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

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

#421

Post by MBCook »

tails4e wrote: post #416
sylens wrote: post #358

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 <$1000

I have a macbook pro 16 (the last Intel one) and it has a claimed 10 hour battery life. I use it mostly for ms office (excel, PowerPoint, outlook) and have zoom/teams open in the background, as well as citirx for access to some Linux servers. I'm lucky to get an hour and a half. Fans running, etc. Window_server chwes up battery like no one's business. Nice hw is nice, but I'm very dissapointed at my first toe-dip int…

I’ve got a similar machine. The last 15” Intel.

Honestly it’s kind of one of the worst. The 2010 was pretty great. If you ignore they keyboard issues (a BIG DEAL) they got better for a few years.

In the last few years it became very clear Apple just couldn’t do what they wanted as the Intel chips kept getting hotter and more power hungry.

I’m sorry you got that experience. It was and now is so much better. You kind of lucked into a low point.

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

#422

Post by wyldfire »

MBCook wrote: post #314
Joe_Boogz wrote: post #197

It appears the consensus is HN is hesitant about the Windows on ARM push. I really want this to succeed. If this gains traction then we should start seeing support for windows laptops on ARM. As a dev who prefers windows but has a m1 MacBook b/c of the battery life I really hope this works out.

I’m out of the Windows ecosystem, except one machine at work. I’d love Windows on ARM to work. I love my M1 and would like something comparable. But Apple had the M1 and the ARM PCs seem to be based on iPhone 7 level chips (perceptually). “You can have Intel or ARM. No one buys ARM so there is little software. Windows was ruined on ARM for a long time. Your ARM laptop will be way slower, but it will be cheap because…

> Your ARM laptop will be way slower, but it will be cheap because the only ones you can buy are ultra-low spec with terrible components like eMMC storage.

It's not clear what you're quoting from. But it's out of date, now. The last generation (or two?) of windows ARM laptops certainly have NVMe storage. And they're not generally cheap (in cost nor components).

> MS can’t fix it (without their own chip) and Qualcomm seemingly wont either.

Well, launching these laptops without a native Chrome build was a bit of a blunder IMO. That was ~2-3 generations ago and while Google might not ship Chrome for windows-arm64 (last I checked), you can download native binaries of Chromium.

IIRC MS does somehow co-brand w/Qualcomm for the SoCs used on the ARM Surface. But I kinda doubt Microsoft will start designing their own.

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

#423

Post by bigmattystyles »

siggen wrote: post #337
kstrauser wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve gotta agree with you there. I love my Apple gear, but I hear and understand the criticisms against them. The above argument sounds to me like “you think one monopolist is bad? Wait until there are 2 of them!”

It will be an oligopoly then.

But wouldn't that be trending the right direction? Seems like a case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

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

#424

Post by sylens »

neogodless wrote: post #408
sylens wrote: post #358

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 <$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 nor…

First, I'm not in Apple's corner by any means. Before I left this comment, I left another one on a different story critical of what they've been doing with macOS.

But I've tried a lot of laptops over the pandemic and nothing has come close to the Apple silicon ones in terms of responsiveness, power efficiency, and just plain reliability. And in terms of sheer battery life and weight, the MBA is king of the hill. Sure, I'm not gaming on it - but then again, I can't stand gaming on a laptop to begin with, as the heat and fan noise really bother me. A typical consumer picking out a laptop for college or for use around the house would be better solved with an M1 MBA than almost any Windows laptop unless they have an absolutely mission critical software need.

The MBA isn't for everyone - heck, it can only support 1 external monitor - but it 's the right fit for that middle part of the bell curve.

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

#425

Post by schaefer »

paxys wrote: post #57
nick88msn wrote: post #8

"Microsoft tells Windows Central that the Windows Dev Kit 2023 is exclusive to Windows 11, with no official support for running other operating systems such as Linux or even Windows 10 on ARM. The product is designed for developers looking to optimize their apps for ARM on top of Windows 11."

That doesn't really mean anything. No laptop released by Microsoft or most of its OEMs officially supports Linux. I'd wager this one will be running some ARM distro within 5 minutes of the first developer getting their hands on it.

> No laptop released by Microsoft or most of its OEMs officially supports Linux.

I disagree that "Most OEMs don't officially support Linux". Lenovo supports Linux on 17 laptops released in 2022 alone [1]. Dell also has a similar effort, with Linux supported on the 2022 XPS 13 Plus [2] among others. HP has its DevOne[3]

But at the moment, I don't know of an modern, high performance ARM laptop with official Linux support.

The closest thing I know of is the Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin Dev kit by NVIDIA[4].

[1] https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-fo... [2] https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops?q=&limit=20&release=22.... [3] https://hpdevone.com/ [4] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...

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

#426

Post by pornel »

treis wrote: post #298
pornel wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course Qualcomm being chronically incapable of making fast CPUs doesn't help, but partly it's just a chicken-egg problem of lack of ARM-optimized Windows software caused by the lack of ARM Windows users. Having a decent devkit may help bring more native ARM software, which may make these underpowered machines struggle less with speed and compatibility.

Genuinely asking because I don't know. Is there anything that's better about ARM or is the Apple/TSMC being better than Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung, et. al.?

TSMC tech helps a lot, but is not exclusive to Apple. A relatively modern and sensible 64-bit ARM architecture helps too, but on top of that Apple seems to be really good at designing the chips.

OTOH Qualcomm is constantly lagging behind Apple, promising that next year they will be almost as fast as a previous-gen Apple chip. The most generous explanation I've heard is that Qualcomm is specializing in quantity over quality, and focuses on making CPUs cheap, rather than fast.

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

#427

Post by cdash »

GeekyBear wrote: post #138
awill wrote: post #78

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 think the point of this machine is to give Developers a test bed for apps they port to ARM Windows. However, given that it took Microsoft more than a decade to decide to port their own Visual Studio to ARM Windows, I'm not sure why they think third parties are chomping at the bit. If Microsoft wants to copy Apple, they need to copy the decision to immediately port all their first party software.

Why would developers want to waste time porting to ARM Windows though?

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

#428

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

The M-series is very directly comparable to, say, an AMD Zen 3 v-cache or a Zen 4 processor. In many scenarios the AMD is faster, and in others the M-series is faster.

The main advantage of the M-series if for laptops on battery. Desktops, gaming, and software development is still significantly better on Intel-compatible desktops. E.g.: I can run Windows 11 with WSL 2 and Docker. That lets me develop using multiple huge ecosystems of tools seamlessly. With Apple, you get immediately relegated to a tiny corner of "optimised for M1" software, and have to either emulate or use cloud-hosting for everything else.

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

#429

Post by my123 »

withinrafael wrote: post #420

This is Microsoft's second go at a developer-focused ARM kit. You may recall the first was called the Snapdragon Developer Kit [1] and was a miserable machine. It appears Microsoft has already pulled it from the Microsoft Store [2]. There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.) Seems like a…

Snapdragon Developer Kit was built with a "cost above all" mandate, $219 target pricing but it just wasn't powerful enough.

> There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.)

Azure cloud instances are also an option.

> but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific development

I think that there is. If there isn't, Windows has bigger problems...

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

#430

Post by yieldcrv »

Joe_Boogz wrote: post #197

It appears the consensus is HN is hesitant about the Windows on ARM push. I really want this to succeed. If this gains traction then we should start seeing support for windows laptops on ARM. As a dev who prefers windows but has a m1 MacBook b/c of the battery life I really hope this works out.

Yeah I want arm windows exclusively so I can install a pirated version on arm bootcamp
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