, WSL/WSL2 and all Linux-based development I've done, photo editing, etc., of course it can run web browsers and be used to check email!)

Why wouldn't I buy a laptop that costs this much and can do so many things well? Because it doesn't work away from plugs for a day? But I live and work at home. Near lots of plugs!

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#409

Post by makeitdouble »

58028641 wrote: post #387
q-big wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is astonishing to me that people are out there buying Intel PC laptops when the M1 MBA can be had for Can the M1 MBA run Windows? EDIT: Or can it run GNU/Linux natively (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33320765 )?

Apple Silicon Macs can run Windows and Linux in a VM. Asahi Linux (native) is making decent progress.

To caveat, Linux in a VM is decent enough for non GUI programs, Windows might have harder limitations on anything that wants GPU power or direct peripherics access, and Asahi Linux is a research project at this point.

We’re far far from the dual booting days, running a mac VM on a Windows machine is probably the holy grail of running every OS on a single machine at this point in time.

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