Signs point to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors showing up in actual, real-world, human-purchasable computers in the next couple of months after years of speculation and another year or so of hype.
For those who haven’t been following along, this will allegedly be Qualcomm’s first Arm processor for Windows PCs that does for PCs what Apple’s M-series chips did for Macs, promising both better battery life and better performance than equivalent Intel chips. This would be a departure from past Snapdragon chips for PCs, which have performed worse than (or, at best, similarly to) existing Intel options, barely improved battery life, and come with a bunch of software incompatibility problems to boot.
Early benchmarks that have trickled out look promising for the Snapdragon X. And there are other reasons to be optimistic—the Snapdragon X Elite’s design team is headed up by some of the same people who made Apple Silicon so successful in the first place.
Rumors indicate that Microsoft's flagship Surface tablet this year will switch to using Qualcomm's Arm chips exclusively rather than selling Arm and Intel versions alongside each other (an Intel Surface Pro 10 exists, but it's only sold to businesses). Microsoft has tried to make Arm Windows happen a bunch of times. But this time feels different.
The first public version of Windows to run on Arm processors was Windows RT, an Arm-compatible offshoot of Windows 8 that launched on a bare handful of devices back in late 2012.
Windows RT came with significant limitations, most notably a total inability to run traditional x86 Windows desktop apps—all apps had to come from the Microsoft Store, which was considerably more barren than it is today. There was no x86 compatibility mode at all.
That limitation may have been due in part to the limited, low-performance Arm hardware available at the time. Arm processors were still predominantly 32-bits, with slow processors and GPUs, 32 or 64GB of slow flash storage, and just 2GB of memory (at the time, 4GB was generally considered adequate for a PC, and 8GB was roomy). Even if you did have x86 app translation, translated apps would have felt awful since the Arm hardware already struggled to run the native built-in apps consistently well.
Further Reading
My kingdom for some apps: The Asus VivoTab RT review
Windows RT died the death it deserved to die; it never ran on many devices, and those that did had totally vanished from the market by 2015 or so. But the technical underpinnings of the operating system remain relevant today.
As detailed by then-Windows head Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft did significant work to define a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), ACPI firmware, and basic class drivers for the Arm version of Windows so that the OS could install and run as expected on a wide variety of barely standardized Arm hardware the same way it did on a thoroughly standardized x86 PC. (Compare this to Google's Wild West approach to Android, which to this day can’t install basic OS or security updates without specific intervention from chipmakers and device manufacturers).
These were building blocks Microsoft could re-use for Windows 10, which first came to Arm devices in 2017 with support for 32-bit x86 app translation. This version of Windows-on-Arm also functioned more as a technical demo than the dawn of a new era, but it did come closer to becoming what Windows-on-Arm needed to be to succeed: a drop-in replacement for the x86 version of Windows, where the two versions were largely indistinguishable for non-technical users.
The next big step down that path came in 2020 when Microsoft announced a preview of 64-bit Intel app translation for Arm PCs, though the final version ended up being exclusive to Windows 11 when it launched in late 2021 (leaving behind, incidentally, that first wave of Windows 10 Arm PCs with a Snapdragon 835 processor in them—another case where early-adopting into this ecosystem has hosed users. Developers also got an easier on-ramp to Arm when Microsoft began allowing them to mix x86 and Arm code in the same app.
That brings us to where we are now: an Arm version of Windows that still has some compatibility gaps, especially around external accessories and specialized software. But the vast majority of productivity apps and even games will now run happily on the Arm version of Windows, with no user or developer intervention required.
An actually viable Arm Windows is good for everyone
The experience of using Windows via Parallels on an Apple Silicon Mac, for example, is getting pretty close to the way it used to be on Intel Macs, outside of specific things like being unable to run newer DirectX 12 games.
Windows on ARM may refer to: Windows RT, a deprecated ARM32 version of Windows 8/8.1. Windows 10 on ARM, Windows 10 compiled for ARM64 devices. Windows 11 on ARM, Windows 11 compiled for ARM64 devices.
Games and apps won't work if they use a version of OpenGL greater than 1.1, or if they rely on "anti-cheat" drivers that haven't been made for Windows 10 Arm-based PCs. Check with your game publisher to see if a game will work. Apps that customize the Windows experience might have problems.
Windows on Arm runs native Arm apps, as well as many unmodified x86 & x64 apps, but for the best performance and battery life, apps should be built to be Arm-native wherever possible.
This is no surprise, as many across the industry consider Windows on Arm devices as the future of computing, with unparalleled speed, battery life, and connectivity. Like me, MS apparently sees the uptake of the advantages that ARM architecture brings to computing having a significant impact at the end-user level.
The transition to Arm in the Windows ecosystem holds promise, but it comes with challenges. Legacy applications designed for x86 architecture might face compatibility issues, requiring either emulation or adaptation.
While both CPU designs can still have high performance (both ARM- and x86-architecture supercomputers compete for the fastest in the world), ARM designs tend to focus on smaller form factors, battery life, size, eliminating cooling requirements, and—perhaps most importantly—cost.
In addition to the April announcement, in August 2023 the companies announced an agreement to accelerate the development and implementation of Arm-based SoCs on the Intel 10 nanometer process.
ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors.
Most Windows applications are primarily compiled for x86 processors, so running them on Arm Windows requires emulation, resulting in slower performance. Arm Windows PCs with Qualcomm chips are not as impressive in terms of performance compared to traditional x86 PCs, and app compatibility remains an issue.
You can create and deploy Windows 11 Arm64 VMs with with Ampere Altra Arm–based processors on Azure. While there are many ways to create an Azure virtual machine, the easiest way to get started is using the Azure portal.
Apple's Shift to Arm and Microsoft's Consideration
Recent reports suggest that Microsoft is actively working on a new build of Windows, codenamed Germanium, specifically tailored to support Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, a powerful Arm-based chip expected to outperform competitors.
Click on the System icon.Click About on the left side menu at the very bottom.Under Device specifications on the right side, check the System type. This will indicate either a x86-based processor (32-bit), x64-based processor (64-bit), or an ARM-based processor.
You can now virtually run Windows 11 on the newest Apple Mac devices (those with Apple's own ARM-based M1, M2, or M3 chips) using Microsoft-authorized methods.
PSA: It doesn't matter if your computer runs on ARM, all of your apps will work on Windows 11. x86-64 apps still run on Arm-based Windows PCs with emulation, and here's why it's vital for future devices.
Introduction: My name is Geoffrey Lueilwitz, I am a zealous, encouraging, sparkling, enchanting, graceful, faithful, nice person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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