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Intel may be planning to sue Microsoft for its plans to include x86 emulation in Windows 10 for ARM machines:
In celebrating the x86 architecture's 39th birthday yesterday—the 8086 processor first came to market on June 8, 1978—Intel took the rather uncelebratory step of threatening any company working on x86 emulator technology.
[...] The post doesn't name any names, but it's not too hard to figure out who it's likely to be aimed at: Microsoft, perhaps with a hint of Qualcomm. Later in the year, companies including Asus, HP, and Lenovo will be releasing Windows laptops using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor. This is not the first time that Windows has been released on ARM processors—Microsoft's first attempt to bring Windows to ARM was the ill-fated Windows 8-era Windows RT in 2012—but this time around there's a key difference. Windows RT systems could not run any x86 applications. Windows 10 for ARM machines, however, will include a software-based x86 emulator that will provide compatibility with most or all 32-bit x86 applications.
This compatibility makes these ARM-based machines a threat to Intel in a way that Windows RT never was; if WinARM can run Wintel software but still offer lower prices, better battery life, lower weight, or similar, Intel's dominance of the laptop space is no longer assured. The implication of Intel's post is that the chip giant isn't just going to be relying on technology to secure its position in this space, but the legal system, too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday June 10 2017, @07:26PM (4 children)
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/85365/thinking-x86-emulation-arm [thurrott.com]
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/x86-emulation-rumored-to-be-coming-to-windows-for-arm-in-late-2017/ [arstechnica.com]
Speed/efficiency is unknown AFAICT. The emulation isn't for Win16, so fire up DosBox. We'll have to see what benchmarks say about the speed, but many Windows applications probably don't need full speed.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Sunday June 11 2017, @02:24AM (3 children)
No matter how many canned demo marketing videos Microsoft puts out, the speed in real day to day work is going to be garbage for one simple reason. Even if it was perfect, the Snapdragon 835 is literally about half the speed of the lowest end Core m3. This shit isn't magic. If you fancy trading in your laptop for one that runs at half speed on a cellphone CPU then go for it. I doubt the market will follow you. This may get some good battery life and light weights but laptops already go for more than ten hours and weigh less than two pounds. This is going to be the modern EeePC. A fad that will drive the fanboys and geeks crazy but won't even make a blip anywhere else. At least let's hope not. Nothing will put a blackeye to the idea of non-Core laptops like one that is so frustratingly slow the average consumer wants to chunk it out the window.
Now tell me how fast and smooth the web browser is on your smartphone is as if that is remotely relevant so I can laugh.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 11 2017, @03:00AM (1 child)
There are already ARM laptops/Chromebooks. Anything like what you described would at least beat Windows RT. Compatibility with x86 makes the systems more useful than RT was.
Not sure if Core m3 is the right comparison when people regularly buy Intel CPUs that are dramatically slower than the m3. You know, dual-core Celerons like the Intel Celeron N2840 (or the newer Intel Celeron N3060). I'm looking at Passmark and seeing numbers that are substantially lower for the N3060 [cpubenchmark.net] than Intel Core M-5Y31 [cpubenchmark.net] or even the Intel Core M-5Y10 [cpubenchmark.net]. I believe that's one of the slowest Core M chips Intel made.
Core M was not so cheap when it debuted [anandtech.com]:
Snapdragon 835 devices may be somewhat cheaper [pcadvisor.co.uk]:
Anything that launches at $400 will be at sale for $250-300 before too long.
The point is that even if Snapdragon 835 turns out to be only half as fast as today's Core m3 chips, something you have no evidence of since Microsoft hasn't released any of their own benchmarks and the Windows on ARM products are not on the market, it might be priced appropriately. A lot of these Core m3 products started [slickdeals.net] at [bestbuy.com] $900 [wikipedia.org] or more.
I wouldn't worry about the emulation speed right now. We'll know how good or bad it really is when it gets benchmarked. I doubt anyone is saving up in the piggy bank to specifically buy a Windows 10 for ARM laptop. We can have another story about this when the first Windows on ARM machines have been benchmarked.
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(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Sunday June 11 2017, @05:53AM
None of these run win32 applications nor do they bear the user expectation burden of being performant while running said applications so they aren't really comparable. The closest thing to what this is was Windows RT which was a dismal failure so if that's what you're going with then.. maybe rethink something.
Most Windows laptops run Core processors so that's the right processor to compare to. Besides, the most common complaint of Atom powered stuff is "it's slow" which supports my point. I chose the m3 because it's the lowest of the low end. I'm actually giving SD 835 a sporting chance in that regard. If I was being completely neutral, I'd compare it to a typical i3 or i5-7200U which would completely slaughter it.
I'm not arguing they won't be cheap. I'm arguing they will be too slow to meet consumer expectation at basically any realistic price. Just like the cheap Android tablets that while cheap, have the highest return rates because they're just too slow.
But that's wrong though. I have plenty of evidence. The internet is full of benchmarks of the 835 and the m3 running general purpose workloads which almost always show the 835 to be about half as fast. The term you're looking for is "proof" and, yes, we won't know for absolute sure until these laptops come out but that's where critical thinking comes into play. If every benchmark shows the 835 to be half as fast as an m3 and the laptops in this case are not just running ARM compiled Windows but actually doing dynamic translation of x86 programs on top in the process, what is the likelihood that the end result is going to be anything but at best the equivalent of the m3 running at half speed. If full Windows laptops with a processor that slow were viable beyond the tepid sales of Atom powered models, we'd know it by now. To put an even finer point on it, I have a Lenovo T420s with the Sandybridge i5-2520m which also benchmarks twice as fast as the SD835. That is a 6 year old laptop with a low to midrange processor. Now imagine everything processor bound on it taking twice as long. That doesn't even get into things like comparative memory I/O etc.
To reiterate the crux of my argument, I believe that SD835 powered laptops will be too slow to meet consumer expectations of a full Windows laptop experience. Benchmarks back that up by showing the chip to be half as fast as the current low-end (Core m3) with acceptable performance. And anything lower than this "low-end" like Atom powered stuff just doesn't sell very well for that exact reason, i.e., it's slow. I also argue that price floor is not as important as people believe based on how cheap current laptops can be and there being a minimum of acceptability of performance at any price, that last part being the fundamental issue. I also argue that battery life and weight is an overblown concern as we have laptops now that weigh less than two pounds and will go all day. It can be argued that, yes, there are Core powered laptops that are fast, have long battery life, and are thin and light but you aren't going to get all that for cheap. True but that isn't an argument in favor of the SD835 stuff since, again, there is a floor of acceptable performance which I assert this will not reach. That's my position but ultimately we'll all see. Just remember that I told you so.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday June 12 2017, @05:16PM
I know organizations that still deal with Visual Basic 6 apps on a daily basis. I tried to migrate them to something newer, but we couldn't find anything they agreed was cheap/easy enough, so the VB6 crap lives on...and now I've started supporting OTHER groups across the country still using this crap because the original devs are long gone. And a few years ago I ran into a company still running Windows 3.1. On a laptop. For their accounting software. I'm sure there's a large number of "business critical" wintel apps that would run just fine on an ARM system because they ran just fine on single core systems a decade or more back and they haven't changed since.
This isn't for gaming. Most office apps aren't loading a 3GHz quad core to 100% utilization. Plenty of software will run just fine.