Qualcomm will try to have its Apple Silicon moment in PCs with “Snapdragon X”
We should learn more about Qualcomm's high-end Arm chip later this month.
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Unless they can convince MS to release Windows for ARM this wont amount to anything. What holds back PC ARM is the fact that Microsoft isn't selling licenses of Windows for ARM.
Windows does actually have a Windows 11 version of ARM. The Thinkpad X13s for example does use it. It doesn't seem to be widely available though, maybe because it's experimental.
Yes it does but Microsoft doesn't seem to be licensing it to anyone. You can't buy licenses and last time I checked only the Surface got it, I believe they're trying to hold it from themselfs in order to push the Surface as the only option if you want a very light / portable Window ARM computer.
They do. No one really wants it. More than the Surface is getting it.
Edit: like, check out this article: https://www.techradar.com/news/new-lenovo-thinkpad-x13s-may-be-the-first-windows-on-arm-laptop-we-want-to-buy
Microsoft holds a lot of things back. X86 also holds a lot of things back especially when the future is ARM.
No its not. They will exist side by side but calling it the future is purely wrong.
Guess we'll see.
Even if they do, they'd still need a Rosetta-like translator. I don't see that happening any time soon.
Can you buy licenses? Why haven't all manufacturers making and selling ARM tablets / laptops with Windows ARM then? I believe they're trying to hold it as a competitive advantage to sell more Surface machines.
Can you buy licenses?
I can't, but OEMs can.
Why haven’t all manufacturers making and selling ARM tablets / laptops with Windows ARM then?
Because no one was buying them.
Microsoft was pushing to make this happen extra hard with Windows 8 or so. They've kept it alive since then. It's revived a bit once they started seeing ChromeOS devices start taking over the low end of the market.
But the available ARM processors kinda sucked; the price difference at the low end wasn't enough for consumers in most cases: low margins are a demotivator for manufacturers; Intel and AMD got better low-power, low-price options; app availability was/is a big problem, etc.
But you can buy Windows ARM laptops and things from Samsung, Lenovo, a few others right now. The others don't care, mostly still for the reasons above.
So it boils down to pointless ARM devices.
At least HP and Lenovo have arm64 notebooks with Windows.
They do? Never saw them...
googles
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/lenovo-announces-the-first-arm-based-thinkpad/
https://www.xda-developers.com/hp-elite-folio-review/
I also recall reading a review of someone trying to get Linux going on the ARM-based Lenovo Thinkpad X13s mentioned above. It sounded like a kinda rough user experience.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad_x13s/
I do have a bunch of the HPs for work related projects - they are pretty nice, and the x86 emulation works pretty good (and at least feels better than the x86 emulation in MacOS) - but a lot of other stuff is problematic, like pretty much no support in Microsofts deployment/imaging tools. So far I haven't managed to create answer files for unattended installation.
As for Linux - they do at least offer disabling secure boot, so you can boot other stuff. It'd have been nicer to be able to load custom keys, though. It is nice (yet still feeling a bit strange) to have an ARM system with UEFI. A lot of the bits required to make it working either have made it, or are on the way to upstream kernels, so I hope it'll be usable soon.
Currently for the most stable setup I need to run it from an external SSD as that specific kernel does not have support for the internal NVME devices, and booting that thing is a bit annoying as I couldn't get the grub on the SSD to play nice with UEFI, so I boot from a different grub, and then chainload the grub on SSD.
