[HN Gopher] Testing Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023
___________________________________________________________________
Testing Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023
Author : ingve
Score : 131 points
Date : 2022-11-03 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| I bought Samsung Galaxy Book with snapdragon ARM for 200USD from
| eBay (somehow come brand new) to get experience with cross-
| compilation for Win 11 ARM emitted on my Win 11 x86 or the laptop
| itself. On the ARM laptop most of x86 application are running
| just fine, some has issues (Dropbox), but I was able to get ARM64
| executable for basically all important applications (VSCode,
| Python 3, Notepad++, NET6 SDK).
|
| What I do not understand on Win ARM64 is why x86 processes have
| blurred GUI. It works fine, but it is very distracting. However
| at least I know on first look that I am running application in an
| emulator.
| retskrad wrote:
| Millennials couldn't care less about Mac, Windows and desktop
| operating systems in general. Everyone does their computing needs
| on their phone.
|
| Apple put the M1 and M2, which are literally the two most
| advanced CPU's on planet earth, and it has only slightly pushed
| the Mac ahead. Putting Windows on ARM is a waste of time.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Wouldn't mind replacing my dell latitude with a Windows laptop
| that has no fan doesn't get hot performs the same and runs 20
| hours on battery though
| rejectfinite wrote:
| >Everyone does their computing needs on their phone
|
| Its so awful. Am I millenial? Im 30.
|
| But my ideal work/play desk is big, 3 monitors, 1 144hz for
| games, desktop PC (bigger fans = less noise + real CPU and GPU,
| no throttling at all) + mech keyboard + mx master/gaming mouse.
|
| A phone is for logging into my bank or to order food.
|
| Phone games are so trash and TikTok rots brains.
|
| Yes I read real actual books, should do more of that.
| filoleg wrote:
| I assume you are a dev (or at least dev-adjacent), so this
| isn't about you. You will, most likely, always prefer
| multiple monitors, beefy desktop, etc., regardless of your
| generation.
|
| We are talking about gen pop here. I am a late millenial, and
| back in my teens, if you wanted to access internet, do social
| media, listen to non-physical format music, etc., you pretty
| much had to own a PC/laptop. Almost everyone back then had
| access to it at their home.
|
| In present day, most people have no need for that. Social
| media, music, internet, etc., is all done on smartphones. I
| see less and less gen pop interest and need in PCs as the
| time goes.
|
| My grandparents learned to use PC just so they could check
| out news and talk to me on skype (we live in different
| countries now). Over time, they switched to smartphones, as
| they found the ease of use and pretty much a complete lack of
| the need for troubleshooting very appealing. Years later,
| they are happy with that decision.
|
| That doesnt mean that PCs are gonna die or dwindle, quite the
| opposite. For work, smartphones are suboptimal, and thus PCs
| will stay around for work, for the enthusiast crowd (which
| would include gaming), and for a bunch of other hobbies/niche
| used (like music production, etc.). I don't foresee PCs and
| multimonitor setups ever going out of my life either, aside
| from the form factors of some of them slightly changing
| (e.g., a virtual multimonitor AR setup instead of a physical
| multimonitor setup).
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| "I'm hopeful for Microsoft's future on ARM, but either Qualcomm
| needs to get their act together, or Microsoft needs to pour money
| into some other chipmaker to optimize for Windows. Otherwise, the
| vast gulf between ARM SBCs on the low end and Apple's custom
| Silicon on the high end will persist."
|
| Part of it is... what on earth is Qualcomm thinking with their
| pricing? Every PC that has had a Windows on ARM processor is
| priced like a premium machine, while running slower than the
| competition from Apple, Intel, and AMD (though Project Volterra
| is the best value by far, so far).
|
| It's like Qualcomm has decided that high-end Snapdragon parts may
| only appear in $1000+ devices, perhaps to prevent people from
| asking questions about the cost of their chips in phones. (If a
| Snapdragon Gen 8 appeared in a $500 laptop, why couldn't it be in
| a $500 smartphone? Especially important, because of legal
| filings, Qualcomm uses the total sale price of the device for
| some royalty calculations IIRC.)
| maxsilver wrote:
| Yeah, Qualcomm is behind the M1, but the funny thing is that
| Qualcomm is _already ahead_ of a lot of the Intel product
| lines, if they were willing to compete at the lower end of the
| PC market.
|
| For example, why does the Surface Go 3 still sell with a "Core
| i3" or "Pentium Gold 6500Y" in it, when it could have this
| Qualcomm chip in it. Qualcomm's Gen 8 is approximately 3x
| faster while also being lower cost _and_ having lower power
| draw! Why does a $500 Go 3 ship with "4GB Ram" and "64GB eMMC"
| when this Qualcomm devkit can ship with 32GB ram and 512 nVME
| SSD for just $100 more? These are the products that should be
| Qualcomm-ified, it would be an immediate improvement to people
| buying this, over any other current PC comparable.
|
| Instead, the consumer version of this Windows devkit is a
| "Surface Pro 9", which when equivalently spec'd to the devkit,
| comes out to $1900 USD. At that price, nearly any Intel / AMD /
| Mac comparable is a way better pick.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > Instead, the consumer version of this Windows devkit is a
| "Surface Pro 9", which when equivalently spec'd to the
| devkit, comes out to $1900 USD.
|
| It seems likely that this machine is being sold at a loss.
| That's why things aren't being Qualcommified.
| [deleted]
| wolpoli wrote:
| They seem to believe that the extra battery life of the
| Snapdragon when running ARM software justifies the price
| premium, when most consumers would be mostly running x86/x64
| software in emulation. The reviewers pick up on that point,
| consumers continue to buy x64 devices, and the Windows ARM
| ecosystem remains largely undeveloped.
|
| Qualcomm and Microsoft's unwillingness to invest in growing the
| ecosystem is very troubling. What was the point of the timed-
| exclusivity agreement to begin with, if not to invest in the
| ecosystem?
| wmf wrote:
| Qualcomm is also trying too hard to encourage cellular in
| laptops. It makes no sense to pay extra upfront and $20/month
| for 5G on a laptop.
| wolpoli wrote:
| I don't get the push for cellular modem in Laptop either. Who
| is actually asking for this, since most of us have could just
| tether off our existing phone or use a wifi hotspot, and
| wouldn't, like you mention, need to pay an extra $20/month.
| beembeem wrote:
| To your last comment - the royalty on ASP is capped. Apple had
| argued in court over this with claims that shoving more storage
| into a phone led to more licensing fees which was not the case.
| I can't speak to whether the pricing on this dev kit would be
| below the cap or not, I forget the rough range of the caps (in
| the mid $100's if my memory serves me right)
|
| Agree on the weird pricing strategy though. My take is that
| they're trying to milk the relationship because Windows is a
| relatively premium brand. Competing interests for sure that
| Windows is looking for a wider audience on the low end while
| Qualcomm wants the $$ from high end.
| [deleted]
| bartlettD wrote:
| >The big question is--will this $599 desktop be enough to push
| more developers towards cross-compiling for native ARM64 software
| on Windows?
|
| No, more consumer hardware like the Surface series will push
| devs. Who will eventually want to get out of the x86 emulation
| layer and run their programs native.
|
| Comparing this to an M1 Mini is a bit odd since they're not
| competing with each other at all, and Microsoft is limited by
| what Qualcomm et al can put out.
| bpye wrote:
| I work for MSFT and have been using an SPX as my primary device
| for a little over a year. I haven't had an issue with user
| space applications, but I do have an audio interface that
| doesn't work because the vendor (MOTU) doesn't ship ARM64
| drivers :(
| mjard wrote:
| Does windows not provide a generic "class compliant" audio
| driver? I'm amazed it works so well everywhere else if
| Microsoft doesn't support it.
| bpye wrote:
| I went down this path. Yes, Windows includes an inbox USB
| audio class driver, but it lacks support for implicit
| feedback. The MOTU interface does not have a feedback
| endpoint, and relies on implicit feedback, so the inbox
| driver doesn't work. I think the inbox driver does work for
| Focusrite's interfaces - I guess they include the feedback
| endpoint, and both Linux and macOS support implicit
| feedback so MOTU's devices work there. Apple actually
| recommend implicit feedback only [0].
|
| [0] - https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes
| /tn2274...
| csdvrx wrote:
| It's sad. I'm using a USB-C to 4.5mm TRRS audio dongle, and
| if you can't get audio drivers, I fear my "exotic" setup is
| even less likely to be supported.
|
| I've been wanting to try Windows 11 on ARM64 with a Microsoft
| or a Lenovo device, but nothing seems to have the basics I'm
| looking for like OLED for a laptop, or ECC (for both a laptop
| or a server)
|
| If there were ARM64 options with ECC RAM, I'd buy that today
| and start deploying tomorrow.
| bpye wrote:
| The only ARM64 option with ECC that I know of is Ampere's
| rather expensive development workstation [0].
|
| [0] - https://solutions.amperecomputing.com/systems/altra/k
| raken-c...
| cooldown_00001 wrote:
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Nope, it won't, as you say. How many people have Surface Pro X,
| or another Windows on ARM machine?
|
| Less than 1% do. Let's say, though this is a high estimate,
| 0.5% of Windows users are ARM. Now let's say my app has 1
| million installs at $1 each (pretty successful). That means my
| total value for optimizing for those ARM users is... $5,000.
| And they can already run my app with translation, so it's
| actually worth less than that. So... when you factor in costs
| of Project Volterra + Developer Time + Fixing Code Time + Lost
| Opportunities on More Productive Things... there's basically no
| way, even with 1 million users at $1 each, to justify the
| effort.
|
| This device is great for developers who already care and love
| their users. Anyone who doesn't care won't care.
|
| Edit: Also, at those numbers, it would be better if I _didn 't_
| offer an ARM-native version. If even a tiny percentage of my
| userbase downloads the ARM-native version by accident on their
| x86 machine, the support costs will eat away at that too.
|
| Edit @bartlettD: We're not - sorry if it reads that way. I'm
| just providing an additional argument, but I've reworded
| slightly to make that a bit clearer.
| giaour wrote:
| > Less than 1% do. Let's say, though this is a high estimate,
| 0.5% of Windows users are ARM. Now let's say my app has 1
| million installs at $1 each (pretty successful). That means
| my total value for optimizing for those ARM users is...
| $5,000. And they can already run my app with translation, so
| it's actually worth less than that.
|
| Not disputing your numbers, but for devs writing web services
| or cloud workloads, compiling for arm can mean spending a lot
| less on VMs. If I were writing software that had to run on
| Windows Server on ARM, I would probably want one of these
| devices for local development.
| jve wrote:
| It takes 1 CEO of Windows ARM device for dogfooding own
| software to ARM :)
|
| Anyways, what I noticed is that CxOs started to carry Apple
| MacBooks around and sysadmins just had to deal with it.
| dboreham wrote:
| > How many people have Surface Pro X
|
| <raises hand>
| bartlettD wrote:
| I don't think we're disagreeing. Devs have no incentive to
| develop for ARM if there is no market share like you said, so
| they're not going to buy a $599 kit and its existence won't
| sway them either.
|
| I think there will come a time when the number of ARM Windows
| machines increases though.
|
| This kit _is_ useful for the devs who care about the
| performance of their programs on ARM kit but they 'll only
| optimise for it if the market is there.
| Kukumber wrote:
| why would you use windows nowadays?
|
| why would you use windows with ARM?
|
| m1 mini let's you build apps for the biggest OS on the market
| (iOS)
|
| macOS is the industry standard when it comes to
| audio/photo/video production
|
| office? everyone uses a web interface, even slack has a web
| interface
|
| and it makes even more sense to compare both, specially
| considering we are headed towards a giant recession due to
| rising cost of energy and the anti-carbon policies that will
| come will affect the companies that are wasting energy with
| inefficient machines
|
| it's mindbloging that people put this much energy defending
| qualcomm contract, it literally is putting the west at a
| disadvantage against China
|
| it makes perfect sense to compare it with the apple chip, you
| are blind if you think otherwise, to stay polite
| z3phyr wrote:
| > Why would you use windows nowadays.
|
| 1) PC Gaming is a big market mover.
|
| 2) (Underrated) As a systems developer, Visual Studio is one
| of the best development environments I have ever used. VS for
| windows is the real one, VS for mac is a totally different
| software.
| Melatonic wrote:
| macOS is the standard for prosumer audio/photo/video
| production - not for the actual pro market. VFX mainly uses
| Linux or Windows desktops and the top compositing
| applications arent even made for macOS.
|
| Not to mention all of the stuff that requires CUDA to run and
| the fact that Apple made their bed with AMD a long time ago
| and you can no longer use Nvidia GPUs.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > m1 mini let's you build apps for the biggest OS on the
| market (iOS)
|
| Mobile OS it's Android,Desktop is Windows.
|
| > office? everyone uses a web interface, even slack has a web
| interface
|
| Huh? Microsoft Word on Windows native?
|
| > companies that are wasting energy with inefficient machines
|
| I bet your usage of cloud office burns more energy than an
| native app.
| rekoil wrote:
| > Huh? Microsoft Word on Windows native?
|
| I think the commenter is trying to say that it's not
| something you need a Windows device for anymore.
|
| I agree with that sentiment, but disagree about web-based
| Word, web-based Word is terrible, we often joke in my team
| that we need to start over if someone accidentally opens a
| SharePoint document in web-based Word.
| [deleted]
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| I can user 2 or more monitors without actually losing my
| sanity.
| rekoil wrote:
| macOS is very clearly optimised towards laptops in this
| regard, which makes sense since they sell waaaay more of
| those than they do stationary.
|
| It's been a while since I used Windows on a laptop, about 2
| years (so Windows 10 20H2 was likely the last I used on a
| laptop). Back then un-docking and re-docking my laptop was
| a pain because it would smoosh all app windows to the
| primary monitor, and I'd have to move everything around on
| my 3 monitors when re-docking. Every. Single. Time.
|
| Those had different DPIs as well, with all the issues that
| brought.
|
| I can't actually recall a time when macOS was that bad at
| managing my app windows when changing monitor
| configurations, but I'll give you that Windows is better at
| window management if all displays stay connected and have
| the same DPI.
|
| Has Windows gotten better at these things?
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| If you have icons on 2 monitors and then you disconnect
| 1, yes icons are everywhere. When you will reconnect the
| second one, it will restore as it was. I do not know how
| it is working (or not) on laptops and monitors
| combinations as I have desktop PC with 2 monitors.
| rekoil wrote:
| I'm not so worried about icons, I don't really use the
| desktop, in fact I actually disable desktop icons on my
| macOS laptop.
|
| I'm more interested in what happens to app windows when
| you remove and reconnect displays.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| > why would you use windows nowadays?
|
| - Gaming
|
| - Cheaper hardware options than Macs
|
| - Commercial software support (e.g., Adobe, Autodesk,
| Affinity, Office, etc.)
|
| - Better hardware support (e.g., Nvidia graphics cards)
|
| - Easier Linux VM setup with WSL and x86(_64) support than
| Mac (i.e., requires ARM iso or the hassle of setting up
| Rosetta)
|
| - Piecemeal hardware upgradability
|
| - Less hassle than Linux, depending on hardware configuration
| and needs
|
| - Smoother experience for some things like (HiDPI) multi-
| monitor setups and video playback than Linux with the current
| state of Wayland and the recent drop of third-party codecs by
| multiple distros
|
| Some of these apply to Mac and some of these apply to Linux,
| but only Windows has _all_ of these characteristics. Windows
| is far from perfect, but it _is_ the best tool for some jobs.
| People also simply have different preferences and trade-off
| priorities, whether it be in regards to usability,
| affordability, privacy, or anything else.
| cooldown_00001 wrote:
| [deleted]
| smackeyacky wrote:
| This is a good list, although for me I find it less and
| less compelling as more of my development tools become
| either fully cross-platform or web based completely and
| distributions like Pop! make hardware support easier.
|
| - Gaming - no question windows is still better.
|
| - Less hassle? - I find that questionable these days.
| Windows 11 has broken this somewhat.
|
| I like WSL2 but for the last couple of years I've found it
| easier to reboot into Linux for dev work and just switch
| back to Windows for gaming.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > why would you use windows nowadays?
|
| PC games, plain and simple.
| neogodless wrote:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
|
| Android 42%
|
| Windows 30%
|
| iOS 18%
|
| > everyone uses a web interface
|
| Can you provide some global statistics for this claim? I
| don't believe it's accurate, but I don't have a good way to
| measure or disprove it.
| Kukumber wrote:
| windows has 0 market value, most of the usage comes from
| zombie machines
|
| it even dropped in revenue in their latest report
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-msft-q1-earnings-
| repo...
| bilekas wrote:
| > windows has 0 market value, most of the usage comes
| from zombie machines
|
| Have you ever worked in an enterprise environment ?
| Kukumber wrote:
| It's clear in that graph
|
| Look around you, look what tech companies uses to make
| their products (hint: electron)
|
| Microsoft moving their Office suite to the web should give
| you an indication where they want to take Windows, due to
| new usages
|
| Global market share is a fake metric, what grandma's PC
| from 2006 has to do with todays usages?
|
| It's true for everything, gaming, music, video, even art
| [1]
|
| "Photoshop's journey to the web"
|
| [1] - https://web.dev/ps-on-the-web/
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > what grandma's PC from 2006 has to do with todays
| usages?
|
| I mean, grandma clearly uses her PC for it to be included
| in a global market share, so why do you think her use
| should be discounted?
|
| Even if her usage is considered "niche" (debatable as
| that is), it doesn't mean it shouldn't be included.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| OP debunks your claims with solid statistics and the best
| way you can respond is "Look around you"?
|
| You fandom for all things Apple make you a bit blind to
| reality, I suggest you look at things with more nuance
| and actually document yourself with actual numbers. You
| might be surprised by what you find.
| cooldown_00001 wrote:
| rejectfinite wrote:
| >why would you use windows nowadays?
|
| One thing people have not mentioned is Enterprise.
|
| Just because its all webapps does not mean everyone can move
| to a Chromebook.
|
| The ecosystem of HP/DELL/Lenovo Thinkpad hardware + Windows
| 10/11 OS + management over Azure AD or on-prem AD that hooks
| into Office 365 and most other apps. Plus all ERP and HR
| software that run on Windows Servers.
|
| Yes the USERS are mostly on the Office 365 suite and webapps
| for things. But their PCs have to be managed and apps have to
| be served.
| elorant wrote:
| Speaking for myself, it's not an ARM desktop PC what I need,
| but an ARM server. Make those highly available and then I'll
| start developing/porting my code on ARM.
| JimmyAustin wrote:
| AWS has them: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/, and you
| can run Lambdas with ARM.
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Amazon (not in AWS).
| cylinder714 wrote:
| Foxconn, Gigabyte and Supermicro make Ampere Altra-based
| servers: https://amperecomputing.com/reference-
| platforms/ampere-altra...
| elorant wrote:
| I've seen those, but they cost a fortune. Even the smallest
| 32core CPU with 128GB RAM and a couple of nvme ssds costs
| more than 10k.
| csdvrx wrote:
| It's hard to get from usual companies like Lenovo, Dell, HP
| etc.
|
| I just want ARM64 with ECC and the ability to put quite few
| NVMe inside (U2 or M2, doesn't matter that much)
| nicoburns wrote:
| Pretty much all the cloud providers have ARM options these
| days, even the smaller ones.
| empraptor wrote:
| Microsoft had preview for ARM64 Azure VMs earlier this year.
| Not sure if they've gone beyond that.
|
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/now-in-preview-
| azure-...
| Kukumber wrote:
| Half the speed of a chip released close to 3 years ago
|
| Qualcomm is bad
| lostgame wrote:
| I have negative interest in Windows, so can anyone in the know
| tell me if they have some sort of x86/x64 emulation layer in
| there like Apple does?
|
| If so, how effective is it? If not, this is as DOA as Surface RT.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| They do, it's called WOW64, and it covers emulation of 32-bit
| and 64-bit x86 on ARM. More details on Microsoft's website:
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
|
| It's not as fast as Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon (not by a long
| shot), but especially for lighter apps like productivity
| software, it isn't bad at all.
| leeter wrote:
| I think it's important to call out that Rosetta 2 on Apple
| silicon uses a special mode that changes how the memory model
| works to support x86 style memory ordering. That massively
| reduces the amount of work needed to emulate x86 and x86-64.
| Pretty sure apple both has a patent on it and a special
| dispensation from ARM to use it. Where qualcomm and MS don't
| have either. Which means emulation on Qualcomm CPUs is going
| to be painfully slow in comparison because it has to use a
| lot more locks and fences than is actually necessary with
| that mode available.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I think it's important to call out that Rosetta 2 on
| Apple silicon uses a special mode that changes how the
| memory model works to support x86 style memory ordering.
| That massively reduces the amount of work needed to emulate
| x86 and x86-64. Pretty sure apple both has a patent on it
| and a special dispensation from ARM to use it.
|
| >Myth: Apple chips are the only ones to implement the x86
| TSO memory model.
|
| Nvidia Denver/Carmel and Fujitsu A64fx do too.
|
| https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1534053625110351872
| ericpauley wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > And in an embarrassing turn of events, right now at
| least, you can eke out more performance running x86 code
| inside Apple's Rosetta 2 in a Linux VM under Windows than
| you can using Windows' native emulation layer!
|
| So clearly there's more going on than just leveraging TSO
| support on Apple's chips.
| abudabi123 wrote:
| > ECS (Elitegroup) LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop
|
| The squircle design aesthetic looks nicer than the latest 32GB
| memory new dev kit. Extrude up the shape to a squcube or stack
| three cubes as modular compute units with a unified memory plane.
| The Microsoft Windows Dev Kit 2023 exterior has no design effort
| on the exterior. Wish industry would give dev-consumers the
| choice of microkernel, user space, window manager kind of like
| how vehicles come in varieties, avoiding Windows avoids the
| heartache of the security hamster wheel by being different
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| It boggles my mind Microsoft didn't get into the custom ARM chip
| design game years ago like Google, Amazon, etc. I imagine it's
| far too late now especially with the state of the semiconductor
| and supply chain world. Good luck betting your future on
| Qualcomm, hope it works out.
| int0x2e wrote:
| A rumor I heard somewhere - MS supposedly built x86 emulation
| for ARM a few years back, and created a demo on top of some
| vendor's ARM servers for transparent Azure x86 on ARM (in
| addition to regular ARM VM SKUs of course). But rather than
| move forward with this as a public offering on Azure, they used
| it to put the squeeze on Intel/AMD, and they got rock-bottom
| price on hardware in return for holding-off on ARM adoption.
|
| Sounds like someone may have gotten a massive bonus that year,
| but may have significantly delayed any ARM efforts on Azure...
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Qualcomm, meanwhile, has announced today that they think 2024
| will be their year.
|
| Great, _an entire 8 years_ after the first Windows on ARM
| Qualcomm devices... but they think they 've got it this time.
| For sure.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/03/qualcomm_q4_2022/
|
| Edit: This is so incomprehensibly late it's just embarrassing.
| It's been 2 presidencies. Qualcomm had an exclusivity contract
| for Windows on ARM for literally half a decade (2016-2021)
| which they did absolutely nothing of significance with. And if
| 2024 is their year, it will be 4 years after M1. Yikes. Not to
| mention the lawsuit between themselves and ARM Holdings over
| whether Nuvia's designs are legitimate, which could delay
| things further. Nuvia had better be like pulling a rabbit out
| of a hat when it arrives.
|
| Edit 2: @beembeem Right... _shutters_. 8 years in the sense of
| modern Windows with some 32-bit Intel app compatibility. But as
| for ARM as a whole... Windows RT and Windows CE before it...
| beembeem wrote:
| 8 years? Try more like a decade.
|
| https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2012/06/impressions-
| window...
| sumtechguy wrote:
| keep going... (source: old wince sdk survivor)
| captainmuon wrote:
| I don't blame Qualcomm as much as I blame Microsoft. They
| tried to use the transition to ARM to lockdown and
| smartphonize PCs. There were at least two attempts to bring
| out a restricted, store only version of Windows (Windows RT
| and Windows 10 S). But what's the point of Windows when you
| can't use the majority of existing Windows software? ARM and
| x86 differences are bad enough, but they had to artificially
| add more barriers.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Thanks for the trip down memory lane...I had a Surface RT in
| 2012 and it was a turd. Terrible performance and way too
| locked down to be useful.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I still use my Surface RT for videos on car trips. It has a
| USB port, a 16:9 screen and can run (a very old version of)
| VLC. I wouldn't have paid money for it, but I got it for
| free.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| For those wanting to jump into Windows on ARM for a lower price,
| who do not mind running an IDE on a separate machine, Microsoft's
| original Windows ARM Devkit is still available from Microsoft, on
| eBay, for $219. It has a Qualcomm 7c which is not powerful at all
| (as shown in his graph as roughly similar to the "Dot 1"). But...
| if you don't want to spend $599, it's a fun few weekends.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/255784903190?
| lostmsu wrote:
| Good to know but my takeaway from the reviews was that it is
| slow as molasses. Just over 1k in Geekbench multicore is
| extremely low.
| Aloha wrote:
| > The rest of the innards are a bit of a mess. It seems obvious
| the guts were basically a Surface Pro X-style main board
| rearranged to fit inside a desktop case. And Microsoft missed out
| on a few golden opportunities, like adding in a 2.5 Gbps network
| port instead of a stodgy old 1 Gbps port. But the box does have
| WiFi 6E and triple display support built in (one via mini
| DisplayPort, two via USB-C).
|
| Is 2.5Gbps networking at all common?
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It's common enough most mid-range and better motherboards (and
| many SBCs and cheap Intel/AMD/ARM desktops) include it by
| default. The chips for 2.5G NICs are about the same price as 1G
| parts now, and driver support is excellent across Windows,
| Linux and macOS.
|
| It's basically a free 2.5x faster networking upgrade with the
| same cabling, so many are adopting it. And since it's backwards
| compatible with 1 Gbps networks, it's not a big issue to
| include it.
|
| 2.5G switches are typically a little more than 1G switches, but
| the prices have come down substantially in the past few years,
| making it a worthwhile upgrade instead of going to 10G,
| especially if you don't need all that speed (and heat) and the
| hassle of cabling/transceiver issues that inevitably crop up.
| Aloha wrote:
| I did a casual look around and I'm not seeing much vendor
| support.
|
| Like its there, but not super there.
| lhoff wrote:
| I'd its gradually changing. For example all available AM5
| mainboards and about 80% of all availabe Socket1700 have it
| build in. Laptops are a different story die to the physical
| size of the port but also get more common (of the laptop has a
| Ethernet port) I bought my first USB Adapters (for a direct
| connection between my NAS and my Desktop) in 2020 for ~30EUR.
| dboreham wrote:
| > Is 2.5Gbps networking at all common?
|
| Yes. Problem is that it isn't _that_ much faster than 1G.
| c-smile wrote:
| I've got one already.
|
| Here are real-life / practical numbers so you will know what to
| expect.
|
| Compiling Sciter (https://sciter.com) full rebuild (C++):
|
| i7/32GB - just 64 seconds.
|
| That ARM (WDK)/32GB machine - 2 minutes 6 seconds.
|
| And for the comparison, same Sciter sources, full rebuild
|
| Mac (Mini) M1 machine - 8 minutes 33 seconds (XCode/LLVM, but it
| builds universal binaries).
|
| And yet, the same Sciter, Linux on MacMini/Intel, GCC
|
| i7/32GB - 9 minutes 45 seconds.
|
| So, when we speak about hardware it is not enough to compare pure
| synthetic benchmarks but real life scenarios.
|
| Really, Microsoft Windows is the most developer friendly
| platform. De facto.
| ericpauley wrote:
| >it builds universal binaries
|
| Are these workloads comparable? It could very well be that
| macOS is doing more compilation. If you wanted a fair
| comparison, you could run Linux on both and compile in that.
|
| Even if building for macOS requires more overall work, I
| wouldn't say this constitutes a "real-life" comparison because
| the output product is different.
| bilekas wrote:
| I see a lot of negative comments and while some of them are
| definitely valid for the Qualcomm choices, but I have to say the
| box still feels like far better value for money over Apples
| offering.
| tyingq wrote:
| I agree, especially once somebody gets Linux running on it, it
| would be a good value for CI/CD Arm build jobs.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It's a bit slower, but does have more memory than any
| available M1 option.
| nigerianbrince wrote:
| I had a ryzen 3 2200g with 32 gigs of ram and it felt way
| faster than my mac mini. That extra space makes everything
| faster.
| graycat wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Since I decided to base my startup on Microsoft, that is, write
| the software using .NET to run on Windows, a few days ago I
| noticed the Microsoft "Dev Kit" and wondered what it was.
|
| I clicked for a few HOURS at the corresponding Microsoft Web
| pages and finally gave up -- I could make no sense at all out of
| what the "Dev Kit" was. Wasted a few thousand mouse clicks and a
| few HOURS or time. Got frustrated.
|
| In particular, in those Microsoft Web pages, there was an HTML
| single line text box were could ask questions, and the question I
| asked, the simplest, most elementary, first question, was
|
| "What is in the Dev Kit?"
|
| In the hours of clicking some thousands of times on those Web
| pages, I asked that question some dozens of times and got back
| nothing meaningful. Right, from all I could tell, for the
| simplest, most elementary, first question, no information.
|
| By the time I gave up, I still had no idea what the heck "Dev
| Kit" was, what was in it, what it was for, etc. Was it hardware
| and software or just software? Couldn't tell. Most elementary
| question, no answer.
|
| So, here with this thread finally I can see the first, simple
| answers to the first, simple questions. Good.
|
| For me the answer is, no, I don't want a "Dev Kit", not for
| money, marbles, chalk, or for free. Good to get that question
| answered!
| ripley12 wrote:
| The very first search result for "windows dev kit":
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-dev-kit-2023/94k0p...
|
| "Everything you need to develop Windows apps for Arm. Powerful
| AI. All on one device."
|
| "Introducing a developer-class desktop device to build, debug,
| and test native Windows apps for Arm."
|
| A tech specs tab shows you exactly what the hardware is.
|
| How did you spend hours on this?
| graycat wrote:
| Apparently via Google you found a good explanation of the Dev
| Kit.
|
| Gee, maybe the Microsoft Web pages should have given the
| links you found!
|
| Yes, eventually I did do a Google search. I found a little
| information, better than the Microsoft Web pages.
|
| But a "device"? What was meant by a "device"? My life, my
| work in computing, my work for my startup, are all awash in
| various _devices_. Heck, my kitchen has a lot of "devices".
| So does my car. I have a sack of gorgeous Nikon camera
| equipment, all "devices".
|
| Somewhere some description needs to get simpler, down to the
| level of the Common Man in the Street, to the 6th grade, with
| an introductory explanation: I've done a LOT in computing and
| still am doing so, but a "device" is just too vague to be
| meaningful. People for whom that jargon is meaningful have a
| background I am missing. For my current work, I have no need
| for that background.
|
| The Microsoft Web pages kept promising to tell me what was in
| the kit, product, offering, box, unit, device, whatever.
| Sooo, I kept clicking, thinking that maybe I just missed the
| Web page that actually explained what the Dev Kit was.
|
| So, the "Dev Kit", the _thing_ Microsoft was talking about,
| is a COMPUTER, complete with a DC power supply, central
| processor, main memory, solid state memory for a file system,
| ports, maybe some version of USB (Intel 's universal serial
| bus) for connecting a keyboard, a mouse, and one or more
| video displays, an operating system, and some software tools
| from Microsoft, and for most of this still I have no actual
| source and am just guessing. NONE of that was at all clear.
|
| My interest was as a founder of a startup, a Web site, and
| the programmer of that Web site. I've done the programming
| using Microsoft's .NET software and their SQL Server. And I
| wrote the code on Windows XL and then Windows 7.
|
| That was a long time ago -- I got delayed by some
| unpredictable, independent, unfortunate outside events. But
| now I'm returning and trying to rush to going on-line as a
| Web site available to everyone on the Internet.
|
| Early in the work, I got from Microsoft a version of SQL
| Server for free. What I wanted to know a few days ago from
| the "Dev Kit" was, is a free (developer) version of SQL
| Server still available? What other versions of SQL Server are
| available? Should I consider converting to PostgreSQL? What
| other Microsoft software is available? Eventually it became
| clear that somehow whatever the Dev Kit was, it was not
| really for people developing a Web site.
|
| Soooo, maybe somewhere there is a little company developing
| and selling software to help, say, a pizza shop. The little
| company writes the software using .NET. Some of the pizza
| shop customers are using computers with ARM processors
| instead of x86 processors and some version of Unix instead of
| Windows. So, the Dev Kit is aimed at software developers in
| such companies. Okay. Microsoft never made any of this at all
| clear, but eventually, okay, now it's clear.
|
| This Dev Kit is not for me. Now I understand this.
|
| Then I did another Google search and got a good, clear,
| surprisingly nice explanation for my question about SQL
| Server:
|
| At
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-
| downlo...
|
| I saw
|
| SQL Server 2019 Express is a free edition of SQL Server,
| ideal for development and production for desktop, web, and
| small server applications.
|
| Sure, I'd still like to know what $ I'm in for if my startup
| is successful and I need a _non toy_ version of SQL Server?
| Ah, getting information like that is asking for too much!
|
| But some such information is available sometimes!!! Last
| month I finally found a path to some serious people at my
| ISP, Comcast, about what they could do for me when I bring my
| Web site live! Most of their answers were good, clear, and
| more favorable than I had guessed.
|
| So, sometimes in business it's actually IS possible to get
| some clear information!!!!
|
| It appears to me that in the last year or so Microsoft has
| made good progress in the main, foundational challenge --
| describing their work. Before, long it appeared that getting
| such information was not like pulling teeth from lions but
| pulling tusks from elephants.
|
| "Device": Whoever at Microsoft described the Dev Kit as a
| "device" needs some serious _counseling_.
|
| In my first use of SQL Server, I had no problems designing
| the database, understanding "normal forms", but spent a solid
| week trying to get a "connection string" to work. Finally I
| sent to Microsoft so much in email and phone calls that I got
| to apparently some mid-level executive in the SQL Server
| organization who told me right away how to get a connection
| string. WOW, only a week wasted!!!!
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Apparently via Google you found a good explanation of the
| Dev Kit. Gee, maybe the Microsoft Web pages should have
| given the links you found!
|
| It's literally the same link as the very first one in the
| body of article this comment thread is about.
|
| > The Microsoft Web pages kept promising to tell me what
| was in the kit, product, offering, box, unit, device,
| whatever. Sooo, I kept clicking, thinking that maybe I just
| missed the Web page that actually explained what the Dev
| Kit was.
|
| As ripley12 says, there's a 'Tech Specs' tab (I realize
| that 'tab' might be a new concept for you, but if you'll go
| to that page and scroll down a little bit you'll see a
| section that looks like |Overview | Tech Specs | FAQ| and
| each of those is a 'tab')
|
| > for most of this still I have no actual source and am
| just guessing. NONE of that was at all clear
|
| In addition to the 'Tech Specs' tab there is a 'FAQ' tab.
| As you might know, this stands for 'Frequently Asked
| Questions' ('frequently' means 'often'). In there you will
| see a list of questions with ">" symbols next to them (this
| ">" does not mean that they are less than some value, it's
| just a typographical symbol).
|
| The first of those (when read from top to bottom) is "What
| are some of the specific challenges Windows Dev Kit 2023
| will help solve for developers? "
|
| If you 'click', with your 'mouse', on that it will reveal
| (which means 'to show which was hidden'), and the revealed
| text reads:
|
| Today, if a developer wants to build an app that targets
| Arm, they generally write their code and build the app
| binaries on a x64 Windows PC, and then copy the built
| binaries over to an Arm device upon which to run or test
| the app. If they need to debug the app, they have to hookup
| a remote debugging session from their x64 PC.
|
| Windows Dev Kit 2023, as an Arm-powered device powered by
| the Snapdragon(r) 8cx Gen 3 compute platform, will enable
| Windows developers to build, test and debug Arm-native apps
| alongside all their favorite productivity tools, including
| Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, WSL, VSCode, Microsoft
| Office and Teams.
|
| I realize there are a lot of words there, but sometimes in
| this industry we have to read them.
| cylinder714 wrote:
| Try typing "Windows Dev Kit 2023" into your preferred search
| engine; it took a while for the news to spread. It's not a
| hotrod, but if you think Windows on ARM has a future, $599 for
| a small form factor PC with 32G of RAM is pretty good.
|
| >Since I decided to base my startup on Microsoft, that is,
| write the software using .NET to run on Windows
|
| If you have any interest in Linux or cross-platform
| development, Microsoft and Canonical announced first-class
| support for .NET for Ubuntu:
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-6-is-now-in-ubu...
|
| https://ubuntu.com/blog/install-dotnet-on-ubuntu
| graycat wrote:
| Thanks. So far I'm developing software to run only on my
| hardware, 64 bit x86, and only on Windows, Windows 7
| Professional or some version of Windows Server. The main
| purpose is just for my Web site. In time I will write more
| software to process, some of it could be called _statistics_
| , some relevant data essentially independent of the Web site
| itself.
|
| I can understand that maybe for a server farm on a few
| million square feet of rack space, and some millions of
| processors, one way and another they could save significant $
| (a) powering the computers and (b) removing the resulting
| heat from the building. My startup is not there yet. Also I
| can understand that my AMD FX-8350 processor can use a few
| more Watts per computation than some recent processors with
| simpler instruction sets and smaller line widths, but I'm not
| worrying about that now either.
|
| I am pleased that Microsoft is working hard to get .NET to
| run on a variety of processor instruction sets and operating
| systems -- for me it means that Microsoft will continue to
| support the .NET I am depending on.
| WithinReason wrote:
| I was hoping Microsoft would port Windows to Raspberry Pi, looks
| like that's too underpowered.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| There's no porting to be done. You can run Windows 10 / 11 on a
| Raspberry Pi 400 today.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Windows 11 only up to one of the betas--the production
| version has some ARMv8.1 extensions that aren't compatible
| with the Pi's SoC.
|
| The Pi is also woefully underpowered, even when overclocked--
| the cheaper ARM SoCs from Qualcomm are still 2-4x faster than
| a Pi 4, and they even feel a bit slow at times running
| Windows on ARM.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| They ported Windows 10 IoT to run on the pi (it's not a desktop
| Windows experience though, don't get your hopes up). I'm not
| sure they maintain or care about it anymore though, I think
| they moved to Azure IoT that's Linux-based.
| notaplumber1 wrote:
| The recently released OpenBSD 7.2 boots and installs on it,
| support for the same Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC used in the ThinkPad
| x13s was added during last release cycle, so support for the
| Microsoft Dev Kit 2023 came for the most part for free.
|
| https://www.openbsd.org/72.html
|
| OpenBSD developer Patrick Wildt shared boot messages (dmesg)
| here: https://twitter.com/bluerise/status/1585584481854816256
|
| Another UK tech reviewer Alex Ellis showed it booting OpenBSD
| into X11: https://blog.alexellis.io/linux-on-microsoft-dev-
| kit-2023/
| uni_rule wrote:
| Wonder if that means alternative OS's will eventually reach the
| Galaxy Book Go. Its rock bottom price intrigues me but it seems
| to lack dev support in that regard. Maybe these attempts to
| support similar specs of machine will trickle down to it.
| my123 wrote:
| Thankfully from the kernel perspective the Galaxy Book Go SoC
| is pretty well supported because Chromebooks did ship with
| the same SoC.
|
| However, that specific device doesn't have good support.
| Would take some developer time to do so... (and not sure if
| that will happen)
| notaplumber1 wrote:
| I believe the Samsung Galaxy Book Go was tested with OpenBSD
| during the initial development for the ThinkPad x13s,
| keyboard support was added in this commit.
|
| https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/74edc71ccae4051eda11fa.
| ..
|
| Many of these older generation "Windows on Snapdragon"
| laptops unfortunately did not use fast NVMe storage however,
| only slow eMMC and eUFS (Universal Flash Storage), the latter
| currently being unsupported by OpenBSD.
| stoplying1 wrote:
| Yeah I don't get how Linux is running on the Thinkpad and
| openbsd was able to boot but a device trees is the blocker for
| Linux? Are they just on some distro that doesn't have the new
| kernel packaged?
|
| Oh, it's because of "APCI" mode working with openbsd
| apparently...
| notaplumber1 wrote:
| The upstreamed Qualcomm drivers in the Linux kernel require a
| device tree from the vendor which doesn't exist yet for this
| machine, I believe the Linux community has something cobbled
| together for the ThinkPad x13s, or got something from Lenovo.
|
| > Oh, it's because of "APCI" mode working with openbsd
| apparently...
|
| Indeed, OpenBSD attempts to support these machines to some
| extent in ACPI mode, but from what I read the ACPI tables are
| in bad shape/incomplete. "Good enough for Windows, ship it.".
| ntauthority wrote:
| > but from what I read the ACPI tables are in bad
| shape/incomplete. "Good enough for Windows, ship it.".
|
| It is a bit more nuanced than this. Qualcomm ships a giant
| custom (mandatory, most the platform will not even work
| without it!) driver stack on Windows and uses ACPI
| definitions more than most x86 platform vendors, to the
| extent that it even exposed a bug in the Windows ACPI
| implementation when an ACPI method return buffer would
| exceed 64 kB so since this generation of SoC a lot of the
| Windows drivers instead bundle their own 'subset' of
| certain ACPI buffers and the main DSDT is empty as a
| result.
|
| Linux on ARM still doesn't really use ACPI except where
| forces more influential than Qualcomm managed (e.g. SBSA?)
| so even downstream Linux kernels for Qualcomm still use DT.
| notaplumber1 wrote:
| Appreciate the additional context. It does seem like
| though a lot of magic is contained in the Qualcomm
| Windows drivers, with large parts of the ACPI tables
| being stubs or broken (requiring hardcoded driver
| quirks/workarounds).
| rcarmo wrote:
| Like I wrote on a similar thread a few days ago, some of these
| expectations seem a tad misplaced, but I would buy one in a flash
| if it was available in my country, as a _personal_ ultra-quiet
| desktop with a good Linux userland and the ability to drive a
| 5K2K display or matching pixel acreage.
|
| For my terminal-centric lifestyle WSL2 is fine, and all of my
| personal machines run either Linux or macOS even though I happen
| to work for MS. And getting a fully working aarch64 Linux
| userland with Windows 11 window management and PowerToys is,
| well... tempting.
|
| I am, however, increasingly leaning towards just getting a Khadas
| Edge 2 Pro (which has an RK3588S and a comparable amount of RAM
| and storage). I don't think Jeff has tested that one yet (and it
| should come in below the SQ2), but if you want _fast_ aarch64
| readily available, it seems to be the thing to beat (I can see it
| now on my regional Amazon store, a click away... must...
| resist...)
| drekipus wrote:
| > with Windows 11 window management and PowerToys is, well...
| tempting.
|
| Can I ask why? In all of my experiences, both "windows window
| management" and "power toys" seem to be lackluster to Linux
| equivalents.
| rcarmo wrote:
| You likely haven't tried FancyZones or the baseline window
| snapping with mouse dragging. I use a set of GNOME extensions
| that mimic them, but they are simply not as... snappy.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| It's not quiet tho. It has a cheap-ass fan and also bad enough
| coil whine to get a mention in the video.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The fan is pretty quiet, at least--I couldn't hear it unless
| I put my ear up to the box.
|
| The coil whine was excessive though. I wouldn't normally
| mention it if it were here and there and quiet, but it was
| noticeable from a few feet away any time I went above 100
| mbps down over Ethernet.
| rcarmo wrote:
| That is interesting - I noticed that in your video, and I
| suspect a little shielding around the Ethernet electronics
| might help (but I have no real idea how the Ethernet was
| integrated into the Surface motherboard variant).
| PointyFluff wrote:
| Dammit, Jeff!
|
| Stop buying up all the Raspberry PIs!
|
| </jk>
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