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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

#441

Post by GeekyBear »

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.?

If the company is selling just the chip, it's in their best interests to hold the die size down as much as possible because doing so directly effects their profit margin.

If the company is selling the whole device, including the chip, they can afford to throw more transistors and die area at performance with a much more minimal impact on their bottom line.

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

#442

Post by tomcam »

tomcam wrote: post #284
smoldesu wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might not get the longest-term support, but it seems like a half-decent deal. If you're comfortable turning it into a home server/compute module once it reaches EOL, I'd say go for it.

Yeah I like that choice to

* too

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

#443

Post by monocasa »

csdvrx wrote: post #434
kotaKat wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm sitting here shocked at everyone's hate. I took a major leap and bought a Thinkpad X13s, with the same 8cx Gen 3 CPU this thing has. I am beyond impressed at it. Windows 11 on it - while, yes, it's Windows 11 with its own concerns and issues - runs flawlessly. I've been able to run my traditional x86 and x64 workloads - even things like arm64 Tailscale without issues, and I get amazing battery life. I am 10…

I love windows and wanted to give it a try, but the lack of OLED option is bothering me. Can you comment about the battery life and the "traditional x86" workloads? Does it use a just-in-time compilation? (I haven't looked at the details yet) Can you dual boot to a Linux arm64 distribution?

> Does it use a just-in-time compilation?

It's a caching JIT that'll squirrel away the translations to use across program invocations, and even shared between different programs in the case of .dlls.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...

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

#444

Post by rodgerd »

moomin wrote: post #376
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!)

The entertaining thing here is that Apple’s walled garden is intended to keep people in, but here it’s keeping them out. The M1 is a technical marvel, but if you’re not already tied to Apple, it’s nowhere near good enough to warrant leaping that wall.

"Apple should adopt Dell's business model, it will work briliantly" is a thing that Apple have heard for a long time.

When they tried in the 90s they went broke and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.

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

#445

Post by RachelF »

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.

Once bitten, twice shy?

MS released Windows on ARM with Windows 8. It them abandoned it and the users.

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

#446

Post by fomine3 »

derefr wrote: post #347
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm okay with Microsoft failing at projects like this. We don't need another Apple-like presence on the market. Personally I’m not ok with being locked out of potential computing power by platform so I can’t get excited as MS struggles to keep up. It’s either MS keeps up or the future ahead is dark.

> It’s either MS keeps up or the future ahead is dark. You say that as if Apple will become some sort of PC-market hegemon, driving consumers and professionals to use its proprietary ARM hardware and OS despite having traditional Windows- or Linux-based workflows, simply because Apple's ARM is just so much faster . Here's the third option: nobody cares what Apple is doing over in its corner of the PC market; the PC m…

I wish Apple's proprietary computing platform keep niche but continue building good products. However iPhone become top share on some market and perhaps is it much higher share on enterprise?

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

#447

Post by MBCook »

hestefisk wrote: post #432
MBCook wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Close. The original NT targeted an experimental Intel cpu called i860 (RISC based) nicknamed “N10”. NT was, according to Wikipedia, a play on words for the target cpu architecture. From Wikipedia: “One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten")”. NT was always supposed to be multi architecture (MIPS, Alpha, I…

That’s right. I forgot a third (failed) processor. Thanks.

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

#449

Post by fomine3 »

qball wrote: post #377
mmis1000 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the primary reason that windows rt failed totally is no software can run on it at all. Not only you can't run x86 software. You can't even download random executable and run it. It is basically killed by ms itself. It is always a mystery to me that why ms would expect user to buy a device that nearly run nothing. It looks like they want to address this. But I wonder if they will succeed this time.

>It is always a mystery to me that why ms would expect user to buy a device that nearly run nothing. Because at the end of the day, Windows RT was a creature born of greed. They saw dollar signs- Apple's 30% App Store cut- and as such wanted a machine that forced you to buy software only from them. There was no technical reason that normal software couldn't run on Windows RT, given that MS themselves did it with Offi…

IIRC, Office RT was made as preinstalled Win32 app, not made on Windows Runtime.

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

#450

Post by fomine3 »

neogodless wrote: post #167
msoad wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget that Microsoft did not put in the work to optimize for Arm like Apple did.

At least according to this related blog post[0] (and submission[1]), they've put in work, albeit not as thorough and effective as Rosetta 2. > To boost performance, we have added vendor-specific optimizations so your apps run well on a variety of Arm hardware. We have several runtime improvements to targeting server throughput (RPS) and latency. Seems largely focused on .NET 7 though[2]. [0] https://blogs.windows.com…

Arm64EC is also looks good
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