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Microsoft accidentally reveals Windows 10 on ARM limitations
Microsoft launched ARM-powered Windows 10 PCs with "all-day" battery life back in December. While HP, Asus, and Lenovo's devices aren't on sale just yet, we're still waiting to hear more about the limitations of Windows 10 running on these new PCs. Microsoft published a full list of limitations last week, spotted first by Thurrott, that details what to expect from Windows 10 on ARM. This list must have been published by accident, as the software giant removed it over the weekend so only cached copies of the information are available.
Only ARM64 drivers are supported and no x64 applications are supported (yet). Games that use a version of OpenGL later than 1.1, hardware-accelerated OpenGL, or "anticheat technologies" won't work on Windows 10 on ARM. The Windows Hypervisor Platform is not supported on ARM.
Related: Big Changes Planned by Microsoft - Windows 10 on ARM, Laptops to Behave More Like Phones
First ARM Snapdragon-Based Windows 10 S Systems Announced
Microsoft Pulls Back on Windows 10 S
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:31AM
I always knew that Micro$eft would be against ARMs! Stand up and support your second amendment rights against the illegal monopoly from Redmond! Or, am I wrong?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:50AM (2 children)
So it has come to this, Microsoft can't get proper GL drivers either. Gotta run Android to get accelerated GL on ARM. That and a lot of popular ARM SoCs only support the EGL subset and they probably do not want to rewrite Windows to support that unless Windows on ARM becomes popular.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by letssee on Wednesday February 21 2018, @09:27AM (1 child)
MS doesn't like OpenGL support. They prefer you use DirectX and stay firmly locked into their ecosystem.
They could easily support OpenGL ES (all smartphones support it, so the hardware is there). They wouldn't need to 'rewrite' windows to support OpenGL ES since windows itself doesn't use OpenGL internally. It's just an extra library.
MS doesn't really support OpenGL on windows either, the GPU makers do that. The OpenGL libraries are part of your GPU driver.
It is not in MS' best interests to support OpenGL, while it is in the GPU makers best interests.
As you can't (yet?) buy discrete gpus for arm chipsets, there's no party benefiting (financially) from creating a winodws opengl driver for arm.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Wootery on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:02AM
At least Edge supports WebGL. They even give the option of using ANGLE to translate it into Direct3D (the same translation layer used by the Windows versions of both Chrome and Firefox).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:27PM (1 child)
Microsoft didn't see the phones / tablets explosion before it happened. They arrived late to the game. Similarly to how Bill Gates said the internet was just a fad. Then Microsoft suddenly awoke and worked hard to embrace the internet. Just in time.
Microsoft didn't see netbooks. But they were able to successfully cripple them by resurrecting XP, and arm twisting OEMs using leverage of potential unfavorable Windows licensing if they didn't make only crippled versions of netbooks.
Microsoft didn't see ARM in time. This was obvious in about 2007 or thereabout. All of this is the result of one thing. Moore's Law. Hardware kept getting cheaper and cheaper for reasonable specs. At some point, when a device is under $200, then the price of OEM Windows becomes the elephant in the room. Linux on netbooks was first. But a polished commercially supported version, like Chromebook, was the inevitable result -- that again, Microsoft simply had and continues to have no vision to see.
A decade ago I was saying (in different forums) that Microsoft on ARM would not really succeed. The value in Windows is and only is the ability to run legacy applications. Developers are not going to port their apps to ARM without forcing the consumer to re-buy those apps again. So legacy software that CAN be ported has no economic advantage to consumers, only developers. And I posited that MUCH legacy software could NOT be ported to ARM. Some things are not fixed with a simple recompile. Older software is no doubt deeply wedded to the Intel architecture, for better or worse.
So Windows on ARM becomes largely a new platform, but an old ported platform, competing against younger nimbler platforms that are free of decades old design decisions. So you get things like iOS, Android, Chromebooks, etc. And many consumers find this is all they actually need in a mostly-web world.
To make matters worse, Microsoft's first attempt at ARM based Windows was a disaster because Microsoft marketed it as "Windows". So consumers expected Windows RT laptops to run legacy software. Uh, NO. So there were massive returns. It might not be so bad today, but still not so good I think.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:28PM
In its struggle for relevance, Microsoft opens up .NET, and SQL Server to run on Linux. And offers Windows Subsystem for Linux to run Linux software on Windows OS.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious