Hell, even Rock chip is making real progress ar this point. The new RK series SoCs have some legitimately impressive performance compared to previous generations.
Aside from Nvidia & Apple they're literally the only ARM company that makes PC-level ARM chips. The big Snapdragon 9 Gen 1 ain't coming until 2024, but don't expect RTX 3080 level of performance from them
Mediacom could be a player too. And I think if the focus early on would be energy efficient Windows laptops that could compete with the M1 Air in terms of price (half the price, a little slower, but similar battery life at least), Microsoft could maybe take that edge they don't get as much with cheaper Celeron/Atom laptops.
also this devkit is not really meant for development development as you implied, it's more of a testing device for devs moving to arm. most development will probably gonna be happening on a different computer.
Right. I'll have an automated test runner running automated testing on this platform, looking for fundamental bugs, and I'll have a QA person testing builds on it. There's no way I write code, commit it to git and build in visual studio on here, but I might use this as a remote target and connect visual studio to remote debug an issue.
It's a native environment for 'run checking' an ARM compiled Windows app. That would be why they engineered it using an existing commercial Windows ARM platform, so that it gives a good real-world result.
@@jasonhaven7170 Most things work on the principle of finding some one who did it right and copying them, if your lucky you improve on it. Most apples best projects have just been a copy of something but done better. They did not make the first MP3 player, they made the one every one wanted. They did not make the first phone, they made the one people wanted. They did not make the first CPU, they made it better (but lost the people who made the M1 CPU, that's a mistake!).
I bought an RT when they released and really liked it, but it was certainly limited due to lack of developer support. Sadly, the same thing happened to the Windows phone, which I also really liked.
Yeah Win11 ARM running inside Parallels on my Macbook Pro M1 Max is pretty great - for the apps I use on Windows no problems and it's fast enough that I don't notice how fast or slow it is.
I'm Running Win 11 using Parallels on my M1 Max Mac Studio... It's probably the most pleasant Windows experience I've ever had! ( And have been using Windows since Windows 3.1! ) And the fact I could use my x86 Win 7 Licence to get ARM Windows made the switch painless
@@pinkorcyanbutlong5651 I think they target different market, just like he says. The chip is the same as in surface studio (a frickin tablet) which you compare an M1 a fully fledged Desktop use. Most dev probably won't develope using that device since it will much harder to develop there. They only use it for build and testing
The absolute worst part about this is that I see it being achievable unlike some of the pie in the sky ambitions they have sometimes. Fantastic video and a great breakdown
I don't see why they'd bother to dothis. They can just sit and as long as devs don't care about Mac (which is most of the time), Intel and AMD wouldn't switch and they'd keep minting money. This is something that s not happening that Apple fans (myself inluded) insist is happening: there is no ARM revolution.
Windows on ARM has came a long way since it was originally introduced in 1996. It still had a ways to go but part of the comparison that makes the Qualcomm chip look bad is that Rosetta is built into the chip on the M1 which Microsoft hasn't baked the translation layer into the chip yet. In this case it is better that Apple has designed their own chip since they were able to do this.
@@williamdrum9899 From a recent Old New Thing article called "Why does the usage of the initial registers of a Win32 process depend on whether it is a 32-bit or 64-bit process?", Raymond Chen notes: "Windows has supported many 32-bit processor architectures, and I’ve covered many of them in the past: x86-32, Alpha AXP, MIPS III, PowerPC, SuperH-3, and ARM. It also has supported a number of 64-bit processor architectures, including Alpha AXP (using all 64 bits this time), Itanium, x86-64, and AArch64." Windows has existed on a lot of things that aren't x86 :)
If Microsoft could even at this game with Apple, that would be great for the PC people as a whole. On a side note, have you heard about the Asahi project? They ported Linux over to the M1/M2 silicon and recently achieved hardware accelerated graphics through a reverse engineered driver. It would be cool if you cover at some point. Anyways quality video, Quinn.
Unfortunately MIcrosoft simply is not in a position to mount a wholesale transition to ARM. It's not going to happen. As long as there's still an abundance of new x86 PC options, few people are going to bother with Windows ARM just to get better power efficiency. Too many people play video games which would be some of the last things to get ported to ARM. Apple got away with it because people didn't really depend on Mac to play video games much in the first place. So there wasn't much expectation to be able to on M1 either. Not to mention, Windows is known for supporting legacy software. Apple doesn't have to. The expectation for Apple users and developers is that binaries will just stop working on recent versions of MacOS after like 5 years. But Microsoft tries to support stuff that's like 20+ years old. Microsoft has way too much momentum on x86. They are going to ride it out to the bitter end.
@@yarnosh Yeah, that is pretty true. This looks most likely to go the way of the Windows Phone. But if they get the ball rolling, we can hope someone will take it further.
@@yarnosh Lol "People won't pay for better power efficiency" Did you just forget that laptops exist? The reason people aren't buying is because developers aren't supporting, costs are prohibitively high on the few Windows-on-ARM devices that exist (plus the ARM version of Windows is locked down so you can't put it on other popular ARM hardware like dev boards), and most of all... Because the performance is trash, especially for the price. It's mainly Qualcomm's fault, if you ask me. I can't wait for the exclusivity deal to expire soon, because Qualcomm has become fat and lazy on their throne of being the "flagship chip" company, their recent smartphone SoCs are nightmares of heat and poor efficiency, and barely more powerful than last few gens. Exynos and even MediaTek are catching up quick if not already on par. Imagine being on par with the budget option and the only reason you get picked is exclusivity deals lmao. Their days of being on top are surely numbered and that's a good thing. It's amazing to see what Apple has been able to achieve with ARM, hardware and software wise, so I just wish the same was possible with the more open ecosystem of PC as a whole (be it Windows or Linux, but let's face it, high performance Linux ARM laptops/desktops are a pipe dream unless a big company like Microsoft makes it happen with Windows first, then we can just install Linux).
@@datachu People will only pay for power efficiency if they can run their apps reliably on it, but developers won't bother making their apps work on Windows ARM until there is a critical mass of users to make it worthwhile. Microsoft simply does not have the leverage here to push things in any one direction. As long as the vast majority of Windows users are on x86, there's where the focus will be. And as the video pointed out, it's actually a better deal, with better performance, to just get a Mac Mini and run WIndows 11 ARM in parallels than it it is to get Microsoft hardware. Rosetta is just better than Microsoft's x86 emulation. You get so much more with the Mac. A better Qualcomm offering would help, but they're just so far behind. They're too late. Apple was successful, yes, in part because the M1 was such a strong chip, but also because they control ALL the hardware. Apple essentially just left x86 behind. Microsoft can't do that. They won't do that.
@@datachu Also, with regard to Linux on high performance ARM laptops, Apple actually has a headstart there as well with Asahi Linux getting GPU support on M1. If Apple is smart they'll help Linux run better on their hardware. And I bet many Linux users will even switch to MacOS once they have genuine hardware. I know I did years ago. I used to be 100% Linux at work and home and then switched to MacOS.
I'm glad they put some effort into making arm-based hardware that is affordable. Arm-based windows (for a long time) has been hot garbage. Apple's translation layers make the change to ARM so seamless and that's what is holding windows back in terms of arm transitions, and getting the arm-based devices into developers hands (and for cheap) will hopefully improve the experience going forward.
Microsoft’s emulation layer isn’t the problem, it’s the Qualcomm chips that are running half the raw horsepower that Apple’s machines have. If Microsoft had access to chips with M1’s power then people would be happy to leave Intel behind and developers would jump at the opportunity to port their software.
@@rstidman Yeah it was pretty decent for the time. The phone software for ARM they had after win8 was pretty good too, but they barely touched advertising it.
@@chfgn Depends on what you are doing, you will notice that most of the benchmarks are based on perf per watt, this is not a linear curve as can be seen by the performance of the M2 (which is the M1 chip with extra cores and the power limiter removed), thus when you ramp up an AMD system for multi-core processing or a 3080/3090 for vertex transformations the M1/M2 struggle and perform quite badly in comparison. Even for compilation, the M2 is only just faster (~3%) on a $4k (AUD) M2 system than a lappy I bought for $2k that is running a mid-high range 12th gen intel. Not that I do much compilation on a laptop as I notice quite the difference in speed compared to desktop.
What Apple's done with their chips is nothing short of a minor miracle. But so far every other ARM SoC is hot garbage from a raw performance standpoint. The other issue is Apple has tight control of their ecosystem, so they can force devs on to a new architecture. Microsoft would have a much harder time with that. On top of that, after Arm (the company) announced more licensing restrictions, I'm starting to think RISC-V is the way forward. There's very few reasons to move away from x86 in the meantime.
Agreed. And even if there weren’t licensing restrictions for ARM, the fact that RISC-V is an open, royalty-free standard means that it (the ISA) is immune to international trade restrictions. If the US government decided to eliminate China’s access to SiFive, for example, China could still design its own RISC-V chips: the sanction wouldn’t immediately topple China’s entire hardware AND software stack. For this reason, nation-states (e.g. China, EU, India) are pouring BIG money into RISC-V: it’s difficult for the free markets to compete with unlimited military funding.
Honestly, I think the main reason Apple is currently so far ahead of everyone else is because ARM seems to be going through what x86 was going through before AMD released the Ryzen line. Everyone other than Apple is just trying to catch up to Qualcomm while Qualcomm has no incentive to majorly improve their chips.
For efficiency unfortunately, the SQ3 is built on a significantly inferior production node (Samsung 5nm vs the M1's TSMC 5nm). Based on the gains that Qualcomm made with the 8gen1 plus vs 8 gen 1, my guess would be a 20% improvement in MC performance whilst using 20-30% less power if they had also bothered to use the newer cores. Qualcomm seems to be waiting on the development of their Nuvia cores before making a real effort on WoA. TBF, it seems that the core was delayed by at least a year but unfortunately, the exclusivity deal they have with Microsoft is making them very complacent.
One thing I worry about is if pcs do manage to make the jump to arm Will we be able to upgrade them? Like will manufacturers make socketable components like we have for PCs now, or will I need to spend $2000 on a new computer every time I need to upgrade ram or if I want a new GPU, even if I'm perfectly fine with all the rest of the computer?
I think a huge roadblock for mass adoption of ARM desktop and laptops other than Macs is video games. Game developers just can't be bother to port to a completely different arrcatecture and that means most old videos games will be unplayable or run in lower performance even with a translation layer. And we know games care about performance numbers alot. Plus the lack of modularity defeats one of the main point of gaming desktops.
@@asmc1492 gaming is all about 3 things: is your CPU bottlenecking your GPU, does your PSU have the power for your GPU and how good your GPU is.Does it matter to you what your GAMING computer has under the hood as long as you can change the GPU and stay up to date in gaming ?
@@asmc1492 It will be the same as the transition from 32 to 64 bit, it will take a lot of time, some developers might start to release arm builds together with x86, after many years someone will take the risk to only release on arm and the market will follow because the best x86 machine will be too weak to run the latest games anyway.
12:35 It's "champing at the bit" (sometimes mistaken as "chomping" ), not "jumping". It comes from horse racing, the "bit' is the part of the harness that is in the horse's mouth. Horses champ at the bit when they're anxious, often before horse races.
Very informative and well put together video. Great job. Your channel is still the best at it, compressing a lot of testing work and research in a fun to watch and easy to understand video. Thx!
This kit only shows that when the surface pro sales bombed, they needed a new way to sell the stockpile of parts nobody wanted to pay for in the form of surface pros lol.
Is the 50-80% of native performance with Window's x64 emulation performance really "not that much worse" than the 70-90% of Rosetta's? I feel like the higher fluctuation of speeds and the fact that it will dog all the way down to 50% kinda sounds like it might be miserable.
The thing is that Microsoft has almost no control over their hardware market. They can't afford to cut off AMD64 support. This leaves them with no ability to push developers onto a Windows for ARM platform. They hitched their company to x86/AMD64 a long time ago, and it will be very difficult for them to outlast that platform. Of course, they also ensure that the platform continues to survive much longer than it would be likely to if Microsoft could shift away from it.
The thing REALLY is that Microsoft doesn’t have control of their own software. The kernel, the userspace is intertwined and difficult to split for proper port to new Arch while maintaining legacy compatibility.
As someone who does videography/photography on the side and IT for my main job....My 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro is my primary machine and I have parallels and windows 11 running 24/7. It's been rock solid, my favorite Windows machine is my MacBook... and it's a VIRTUAL MACHINE!? Kudos to Apple for leading the charge on ARM but it is wildly concerning how far behind the competition is. My MacBook is in low power mode on battery, 4 cores and 8GB of RAM allocated to the VM (default config from Parallels). I can be editing and exporting videos in Premiere or photos in Lightroom while the VM is running as usual AND STILL get 4-5 hours of battery life with the fans off or idling at their lowest speed. I gave Apple a LOT of crap for my 2016 MacBook Pro but held out for the M1 MAX 16". I'll still give them crap for other things but the hardware is exceptional this time around and their SOCs have held an incredibly strong lead over Qualcomm on mobile devices. Looking forward to more competition for Apple's ARM SOCs
The Asahi project has been trying with Linux. They recently got their own graphics driver up and running. I'd imagine there's something similar happening for windows somewhere... I hope.
Great video and informative information. I don't use Windows unless I need to ( I prefer Linux) but I find it depressing that a company I was once fond of has failed in so many markets. Here's to hoping Risc V becomes the future we desperately need.
I was just getting into computers around 2000 when things were changing so fast people said your computer would be completely outdated by the time you carried it ouf of the store. How times have changed... MS can make a computer that's several YEARS behind and while it's not a great deal, it's also not a ridiculous idea imagining someone using this thing. Nintendo is happily two generations behind its competition. People keep their phones for 5 years. Most of the progress is happening in GPUs and more specialized chips but regular people can't afford the new ones anyway. It's a weird time, isn't it? Extra performance is a nice bonus nowadays, but hardly a game-changer unless you have very specific needs for it.
Quinn you hit the heart of the matter dead on its head, Qualcomm's very strong monopoly over Windows creates complications whereby it scares developers away rather than welcoming them to develop their apps in ARM. Qualcomm is too confident and comfortable as it has too many stans that can't admit that other chips are doing/capable of doing better. I remember more than half a decade ago when Apple released their Bionic chip (can't remember the version) that clearly beats any Snapdragon powered phones, was met with blatant fanboy denials claiming a lot of negative things that was wrong. And Qualcomm's response was not good either. What they did was increase the energy usage (wattage) and crank up clock speed and core count and called it a day. Ever since then, Qualcomm Snapdragon have always been playing catchup with Apple Silicon be it M1/M2 or Bionic, and often times at the expense of efficiency. The stans have made it harder too for other chip maker such as Exynos from Samsung, with recent rumors from industry insiders of Samsung possibly moving on from Exynos and primarily use Snapdragon SOCs. Huawei's Hisilicon Kirin chips are interesting. But due to tensions from China's adamant surveillance over foreign data, and Huawei's deep relationship with the CCP, I don't think any international companies would be looking into developing for Kirin soon. Lastly, Google Tensor. Google Tensor reminds me of the "early" days of Iphones. Underpowered, but super well optimized. While Tensor is not as fast as Snapdragon's flagship counterpart, for what it is intended to do it's doing really well. I think Chromebook and ChromeOS can greatly benefit from integration between the Tensor CPU and the OS. Unfortunately, not so much for Windows, given that the two OSes are competing. I don't know what the future of ARM CPUs in the Windows market would be. If there's more competition, that would force the companies to evolve their chips better, but too much CPU might cause confusion at the software development level. Love it or hate it, I still have to give it to Apple for really pushing ARM computing to the next level. They didn't release a haphazard product. They ensure that the end product released was 99% usable and faster than most computers on the market, at an acceptable price to performance ratio. I, a Windows user myself can admit to that. Yet, at the same time I also know Apple's "walled garden" approach to their design, research, and development, allows for ARM computing to be such a success within their product line. It creates an easy standard/guideline for devs to follow when developing an application for MacOS.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has a better GPU when compared to the A16 and it's multi-core performance is only slightly behind. The single core performance and power consumption is where Apple has a significant advantage. Qualcomm's Oryon CPU releasing next year is meant to remedy the deficiencies in CPU performance as it is made by the team behind Apple's SoCs.
11 on idle? Man, that's a ton for an ARM chip. My x86 Linux laptop hovers between 7.5 and 8.5 watts on idle, and that's an old 8th gen Intel processor. On a modern AMD chip, it easily dips down to 5 watts.
The fact it's storage is upgradable makes it superior to any Apple product even if the processor is a bit slower. if it fails you can swap your storage it into a new arm pc, making it more of a "professional device" than an M1 which becomes trash with you data stuck inside.
Seems like a great little box to run an ARM Linux distro on. About the storage situation, it _looks_ like there's space for the standoff to exist - considered just moving the existing standoff there?
I think apple sees it ironically as a dual sided win. If companies give up they own the arm pc space entirely, if companies get ahead, then they finally get a vast array of Multiplatform games and programs without lifting a finger.
11:48 The fact that this is under $1000 tells me that at the last minute they decided to not market it towards consumers. Dev kits are traditionally expensive, just look at the Nvidia Orin NX $499 and its just the CPU and RAM, you have to provide the rest of the computer if you want the whole computer the Orin AGX can be as much as $2000 for the 64GB model that has the same CPU as the 4GB model(but better GPU similar to an RTX 3050 mobile at 1024FP32 and 1024INT+FP32)
Of note, while Orin should be notebly faster than the SQ3, it should be less efficient than the SQ3 possibly pushing total system power abive 60w. because i beleive Orin is on Samsung 8nm instead of samsing 5nm. Apple is far ahead of the SQ3 partly due to their years of custom hardware optimsation speciffically for IOS and MacOS(and optimizing sofrware for the hardware), but also because Samsung 5nm is closer in efficiency to TSMC 7nm, which puts this SQ3 chip on 2019 Apple A13 level of node efficiency. Even the 2020 Mac Mini was on TSMC 5nm which was a huge leap over 7nm in performance per watt
@@snazzy True they probably do need to bring this in as a loss leader to help future sales. And holy crap that die is massive. 340mm²? WTF does it have in there? This thing is massively more expensive than i expected, probably around the cost of the RTX 3060. You get 16 x86 cores from AMD in around 1/2 the space of these 8 cores. Heck the AMD equivelant of this, the 6800u is only 208mm² and that has an imensely powerful GPU for a mobile device and the CPU is both more powerful, and more efficient on par and sometimes better than the M1.
The elephant in the room with M1 and M2 is GPU. Specifically with multiple displays. GPU performance is behind Intel iGPUs from 2018, and not to mention the PCIe controllers have a chip errata that prevents dGPUs from being used, even on other OS’s like Linux that do have drivers available. The fact that no one from the Mac community really wants to talk about this is concerning.
I was among one of the first developers working on ARM-version of 64-bit Windows and the development kit for it... We used to cross-compile on x86 until there was ARM hardware to run the development kit.
Its always nice to have some competition. Now Microsoft was never about cutting edge hardware, or budget friendly. Hell, its so bad it makes apple looks good, but, they get points for trying and its always nice to see a major OS developer caring about ARM. Now Kudos for apple for bringing the best in both Intel and AMD. Now its a good time to get w/e chip you like.
ARM is the future of computing. You can thank Sophie Wilson for her contributions to the instruction set, which is part of what makes it more efficient. I think the next step in the development of ARM will be massive parallel processing, that is, having a large number (100+) of high-efficiency cores that can be turned on and off as needed. That way, we can use very little power for the low-intensity job of running Microsoft Word, compared to having every core run at once when editing videos.
Totally Agree. Microsoft may have buried Acorn as a company, but Acorn are having the last laugh and I couldn't be happier. I think it is long overdue time for Acorn to make a comeback and utilise the modern tech of today with RiscOS. Yes I know RiscOS is on Raspberry PI but those systems are severely under powered. Imagine a RiscOS system with 32GB RAM, an OS that is 10MB stored in flash ROM with an equal OS footprint to match, an SSD and an RTX3080. With the support on board I just don't think Microsoft or Apple could compete.
This is such great timing I was literally looking for a windows on arm bench mark. I really want/wanted to see how good software compatibility has gotten on arm for windows. Especially video games.
@@Mereo110 ya no that’s definitely not true I have gotten all of my steam games working on a MacBook using parallels so that’s not even close to true bud. Base m1 MacBook Air and they ran AMAZINGLY I was astonished at the performance
The title fooled me, I casually read "Microsoft made a mac-mini", and then I revised " Microsoft made a what??! ". I had to re-read to understand that it said Microsoft and mac mini only..
People REALLY underestimate just how amazing the M1/M2 chips are. They beat out everything easily in the same class range and often punch way above their own class. I'd really love to see another competitor bring ARM processors that rival Apple just for everything else.
Funny since we're talking about Apple here, but even the pricing is pretty decent now. Actually thinking about buying a second hand Mac Mini for recording music since the 3500U in my laptop has abysmal performance. At least AMD improved their laptop processors quite a bit since that abomination
Efficiency, absolutely. Performance? No. Laptop processors with AMD 5000 and 6000, and Intel 12th gen are usually more powerful, and AMD 6000 also has comparable integrated graphics.
Surely you should compare the performance against the original 'Apple Silicon' dev kits? They used older CPUs. As for ARM, apart from the very early days in the Acorn Archimedes/Risc PC, they've never really ventured in to the full 'desktop' performance arena. They've got the low power SOC markets all sewn up, although ARM licensees can design and manufacture their own chips, just like Apple did. But trying to break the Intel/AMD x86 stranglehold with ARM would be a huge gamble. Apple are the first to really push in that direction... but they have the financial and marketing resources to make it happen.
Tricky part is, Apple DTK is protected by NDAs, and benchmarking on them is strictly prohibited. There're some Geekbench scores there though, but nothing to cross check as even you didn't return the DTK, it will not start today either.
Haven’t watched this guy since iOS 13 JB was released and coming back, he’s so much more entertaining. Well done Snazzy Labs, you re-earned my subscription
If I grabbed one of these, I'd probably throw AARCH Linux on it. Likely Endeavour OS or Manjaro, both of which are either forks or variants of Arch Linux.
Yeah, we bought a couple Surface X (ARM) tablets two years ago and constantly hit issues with apps that might not install, or would only see Windows 10 as a 32-bit OS (which it's not) but we even had some installers sense 32-bit and then not install. Browsing and some other tasks were okay, but the 3rd party app support for ARM just really need to improve before Windows on ARM is widely usable.
@@SchwertKruemel Probably in Windows 11. - which we didn't have installed on the Surface X when we used it (pre-11) so it was just a non-starter for us. Which is a shame because it was a quiet, thin, large, sleek and nice tablet. Otherwise fast, but it just wouldn't run what we wanted to run on it.
I think what apple has done with the arm based chips is amazing. However, I've never quite understood the alure of buying an apple computer. If your job was only web based sure any station will do, but repairability, cost, and general integration into most business level networks, whether that be printing, file sharing, domain environments, Windows is still king. I think apple computers are interesting, but would I ever own one? Highly doubtful.
On the integration in business level networks thing: I work in a Uni IT-department. if you want to set up an apple device, you download a config file, install it in settings and it works. This is built in functionality and works very similar with VPNs & certs. We need a script for that on every other OS. the windows one has the largest codebase of them all. For printing it just works like it does on windows, the mac supports all the common protocols. I'm not too involved in the other two, but our file server works fine on every OS, but the worst on windows (due to few, but very annoying bugs)
I eventually want to get an ARM-based PC for coding, but since other members of my team already have M1 Macs, and they still represent such a small portion of our current target market, I'm still holding out and using an energy hog of a PC.
Windows has been on retail ARM for about 10 years, they have released several devkits over the years. Rosetta is not a translation layer in the OS, it is a x86 interpretation chip that is on the M1 SOC, this is why it is so much better than Rosetta 1 which was purely software, This is also why rosetta works on Linux on the m1, because the VM can still send the 'same' commands to the SOC and the SOC will run them through the translation chip. So software -> linux -> vm container -> MacOS -> translation chip -> native code. It may also be possible that linux inatively supports the rosetta SOC and it may run the translation prior to exiting the VM, it's a fascinating area. Another point that needs to be made is that devkits typically use lower-end older CPUs of the same base type (x86, ARM, RISC), it was the same with early playstation devkits which had lower specs than the final retail release. Apple was a bit different here in that they were devkitting the CPU as well as the OS and other hardwarre components, whereas MS is only devving the OS. Also most devkits (this one included), rely on another sytem for the actual programming, the devkit being only for testing the software on compatible hardware to what is going to be released. There are many other manufacturers of ARM CPUs, AMD for one has been making ARM systems and SOCs for a very long time and make quite performant ones, but they are specialised cpus for doing particular things, not a general purpose SOC. I believe Microsoft will use the remaining time with qualcom to fine-tune windows on ARM, then when the CPU agreement (which seems like it should be a breach of competition laws) is finished they will move onto a different provider's cpus. Qualcom has a really pooor history of stifling innovation and trying to legally bind both their suppliers and their competition (see their breach of the wifi patents that Australia holds, Apple was also involved on this one, or their suing of ARM when they tried to use their aquisition of another much smaller company to bypass their legal contracts with ARM). Any which way, I'm not going to be buying an ARM system as a daily driver anytime soon.
one thing to worry about is that in future revisions and once native arm apps for mac reach a complete level, apple might remove the in-chip rosetta support and use that chip space for more ai or encoders stuff. i mean, what point is there to have it, if all apps run natively and you get no profit from it?
@@giornikitop5373 The original plan was for them to have removed it and leave software translation in place for the M2, but the M2 released is simply a power uncapped M1 with more cores. Although it doesn't stack up against AMD at the same wattage. So essentially like an i9 (m2) vs an i7 (m1). This occurred because the next gen chip they are working on was supposed to have launched by now. AFAIK the plan to remove the x86 translation hardware is still in place. So that efficiency of translation may probably start to look more like rosetta 1 (a very slow pig). At the next CPU product launch unless they use the M1 design again.
If it's effectively the same board as the surface pro 9 (its seems resonable to think so) it make sense to have the mini display port as the main display output (it could be a full size dp port however, maybe not due to board space constraint...) because current laptops use the e-DP protocol for the integrated screen. Which is basically the samething as external DP but in another formfactor.
I’ve been using it as a linux development server and was actually a better choice over the m1 mac mini due to the 32gb of ram and lower price. Hope someone will make linux work natively
i dont like the fact that you are comparing the microsoft devkit directly to the m1 mac mini... as you said, its only a devkit that enables developers to make apps for arm. Apple did the same, also with a slower chip. my point is that maybe this is just a cost saving alternative, and not the chip that microsoft might actually want in their high-end arm computers:)
It makes sense since Microsoft was barely working on WoA themselves until recently. Hence Qualcomm wasn't really trying since they didn't know if Microsoft was serious with WoA or if it would just be killed like Windows RT. Until recently, but unfortunately hardware takes ages, so we still haven't seen the fruits of Qualcomm's NUVIA acquisition yet
Qualcomm hasn’t been trying for the last decade. For years while apple was making custom arm chips for the Apple Watch. WearOS was stuck originally with years old less efficient phone SoC in their devices. It wasn’t until the 3100 and now 4100 series that Qualcomm has even attempted to improve those SoC chips. Don’t mistake it for one minute. Windows ARM is a hot mess cause of development. The real villain though in all this is Qualcomm’s stranglehold on the ARM market.
@@RobertWilke lol the gap between Qualcomm's 8g2 and A16's CPUs is the smallest its ever been in the past decade (and the 8g2's GPU is better than the A16's). WearOS is the same as WoA. No one knew if Google/Microsoft were serious. The "real villains" are Google/Microsoft who didn't do shit with WearOS/WoA until recently. Hence Qualcomm didn't put effort into their WearOS/WoA chips, since they didn't need to as no one else was interested in competing with them (MediaTek and Intel both gave up on WearOS due to no sales)
Just so you know the guys that designed the M1, M2 etc. founded Nuvia and where bought buy Qualcomm last year. There will be very goody ARM chips in the future for Windows PCs….
I’m a die hard Apple fan, but to me it’s really frightening that Apple is leading in the computer market especially regarding laptops by far for several years now. Hopefully other companies will eventually catch up or even surpass them and increase their market share again, otherwise in some decades we might be living in a world ruled by an apple
24 years ago people joked that Windows 98 looked so much like Windows 95 because Apple hadn't done anything worth copying over the last few years. In many ways we've been living in an Apple-led tech world for about 30 years.
Competitors have created better laptops. Any Laptop with the Ryzen 7 6800U outperforms M1 and M2 and has the same efficiency. Screens are better there as well because OLED is used. The only problems remaining are the touchpad and speakers. Those are still trash on many devices.
Still no native PDF editor ay? Windows 11 limit to native pdf handling is viewing a pdf in Edge and scribbling colors on the pdf in Edge. Nothing else.
ปีที่แล้ว +2
The Microsoft dev kit does have one important advantage for some workloads - 32 GB of RAM. The base configuration of the Mac Mini has only 8 GB. That won't show up in most benchmark results but will hold it back in some real world uses.
Windows 11 for ARM under Parallels on my M1 Max Macbook Pro is the best Windows I ever used - and I started with Windows 3.0. Snappy, stable, just working. And of course, almost 100% of my apps I run under Windows are not ARM-compatible, so they run in the MS emulation. Still, with all the emulation and virtualisation going on, this is the snappiest Windows I ever had. Just shows how great the Apple Silicon Platform is.
Microsoft did ARM btw a decade ago with Windows RT. People hated it because it didn't play legacy Windows apps without realizing why. They had a massive marketing blunder with that then just buckled and dropped support for RT altogether, which has been symptomatic of Microsoft for a long time. They have a great idea which doesn't fully fly early and needs work but they abandon it and someone picks it up later. Same case with their Metro UI, Live Tiles.
Question though - does Intel has any plans to go into ARM? Or perhaps, AMD? I feel like both could be making great cpu's - although I'd give intel a slight advantage on this one. Also: Nvidia ARM cpu's??
One thing about the point about developing Windows app on M1 Mac Mini. You generally want to test apps on hardware as close to the final one as possible. Emulation is fine for quick and dirty tests but emulators can and will behave differently than actual device. When I was working on iPhone app in work we used emulators only for testing the functionality and to avoid the crashes but acceptance test was always done on iPhone. That's why you generally want to use a "native" dev kit instead of emulating the device in VM. It's sad that qualcomm is holding ARM on PC back when in fact they would benefited greatly if ARM PC were a thing since they would and could sell more chips.
Electron apps can run native code, correct? So it would not be unexpected for an electron app to have compatibility issues. It is my understanding that VS Code uses native code for performance and that if it not require this code, it could be purely browser based. Do the programs that fail on the devkit also fail in emulation on the mac?
Microsoft should've done this in the early 1990s, when they had control of the industry. Granted that the closest to an ARM processor back then was for a T.I. calculator.
Hoping this means, I can soon replace the melty "workstation" intel laptop with something power efficient, and suited to my mostly C++ compilation/python/remote access workloads.
Qualcomm seems to be singlehandedly holding back ARM progress on non-apple platforms.
Pretty much, yes.
Hell, even Rock chip is making real progress ar this point. The new RK series SoCs have some legitimately impressive performance compared to previous generations.
Aside from Nvidia & Apple they're literally the only ARM company that makes PC-level ARM chips. The big Snapdragon 9 Gen 1 ain't coming until 2024, but don't expect RTX 3080 level of performance from them
Mediacom could be a player too. And I think if the focus early on would be energy efficient Windows laptops that could compete with the M1 Air in terms of price (half the price, a little slower, but similar battery life at least), Microsoft could maybe take that edge they don't get as much with cheaper Celeron/Atom laptops.
@@goruyorsunuzz they already know all that from the rt and windows phone days.
also this devkit is not really meant for development development as you implied, it's more of a testing device for devs moving to arm. most development will probably gonna be happening on a different computer.
Right. I'll have an automated test runner running automated testing on this platform, looking for fundamental bugs, and I'll have a QA person testing builds on it. There's no way I write code, commit it to git and build in visual studio on here, but I might use this as a remote target and connect visual studio to remote debug an issue.
It's a native environment for 'run checking' an ARM compiled Windows app. That would be why they engineered it using an existing commercial Windows ARM platform, so that it gives a good real-world result.
Literally copying Apple
@@jasonhaven7170 Most things work on the principle of finding some one who did it right and copying them, if your lucky you improve on it. Most apples best projects have just been a copy of something but done better. They did not make the first MP3 player, they made the one every one wanted. They did not make the first phone, they made the one people wanted. They did not make the first CPU, they made it better (but lost the people who made the M1 CPU, that's a mistake!).
I bought an RT when they released and really liked it, but it was certainly limited due to lack of developer support. Sadly, the same thing happened to the Windows phone, which I also really liked.
I had a Nokia Lumia 920. Was an amazing phone but the app store was god awful.
I loved Windows Phone. RIP.
I used the Lumia 920 for almost 5 years. It was great.
@@SudoYETI That was the same model I had. Yep, amazing phone.
I remember using the Surface RT, it was sooo janky but I made it work for what I needed somehow
Yeah Win11 ARM running inside Parallels on my Macbook Pro M1 Max is pretty great - for the apps I use on Windows no problems and it's fast enough that I don't notice how fast or slow it is.
I'm Running Win 11 using Parallels on my M1 Max Mac Studio... It's probably the most pleasant Windows experience I've ever had! ( And have been using Windows since Windows 3.1! ) And the fact I could use my x86 Win 7 Licence to get ARM Windows made the switch painless
Ah Qualcomm, they never fail to disappoint everyone.
How exactly do they disappoint when the SQ3 is by far the most powerful non apple soc?
@@Ignacio.Romero ...by the fact that the most powerful non apple soc still is extremely less powerful than an older apple soc
@@pinkorcyanbutlong5651 They're the only company trying
@@pinkorcyanbutlong5651 I think they target different market, just like he says. The chip is the same as in surface studio (a frickin tablet) which you compare an M1 a fully fledged Desktop use.
Most dev probably won't develope using that device since it will much harder to develop there. They only use it for build and testing
@@chawza8402
M1/M2 in ipads?
The absolute worst part about this is that I see it being achievable unlike some of the pie in the sky ambitions they have sometimes.
Fantastic video and a great breakdown
I don't see why they'd bother to dothis. They can just sit and as long as devs don't care about Mac (which is most of the time), Intel and AMD wouldn't switch and they'd keep minting money. This is something that s not happening that Apple fans (myself inluded) insist is happening: there is no ARM revolution.
@@abubakrakram6208 Wanna bet an arm on that?
@@wheelsonfire1982 I might. Money talks, not efficiency.
Windows on ARM has came a long way since it was originally introduced in 1996. It still had a ways to go but part of the comparison that makes the Qualcomm chip look bad is that Rosetta is built into the chip on the M1 which Microsoft hasn't baked the translation layer into the chip yet. In this case it is better that Apple has designed their own chip since they were able to do this.
I didn't think windows existed on anything other than x86
@@williamdrum9899 From a recent Old New Thing article called "Why does the usage of the initial registers of a Win32 process depend on whether it is a 32-bit or 64-bit process?", Raymond Chen notes: "Windows has supported many 32-bit processor architectures, and I’ve covered many of them in the past: x86-32, Alpha AXP, MIPS III, PowerPC, SuperH-3, and ARM. It also has supported a number of 64-bit processor architectures, including Alpha AXP (using all 64 bits this time), Itanium, x86-64, and AArch64."
Windows has existed on a lot of things that aren't x86 :)
Rosetta isn't built on to the chip. M1 just supports x86 semantics for memory ordering which fixes most of the performance gap.
If Microsoft could even at this game with Apple, that would be great for the PC people as a whole. On a side note, have you heard about the Asahi project? They ported Linux over to the M1/M2 silicon and recently achieved hardware accelerated graphics through a reverse engineered driver. It would be cool if you cover at some point. Anyways quality video, Quinn.
Unfortunately MIcrosoft simply is not in a position to mount a wholesale transition to ARM. It's not going to happen. As long as there's still an abundance of new x86 PC options, few people are going to bother with Windows ARM just to get better power efficiency. Too many people play video games which would be some of the last things to get ported to ARM. Apple got away with it because people didn't really depend on Mac to play video games much in the first place. So there wasn't much expectation to be able to on M1 either.
Not to mention, Windows is known for supporting legacy software. Apple doesn't have to. The expectation for Apple users and developers is that binaries will just stop working on recent versions of MacOS after like 5 years. But Microsoft tries to support stuff that's like 20+ years old. Microsoft has way too much momentum on x86. They are going to ride it out to the bitter end.
@@yarnosh Yeah, that is pretty true. This looks most likely to go the way of the Windows Phone. But if they get the ball rolling, we can hope someone will take it further.
@@yarnosh Lol "People won't pay for better power efficiency" Did you just forget that laptops exist?
The reason people aren't buying is because developers aren't supporting, costs are prohibitively high on the few Windows-on-ARM devices that exist (plus the ARM version of Windows is locked down so you can't put it on other popular ARM hardware like dev boards), and most of all... Because the performance is trash, especially for the price. It's mainly Qualcomm's fault, if you ask me.
I can't wait for the exclusivity deal to expire soon, because Qualcomm has become fat and lazy on their throne of being the "flagship chip" company, their recent smartphone SoCs are nightmares of heat and poor efficiency, and barely more powerful than last few gens. Exynos and even MediaTek are catching up quick if not already on par. Imagine being on par with the budget option and the only reason you get picked is exclusivity deals lmao. Their days of being on top are surely numbered and that's a good thing.
It's amazing to see what Apple has been able to achieve with ARM, hardware and software wise, so I just wish the same was possible with the more open ecosystem of PC as a whole (be it Windows or Linux, but let's face it, high performance Linux ARM laptops/desktops are a pipe dream unless a big company like Microsoft makes it happen with Windows first, then we can just install Linux).
@@datachu People will only pay for power efficiency if they can run their apps reliably on it, but developers won't bother making their apps work on Windows ARM until there is a critical mass of users to make it worthwhile. Microsoft simply does not have the leverage here to push things in any one direction. As long as the vast majority of Windows users are on x86, there's where the focus will be.
And as the video pointed out, it's actually a better deal, with better performance, to just get a Mac Mini and run WIndows 11 ARM in parallels than it it is to get Microsoft hardware. Rosetta is just better than Microsoft's x86 emulation. You get so much more with the Mac. A better Qualcomm offering would help, but they're just so far behind. They're too late.
Apple was successful, yes, in part because the M1 was such a strong chip, but also because they control ALL the hardware. Apple essentially just left x86 behind. Microsoft can't do that. They won't do that.
@@datachu Also, with regard to Linux on high performance ARM laptops, Apple actually has a headstart there as well with Asahi Linux getting GPU support on M1. If Apple is smart they'll help Linux run better on their hardware. And I bet many Linux users will even switch to MacOS once they have genuine hardware. I know I did years ago. I used to be 100% Linux at work and home and then switched to MacOS.
I'm glad they put some effort into making arm-based hardware that is affordable. Arm-based windows (for a long time) has been hot garbage. Apple's translation layers make the change to ARM so seamless and that's what is holding windows back in terms of arm transitions, and getting the arm-based devices into developers hands (and for cheap) will hopefully improve the experience going forward.
Microsoft’s emulation layer isn’t the problem, it’s the Qualcomm chips that are running half the raw horsepower that Apple’s machines have. If Microsoft had access to chips with M1’s power then people would be happy to leave Intel behind and developers would jump at the opportunity to port their software.
windows nt for ARM and ARM64 wasn't that bad 30 years ago.
@@rstidman Yeah it was pretty decent for the time. The phone software for ARM they had after win8 was pretty good too, but they barely touched advertising it.
@@chfgn Depends on what you are doing, you will notice that most of the benchmarks are based on perf per watt, this is not a linear curve as can be seen by the performance of the M2 (which is the M1 chip with extra cores and the power limiter removed), thus when you ramp up an AMD system for multi-core processing or a 3080/3090 for vertex transformations the M1/M2 struggle and perform quite badly in comparison. Even for compilation, the M2 is only just faster (~3%) on a $4k (AUD) M2 system than a lappy I bought for $2k that is running a mid-high range 12th gen intel. Not that I do much compilation on a laptop as I notice quite the difference in speed compared to desktop.
Windows is not based on Unix unlike Mac OS which is unix based. All OS’s running on arm are unix based.
Firefox has arm support for windows, I use it in parallels on my Mac Studio.
What Apple's done with their chips is nothing short of a minor miracle. But so far every other ARM SoC is hot garbage from a raw performance standpoint. The other issue is Apple has tight control of their ecosystem, so they can force devs on to a new architecture. Microsoft would have a much harder time with that. On top of that, after Arm (the company) announced more licensing restrictions, I'm starting to think RISC-V is the way forward. There's very few reasons to move away from x86 in the meantime.
My thoughts exactly.
Agreed. And even if there weren’t licensing restrictions for ARM, the fact that RISC-V is an open, royalty-free standard means that it (the ISA) is immune to international trade restrictions. If the US government decided to eliminate China’s access to SiFive, for example, China could still design its own RISC-V chips: the sanction wouldn’t immediately topple China’s entire hardware AND software stack. For this reason, nation-states (e.g. China, EU, India) are pouring BIG money into RISC-V: it’s difficult for the free markets to compete with unlimited military funding.
Honestly, I think the main reason Apple is currently so far ahead of everyone else is because ARM seems to be going through what x86 was going through before AMD released the Ryzen line. Everyone other than Apple is just trying to catch up to Qualcomm while Qualcomm has no incentive to majorly improve their chips.
@@PercyPanleo Qualcomm seems thoroughly checked out of ARM and is instead eagerly awaiting the rise of RISC-V without risking their own farm over it.
all of them are garbage even apple. there's a reason why they're relegated to only showing geekbench instead of any real world benchmark.
For efficiency unfortunately, the SQ3 is built on a significantly inferior production node (Samsung 5nm vs the M1's TSMC 5nm). Based on the gains that Qualcomm made with the 8gen1 plus vs 8 gen 1, my guess would be a 20% improvement in MC performance whilst using 20-30% less power if they had also bothered to use the newer cores.
Qualcomm seems to be waiting on the development of their Nuvia cores before making a real effort on WoA. TBF, it seems that the core was delayed by at least a year but unfortunately, the exclusivity deal they have with Microsoft is making them very complacent.
remember they're on a lawsuit with ARM Holdings over the tech they got from Nuvia, so uh... have fun
One thing I worry about is if pcs do manage to make the jump to arm
Will we be able to upgrade them? Like will manufacturers make socketable components like we have for PCs now, or will I need to spend $2000 on a new computer every time I need to upgrade ram or if I want a new GPU, even if I'm perfectly fine with all the rest of the computer?
I think a huge roadblock for mass adoption of ARM desktop and laptops other than Macs is video games. Game developers just can't be bother to port to a completely different arrcatecture and that means most old videos games will be unplayable or run in lower performance even with a translation layer. And we know games care about performance numbers alot. Plus the lack of modularity defeats one of the main point of gaming desktops.
@@asmc1492 gaming is all about 3 things: is your CPU bottlenecking your GPU, does your PSU have the power for your GPU and how good your GPU is.Does it matter to you what your GAMING computer has under the hood as long as you can change the GPU and stay up to date in gaming ?
@@asmc1492 It will be the same as the transition from 32 to 64 bit, it will take a lot of time, some developers might start to release arm builds together with x86, after many years someone will take the risk to only release on arm and the market will follow because the best x86 machine will be too weak to run the latest games anyway.
12:35 It's "champing at the bit" (sometimes mistaken as "chomping" ), not "jumping". It comes from horse racing, the "bit' is the part of the harness that is in the horse's mouth. Horses champ at the bit when they're anxious, often before horse races.
Very informative and well put together video. Great job. Your channel is still the best at it, compressing a lot of testing work and research in a fun to watch and easy to understand video. Thx!
Thank you very much!
Great to see even Microsoft is starting to take ARM desktops seriously.
This kit only shows that when the surface pro sales bombed, they needed a new way to sell the stockpile of parts nobody wanted to pay for in the form of surface pros lol.
They do for a while… However developers…
At least the ssd is replaceable in the windows box,the m1 mac mini has it is soldered to the logic board.
Which is an absolutely braindead, anti-consumer thing to do.
Can’t wait to get native BootCamp on Apple M-Series!
Is the 50-80% of native performance with Window's x64 emulation performance really "not that much worse" than the 70-90% of Rosetta's? I feel like the higher fluctuation of speeds and the fact that it will dog all the way down to 50% kinda sounds like it might be miserable.
You actually are the only person I like listening to giving kudos to their sponsors! Well done!
The thing is that Microsoft has almost no control over their hardware market. They can't afford to cut off AMD64 support. This leaves them with no ability to push developers onto a Windows for ARM platform. They hitched their company to x86/AMD64 a long time ago, and it will be very difficult for them to outlast that platform. Of course, they also ensure that the platform continues to survive much longer than it would be likely to if Microsoft could shift away from it.
Good we don't need another walled place like Apple.
The thing REALLY is that Microsoft doesn’t have control of their own software. The kernel, the userspace is intertwined and difficult to split for proper port to new Arch while maintaining legacy compatibility.
As someone who does videography/photography on the side and IT for my main job....My 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro is my primary machine and I have parallels and windows 11 running 24/7. It's been rock solid, my favorite Windows machine is my MacBook... and it's a VIRTUAL MACHINE!? Kudos to Apple for leading the charge on ARM but it is wildly concerning how far behind the competition is. My MacBook is in low power mode on battery, 4 cores and 8GB of RAM allocated to the VM (default config from Parallels). I can be editing and exporting videos in Premiere or photos in Lightroom while the VM is running as usual AND STILL get 4-5 hours of battery life with the fans off or idling at their lowest speed.
I gave Apple a LOT of crap for my 2016 MacBook Pro but held out for the M1 MAX 16". I'll still give them crap for other things but the hardware is exceptional this time around and their SOCs have held an incredibly strong lead over Qualcomm on mobile devices. Looking forward to more competition for Apple's ARM SOCs
I hope one day we'll be able to run Windows on M1 Mac natively.
Yeah it's surprising Microsoft still doesn't allow it
@@keco185 They couldn't have done it until recently, because they had an exclusivity deal with Qualcom.
The Asahi project has been trying with Linux. They recently got their own graphics driver up and running. I'd imagine there's something similar happening for windows somewhere... I hope.
Why would you buy a Mac and then run windows on it? 🤢🤮
@@ArthropodSpidey Because some people have different preferences than you and will do different thing with the hardware they own.
Could you do a Dev Kit vs Apple Silicon benchmark comparison? I think that would be fairer.
I just appreciate your content and production. Even the sponsored part is fun and informative. Thank you.
Great video and informative information. I don't use Windows unless I need to ( I prefer Linux) but I find it depressing that a company I was once fond of has failed in so many markets. Here's to hoping Risc V becomes the future we desperately need.
I was just getting into computers around 2000 when things were changing so fast people said your computer would be completely outdated by the time you carried it ouf of the store. How times have changed... MS can make a computer that's several YEARS behind and while it's not a great deal, it's also not a ridiculous idea imagining someone using this thing. Nintendo is happily two generations behind its competition. People keep their phones for 5 years. Most of the progress is happening in GPUs and more specialized chips but regular people can't afford the new ones anyway. It's a weird time, isn't it? Extra performance is a nice bonus nowadays, but hardly a game-changer unless you have very specific needs for it.
Quinn you hit the heart of the matter dead on its head, Qualcomm's very strong monopoly over Windows creates complications whereby it scares developers away rather than welcoming them to develop their apps in ARM.
Qualcomm is too confident and comfortable as it has too many stans that can't admit that other chips are doing/capable of doing better. I remember more than half a decade ago when Apple released their Bionic chip (can't remember the version) that clearly beats any Snapdragon powered phones, was met with blatant fanboy denials claiming a lot of negative things that was wrong. And Qualcomm's response was not good either. What they did was increase the energy usage (wattage) and crank up clock speed and core count and called it a day. Ever since then, Qualcomm Snapdragon have always been playing catchup with Apple Silicon be it M1/M2 or Bionic, and often times at the expense of efficiency.
The stans have made it harder too for other chip maker such as Exynos from Samsung, with recent rumors from industry insiders of Samsung possibly moving on from Exynos and primarily use Snapdragon SOCs.
Huawei's Hisilicon Kirin chips are interesting. But due to tensions from China's adamant surveillance over foreign data, and Huawei's deep relationship with the CCP, I don't think any international companies would be looking into developing for Kirin soon.
Lastly, Google Tensor. Google Tensor reminds me of the "early" days of Iphones. Underpowered, but super well optimized. While Tensor is not as fast as Snapdragon's flagship counterpart, for what it is intended to do it's doing really well. I think Chromebook and ChromeOS can greatly benefit from integration between the Tensor CPU and the OS. Unfortunately, not so much for Windows, given that the two OSes are competing.
I don't know what the future of ARM CPUs in the Windows market would be. If there's more competition, that would force the companies to evolve their chips better, but too much CPU might cause confusion at the software development level.
Love it or hate it, I still have to give it to Apple for really pushing ARM computing to the next level. They didn't release a haphazard product. They ensure that the end product released was 99% usable and faster than most computers on the market, at an acceptable price to performance ratio. I, a Windows user myself can admit to that. Yet, at the same time I also know Apple's "walled garden" approach to their design, research, and development, allows for ARM computing to be such a success within their product line. It creates an easy standard/guideline for devs to follow when developing an application for MacOS.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has a better GPU when compared to the A16 and it's multi-core performance is only slightly behind. The single core performance and power consumption is where Apple has a significant advantage. Qualcomm's Oryon CPU releasing next year is meant to remedy the deficiencies in CPU performance as it is made by the team behind Apple's SoCs.
11 on idle? Man, that's a ton for an ARM chip. My x86 Linux laptop hovers between 7.5 and 8.5 watts on idle, and that's an old 8th gen Intel processor. On a modern AMD chip, it easily dips down to 5 watts.
Man, I didn't know some computers actually used less energy than a LED bulb when gaming PCs have a 350W power supply at the (very) least
@@semisagoglu Those gaming pc's also have quite low idles compared to their peak draws though.
@@semisagoglu I mean, you're basically running a jet engine on those gaming machines. Dedicated GPUs need a ton of power.
The windows ARM PC would not be all that bad if it used Nvidia Jetson ORIN.
The fact it's storage is upgradable makes it superior to any Apple product even if the processor is a bit slower.
if it fails you can swap your storage it into a new arm pc, making it more of a "professional device" than an M1 which becomes trash with you data stuck inside.
Seems like a great little box to run an ARM Linux distro on. About the storage situation, it _looks_ like there's space for the standoff to exist - considered just moving the existing standoff there?
I think there are likely better options for Linux, Lotta pretty beefy SBCs out there.
@@luigimaster111 the 32GB RAM is very appealing for Linux use.
just get an mac mini. and if you don't care about performance at all, something from pine 64
"Not even scratching the Surface" I see what you did there.
I think apple sees it ironically as a dual sided win. If companies give up they own the arm pc space entirely, if companies get ahead, then they finally get a vast array of Multiplatform games and programs without lifting a finger.
11:48 The fact that this is under $1000 tells me that at the last minute they decided to not market it towards consumers.
Dev kits are traditionally expensive, just look at the Nvidia Orin NX $499 and its just the CPU and RAM, you have to provide the rest of the computer if you want the whole computer the Orin AGX can be as much as $2000 for the 64GB model that has the same CPU as the 4GB model(but better GPU similar to an RTX 3050 mobile at 1024FP32 and 1024INT+FP32)
Of note, while Orin should be notebly faster than the SQ3, it should be less efficient than the SQ3 possibly pushing total system power abive 60w. because i beleive Orin is on Samsung 8nm instead of samsing 5nm. Apple is far ahead of the SQ3 partly due to their years of custom hardware optimsation speciffically for IOS and MacOS(and optimizing sofrware for the hardware), but also because Samsung 5nm is closer in efficiency to TSMC 7nm, which puts this SQ3 chip on 2019 Apple A13 level of node efficiency. Even the 2020 Mac Mini was on TSMC 5nm which was a huge leap over 7nm in performance per watt
The Surface using the same board with 1/4 the memory is $1,500. So I think it’s a loss leader to plead with developers to bring their stuff over.
@@snazzy True they probably do need to bring this in as a loss leader to help future sales. And holy crap that die is massive. 340mm²? WTF does it have in there? This thing is massively more expensive than i expected, probably around the cost of the RTX 3060.
You get 16 x86 cores from AMD in around 1/2 the space of these 8 cores.
Heck the AMD equivelant of this, the 6800u is only 208mm² and that has an imensely powerful GPU for a mobile device and the CPU is both more powerful, and more efficient on par and sometimes better than the M1.
I feel like risc-v will replace arm especially with new restrictions on custom arm SOCs.
The elephant in the room with M1 and M2 is GPU. Specifically with multiple displays. GPU performance is behind Intel iGPUs from 2018, and not to mention the PCIe controllers have a chip errata that prevents dGPUs from being used, even on other OS’s like Linux that do have drivers available. The fact that no one from the Mac community really wants to talk about this is concerning.
Are you sure? I thought M1 outperforms iGPUs from Intel easily. AMD is very close with RDNA2
I was among one of the first developers working on ARM-version of 64-bit Windows and the development kit for it... We used to cross-compile on x86 until there was ARM hardware to run the development kit.
Its always nice to have some competition. Now Microsoft was never about cutting edge hardware, or budget friendly. Hell, its so bad it makes apple looks good, but, they get points for trying and its always nice to see a major OS developer caring about ARM. Now Kudos for apple for bringing the best in both Intel and AMD. Now its a good time to get w/e chip you like.
12:13 "Not even scratching the surface". 😏
ARM is the future of computing. You can thank Sophie Wilson for her contributions to the instruction set, which is part of what makes it more efficient. I think the next step in the development of ARM will be massive parallel processing, that is, having a large number (100+) of high-efficiency cores that can be turned on and off as needed. That way, we can use very little power for the low-intensity job of running Microsoft Word, compared to having every core run at once when editing videos.
Totally Agree. Microsoft may have buried Acorn as a company, but Acorn are having the last laugh and I couldn't be happier. I think it is long overdue time for Acorn to make a comeback and utilise the modern tech of today with RiscOS. Yes I know RiscOS is on Raspberry PI but those systems are severely under powered. Imagine a RiscOS system with 32GB RAM, an OS that is 10MB stored in flash ROM with an equal OS footprint to match, an SSD and an RTX3080. With the support on board I just don't think Microsoft or Apple could compete.
I thought RISC-V was the future.
@@jthwang I can't see it anytime soon. I don't know why it is such a big thing other than for political reasons.
@@johntrevy1 Oh? Did a politician hype it up?
@@jthwang All I hear is hype about how it is going to be an open architecture to stick it to the main manufacturers. Purely political.
hey i was literally just on the street they shot the dashcam footage on. Should i buy a lottery ticket?
This is such great timing I was literally looking for a windows on arm bench mark. I really want/wanted to see how good software compatibility has gotten on arm for windows. Especially video games.
If you want games support, don't bother with Arm, stay with x86.
@@Mereo110 ya no that’s definitely not true I have gotten all of my steam games working on a MacBook using parallels so that’s not even close to true bud. Base m1 MacBook Air and they ran AMAZINGLY I was astonished at the performance
The title fooled me, I casually read "Microsoft made a mac-mini", and then I revised " Microsoft made a what??! ".
I had to re-read to understand that it said Microsoft and mac mini only..
People REALLY underestimate just how amazing the M1/M2 chips are. They beat out everything easily in the same class range and often punch way above their own class. I'd really love to see another competitor bring ARM processors that rival Apple just for everything else.
True but it’s Mac OS. I prefer Windows :/
Funny since we're talking about Apple here, but even the pricing is pretty decent now. Actually thinking about buying a second hand Mac Mini for recording music since the 3500U in my laptop has abysmal performance. At least AMD improved their laptop processors quite a bit since that abomination
@elfrjz in what workload?
@elfrjz i see, i thought it was much better since it benches twice as fast as mx250 on gfxbench
Efficiency, absolutely. Performance? No. Laptop processors with AMD 5000 and 6000, and Intel 12th gen are usually more powerful, and AMD 6000 also has comparable integrated graphics.
Surely you should compare the performance against the original 'Apple Silicon' dev kits? They used older CPUs. As for ARM, apart from the very early days in the Acorn Archimedes/Risc PC, they've never really ventured in to the full 'desktop' performance arena. They've got the low power SOC markets all sewn up, although ARM licensees can design and manufacture their own chips, just like Apple did. But trying to break the Intel/AMD x86 stranglehold with ARM would be a huge gamble. Apple are the first to really push in that direction... but they have the financial and marketing resources to make it happen.
Tricky part is, Apple DTK is protected by NDAs, and benchmarking on them is strictly prohibited. There're some Geekbench scores there though, but nothing to cross check as even you didn't return the DTK, it will not start today either.
@@laosb its just an iPad chip, we know how fast that is.
This is the point where Apple tells Microsoft "hey, just license your OS to us. We will take care of the hardware for ya!" LOL
Haven’t watched this guy since iOS 13 JB was released and coming back, he’s so much more entertaining. Well done Snazzy Labs, you re-earned my subscription
Qualcomm's got separate architecture for PCs called Oryon which is a year away
If I grabbed one of these, I'd probably throw AARCH Linux on it. Likely Endeavour OS or Manjaro, both of which are either forks or variants of Arch Linux.
You said “jumping at the bit” in the last chapter - that’s an egg-corn I haven’t heard before! It’s “champing at the bit” (refers to horses)
Yeah, we bought a couple Surface X (ARM) tablets two years ago and constantly hit issues with apps that might not install, or would only see Windows 10 as a 32-bit OS (which it's not) but we even had some installers sense 32-bit and then not install. Browsing and some other tasks were okay, but the 3rd party app support for ARM just really need to improve before Windows on ARM is widely usable.
the 32bi problem probably comes from windows on arm early on only supporting x86 emulation for 32bit apps. The 64bit support came much much later
@@SchwertKruemel Probably in Windows 11. - which we didn't have installed on the Surface X when we used it (pre-11) so it was just a non-starter for us. Which is a shame because it was a quiet, thin, large, sleek and nice tablet. Otherwise fast, but it just wouldn't run what we wanted to run on it.
Will be interesting to see how the new Qualcomm Oryon chips compare to the M series chips whenever they launch.
I think what apple has done with the arm based chips is amazing. However, I've never quite understood the alure of buying an apple computer. If your job was only web based sure any station will do, but repairability, cost, and general integration into most business level networks, whether that be printing, file sharing, domain environments, Windows is still king. I think apple computers are interesting, but would I ever own one? Highly doubtful.
On the integration in business level networks thing:
I work in a Uni IT-department. if you want to set up an apple device, you download a config file, install it in settings and it works. This is built in functionality and works very similar with VPNs & certs. We need a script for that on every other OS. the windows one has the largest codebase of them all.
For printing it just works like it does on windows, the mac supports all the common protocols.
I'm not too involved in the other two, but our file server works fine on every OS, but the worst on windows (due to few, but very annoying bugs)
I want to see beard on your channel art. Great video!
can you put mac os on it?
It makes you wonder if Parallels would consider something like that.
A much worse, slightly cheaper Mac Mini would be so much fun!
@@OLBastholm agreed
@@TheGunnyBadger03xx it would be a great idea. Something cheap, upgradeable, and usable all at once.
I eventually want to get an ARM-based PC for coding, but since other members of my team already have M1 Macs, and they still represent such a small portion of our current target market, I'm still holding out and using an energy hog of a PC.
Windows has been on retail ARM for about 10 years, they have released several devkits over the years.
Rosetta is not a translation layer in the OS, it is a x86 interpretation chip that is on the M1 SOC, this is why it is so much better than Rosetta 1 which was purely software, This is also why rosetta works on Linux on the m1, because the VM can still send the 'same' commands to the SOC and the SOC will run them through the translation chip. So software -> linux -> vm container -> MacOS -> translation chip -> native code. It may also be possible that linux inatively supports the rosetta SOC and it may run the translation prior to exiting the VM, it's a fascinating area.
Another point that needs to be made is that devkits typically use lower-end older CPUs of the same base type (x86, ARM, RISC), it was the same with early playstation devkits which had lower specs than the final retail release. Apple was a bit different here in that they were devkitting the CPU as well as the OS and other hardwarre components, whereas MS is only devving the OS. Also most devkits (this one included), rely on another sytem for the actual programming, the devkit being only for testing the software on compatible hardware to what is going to be released.
There are many other manufacturers of ARM CPUs, AMD for one has been making ARM systems and SOCs for a very long time and make quite performant ones, but they are specialised cpus for doing particular things, not a general purpose SOC. I believe Microsoft will use the remaining time with qualcom to fine-tune windows on ARM, then when the CPU agreement (which seems like it should be a breach of competition laws) is finished they will move onto a different provider's cpus. Qualcom has a really pooor history of stifling innovation and trying to legally bind both their suppliers and their competition (see their breach of the wifi patents that Australia holds, Apple was also involved on this one, or their suing of ARM when they tried to use their aquisition of another much smaller company to bypass their legal contracts with ARM).
Any which way, I'm not going to be buying an ARM system as a daily driver anytime soon.
one thing to worry about is that in future revisions and once native arm apps for mac reach a complete level, apple might remove the in-chip rosetta support and use that chip space for more ai or encoders stuff. i mean, what point is there to have it, if all apps run natively and you get no profit from it?
@@giornikitop5373 The original plan was for them to have removed it and leave software translation in place for the M2, but the M2 released is simply a power uncapped M1 with more cores. Although it doesn't stack up against AMD at the same wattage.
So essentially like an i9 (m2) vs an i7 (m1).
This occurred because the next gen chip they are working on was supposed to have launched by now.
AFAIK the plan to remove the x86 translation hardware is still in place.
So that efficiency of translation may probably start to look more like rosetta 1 (a very slow pig). At the next CPU product launch unless they use the M1 design again.
If it's effectively the same board as the surface pro 9 (its seems resonable to think so) it make sense to have the mini display port as the main display output (it could be a full size dp port however, maybe not due to board space constraint...) because current laptops use the e-DP protocol for the integrated screen. Which is basically the samething as external DP but in another formfactor.
I’ve been using it as a linux development server and was actually a better choice over the m1 mac mini due to the 32gb of ram and lower price. Hope someone will make linux work natively
Qualcom chips are great room heaters btw
The x86 emulation is actually huge. ARM is the future for sure
1:23 you giggled when you realized you just did a Linus segue
Just bought the M2 MacBook Pro 16 GB for visual studio development and the things a literal beast with amazing battery life
i dont like the fact that you are comparing the microsoft devkit directly to the m1 mac mini... as you said, its only a devkit that enables developers to make apps for arm. Apple did the same, also with a slower chip. my point is that maybe this is just a cost saving alternative, and not the chip that microsoft might actually want in their high-end arm computers:)
Please watch the video. Even comparing the A12Z DTK, this chip gets crushed.
Also, even if that were true, the chip is available today in the Surface Pro 9 sold to the public. So they deserve the heat.
@@snazzy yeah you are right:) thanks for the clarification
Nice, we have 2 Facebook browsing machines now to choose from
It makes sense since Microsoft was barely working on WoA themselves until recently. Hence Qualcomm wasn't really trying since they didn't know if Microsoft was serious with WoA or if it would just be killed like Windows RT. Until recently, but unfortunately hardware takes ages, so we still haven't seen the fruits of Qualcomm's NUVIA acquisition yet
Qualcomm hasn’t been trying for the last decade. For years while apple was making custom arm chips for the Apple Watch. WearOS was stuck originally with years old less efficient phone SoC in their devices. It wasn’t until the 3100 and now 4100 series that Qualcomm has even attempted to improve those SoC chips. Don’t mistake it for one minute. Windows ARM is a hot mess cause of development. The real villain though in all this is Qualcomm’s stranglehold on the ARM market.
@@RobertWilke lol the gap between Qualcomm's 8g2 and A16's CPUs is the smallest its ever been in the past decade (and the 8g2's GPU is better than the A16's). WearOS is the same as WoA. No one knew if Google/Microsoft were serious. The "real villains" are Google/Microsoft who didn't do shit with WearOS/WoA until recently. Hence Qualcomm didn't put effort into their WearOS/WoA chips, since they didn't need to as no one else was interested in competing with them (MediaTek and Intel both gave up on WearOS due to no sales)
Just so you know the guys that designed the M1, M2 etc. founded Nuvia and where bought buy Qualcomm last year. There will be very goody ARM chips in the future for Windows PCs….
that starting plug almost made me cut the video off lol.
I’m a die hard Apple fan, but to me it’s really frightening that Apple is leading in the computer market especially regarding laptops by far for several years now. Hopefully other companies will eventually catch up or even surpass them and increase their market share again, otherwise in some decades we might be living in a world ruled by an apple
24 years ago people joked that Windows 98 looked so much like Windows 95 because Apple hadn't done anything worth copying over the last few years. In many ways we've been living in an Apple-led tech world for about 30 years.
Competitors have created better laptops. Any Laptop with the Ryzen 7 6800U outperforms M1 and M2 and has the same efficiency. Screens are better there as well because OLED is used.
The only problems remaining are the touchpad and speakers. Those are still trash on many devices.
Apple isn't leading the computer market; Neither in market share nor performance. It has a niche spot in ultralight multimedia machines.
Still no native PDF editor ay? Windows 11 limit to native pdf handling is viewing a pdf in Edge and scribbling colors on the pdf in Edge. Nothing else.
The Microsoft dev kit does have one important advantage for some workloads - 32 GB of RAM. The base configuration of the Mac Mini has only 8 GB. That won't show up in most benchmark results but will hold it back in some real world uses.
Windows 11 for ARM under Parallels on my M1 Max Macbook Pro is the best Windows I ever used - and I started with Windows 3.0. Snappy, stable, just working. And of course, almost 100% of my apps I run under Windows are not ARM-compatible, so they run in the MS emulation. Still, with all the emulation and virtualisation going on, this is the snappiest Windows I ever had. Just shows how great the Apple Silicon Platform is.
7:29 is that a spider moving up? 🕷
Wow I haven't watched one of your videos in forever! Loving the beard :)
can you make full review of the omni dash cam?
I guess they do not want to make a M1 Like ARM Chip, but I don't know why or they don't know how.
Microsoft did ARM btw a decade ago with Windows RT. People hated it because it didn't play legacy Windows apps without realizing why. They had a massive marketing blunder with that then just buckled and dropped support for RT altogether, which has been symptomatic of Microsoft for a long time. They have a great idea which doesn't fully fly early and needs work but they abandon it and someone picks it up later. Same case with their Metro UI, Live Tiles.
As a fan of Windows 8.1 and Windows phone I can confirm
aaah, an old proart. I see you're a man of culture
New era of windows on mac is upon us
We needed this video.
was that a bently in the dashcam sponsor spot??
Question though - does Intel has any plans to go into ARM?
Or perhaps, AMD?
I feel like both could be making great cpu's - although I'd give intel a slight advantage on this one.
Also: Nvidia ARM cpu's??
...can it run linux? But remember, the M1 has the memory on-die. So what's the memory throughput on the new MS box? Probably not 800GB/S.
I thought most people don't compile etc on a dev kit, they only use it for compatibility and performance testing. Is that not the case?
I kinda want to put and 8TB SSD in it and make it a tiny Plex server, lol.
The sponsor transition was as smooth as LTT, cngrats lmao
One thing about the point about developing Windows app on M1 Mac Mini. You generally want to test apps on hardware as close to the final one as possible. Emulation is fine for quick and dirty tests but emulators can and will behave differently than actual device.
When I was working on iPhone app in work we used emulators only for testing the functionality and to avoid the crashes but acceptance test was always done on iPhone. That's why you generally want to use a "native" dev kit instead of emulating the device in VM.
It's sad that qualcomm is holding ARM on PC back when in fact they would benefited greatly if ARM PC were a thing since they would and could sell more chips.
Electron apps can run native code, correct? So it would not be unexpected for an electron app to have compatibility issues. It is my understanding that VS Code uses native code for performance and that if it not require this code, it could be purely browser based.
Do the programs that fail on the devkit also fail in emulation on the mac?
I don't like that you pointed out that this thing isn't super good. I disliked that.
Sorry, Bill.
The dash cam only works up 60c that's no where near hot enough for anyone that lives in the tropics
ARM on the PC side should've already been a thing for a few years before apple did theres
qualcomm is just an ancor thats stuck
Microsoft should've done this in the early 1990s, when they had control of the industry. Granted that the closest to an ARM processor back then was for a T.I. calculator.
Ad was so long I forgot what this video was about 😂
"It's not even scratching the Surface..."
I see what you did there.
😊
Hoping this means, I can soon replace the melty "workstation" intel laptop with something power efficient, and suited to my mostly C++ compilation/python/remote access workloads.
At least they are able to create something working. What about longevity and sustainability in long run? oh well.
who knew Bo Burnham's older brother knows so much about computers
I still love windows on arm, because I have it installed on my phone.
Which is more useful than it sounds
If it’s not repairable it’s not the future.