Technology

Is Microsoft working on a compatibility layer like Apple did? If no then 2024 is just another x86_64 year filled with bullshit news and hype train conductors.

Having used an ARM Mac, and the pains of countless utilities and apps that are x86/x64 only, as well as the pains of virtualising x86/x64 operating systems, I’m not a fan. I can virtualise ARM just fine on x64 but not the other way around.

(Edit: I’m not referring to OS utilities and apps - Apple have done a fine job with porting the OS to ARM, but the same can’t be said for the wider ecosystem - especially FOSS and niche developer toolchains).

They're going to have to get the emulation working better for x86/x64 software. And they're going to have to get the driver situation sorted -- which likely means requiring ARM drivers alongside x86/x64 drivers in order to meet certification for having a Windows sticker or WHQL certification to gradually build up the list of supported hardware.

Not a chance. We have several more years of x86 dominance.

How can it be both the year of ARM and the year of the linux desktop?

I don’t care as long as desktops remain modular.

Nope, I'll never run windows on anything other than x86 (for my desktop).

I'm very happy with my ARM MBP for work, but I occasionally pull up software written decades ago (either music production plugins or games typically) on windows and it still runs, some of the companies that wrote that software no longer exist, so no first party patches will be coming.

For all the informed technical analysis and debates about this, the vast majority of consumers don't care about any of this stuff, and they're the ones who will decide this "year of the whatever." The worse option technically speaking has won out many times in the past.

Tell me you never used Arm based system for daily drive without telling me you never used Arm based system. General software compatibility is not there and PC is not only on Windows or Mac. Sure on Mac they have enterprise support for their user. By having more power (bruteforcing) to run the emulation simply does not mean the software run flawless.

Maybe I'm a bit bias since I'm comparing it with SBCs (but thats what is affordable). As someone who have Raspberry Pi 4 and Orange Pi 5, the situation is a bit different. Raspberry Pi have a well supported system by communities and the devs, meanwhile on Orange Pi 5 some drivers are not released by the Orange Pi/left to the dust if there are no maintainer, not to mention if you want specific build of binary which not covered by repo/ppa, you have to build yourself from source, and the GPU driver situation for OPi5 which not yet have Vulkan support and sub par performance on Linux meanwhile on RPi5 they have Vulkan support 2 weeks after release.

All the top posts here are people saying it won’t happen.

I was at the store over the weekend and saw a full display of chromebooks. Someone purchased one right in front of me.

I’m sure there’s a market for both technologies to exist at the same time.

There's a lot of focus on Windows for these types of chips, but Chromebooks are probably the best use case for them right now. ChromeOS runs great on ARM and there's no legacy software to worry about, but they feel kind of slow because the ARM chips they've used have been slow. I'd love an ARM Chromebook that actually rips.

Yeah, no. Still got a huge software issue there.

Lololol no.

Could we have a future where we have an arm main CPU, gaming GPU, and also an x86 card?

I've used an ARM Mac for the past 3 years on both macOS and Linux. My trusty M1 Air has been an absolute joy to use. I would like more options for a fast, battery efficient and most importantly fanless laptop, so I'm looking forward to this.

The main advantage of ARM right now is that there are low power cores available. The actual instruction set is unrelated to this advantage. If Intel or AMD put more serious effort into power efficiency most of the advantages go out the window.

As for instruction set changes impacting what software you can run I think that is still a big issue. Yes porting to ARM is straitforward in more modern programming environments but most software actively developed at the moment has a lot of old cruft that won't easily port if the engineers can even be convinced to touch it. Most businesses are dependent on old software not all of which is still maintained. Most gamers are even more tied to old software that is not going to get ported and often has annoying anti-virtualization checks (see games breaking on systems with enabled intel e-cores).

I am not sure how large the modern non gaming personal pc market is (tablets, phones, works computers, and chromebooks probably took a chunk out of it) but that could be in play.

Limping along with a wonky hinge on my 5 year old laptop waiting for these to come out. Haven't run windows for years now so I don't think I'll be missing intel much at all. Might have to do some cross compiling for deploying software to intel cloud nodes, but arm VMs for android development will speedy.

I think this is likely. After dealing with how bad W11 is, MS realized they don't need working software or backwards compatibility to sell units.

Silly bot, windows go on the walls.

Don't care what Windows does. What's going on on Linux here.

Wake me up when they make faster ARM than my 5900x