I don't believe it supports 64-bit x86 emulation, just 32-bit. I think most Windows software (including games) is still 32-bit, though, so that shouldn't be a huge issue (assuming the emulation runs tolerably in the first place).
"Based on.... ? Wouldn't amd64 be easier to implement on aarch64 since the bitnesses match?"
Actually it's far more difficult since you would need to add in BOTH 64 and 32bit instruction emulation rather than just 32bit. ARM doesn't play nicely with mixed bit situations
>you would need to add in BOTH 64 and 32bit instruction emulation
Why would you have to do that? Windows does not allow 32 bit code in a 64 bit process or vice versa. They would need only to implement support for long mode.
ARM64 is not much different to AMD64 regarding the implementation of 64 bit support. Both architecture supports 64 bit as an extension to 32 bit support.
> Windows does not allow 32 bit code in a 64 bit process or vice versa. It's completely false. Actually there are only 64 bit processes on 64 bit Windows and all of them have 64 bit ntdll.dll. "32 bit" processes then load WOW subsystem that creates appropriate 32 bit environment and translation layers. So you can use 64 bit code in "32 bit" processes if you know what you are doing.
I suspect the obvious reason for sticking with 32-bit x86 over x86-64 is for legacy 16-bit execution compatibility. As the article emphasized, this move is a purely legacy-focused one where performance is not the key metric, compatibility is. 64-bit windows environments can not run 16-bit code, and presumably emulated 64-bit windows environments have the same restriction.
This is actually the ONLY reason why Microsoft still even has a 32-bit SKU. Virtually every 32-bit program and piece of hardware from the last decade supports x86-64 windows environments, but 16-bit programs that were still being written as late as 2010, do not.
Or, far more likely - time. It takes time to implement a feature like this, and x64 adds a lot to the ISA. Given that 95% of applications (and 99.99% of legacy business applications) are still 32-bit or have 32-bit versions, they probably decided to start with that. I'd bet good money that x64 support will come some time after first launch.
"3D features are disabled on 32-bit platforms and on computers having less than 512MB of VRAM. Video features are not supported on 32-bit Windows systems."
Photoshop struggles even on core m with 8 gigs of ram, now add a slower cpu + less ram + emulation, and you will have yourself one hell of an experience.
Yes today it probably wouldn't provide good photoshop performance but my guess is that they're looking at upcoming ARM chips that'll be able to provide passable performance even with the emulation hit. If they're being used in a laptop a lot of the thermal limitations that hold back these chips won't matter.
Right because professionals who complain that top-of-the-line x86 processors aren't able to always keep up performance-wise are going to switch to something that's barely as fast as a Core M or a 6-year-old MacBook Air. Hahahah, no.
They will run like cr@p. Desktop applications have already been getting progressively bloated and with very inefficient runtimes, both in terms of CPU time and memory usage. Emulation is only going to make it worse, while throwing it at a very underpowered platform. Not to mention user experience, good luck hitting buttons, menus and pretty much any GUI element at a 1080p 5 inch display.
Continuum? Tablets? It just says "Qualcomm device" and "Qualcomm processor". Also the device in the video has mouse and pen attached, we can assume the guy is not running on a 5" screen.
But you sure have a lot of "informed" opinions about emulation performance for a guy who thinks "ms" stands for "microseconds".
ALL desktop Apps, (32bit as well as 64bit) can run at full speed on a nearby desktop and be streamed to a 32bit tablet making the tablet perform at desktop speeds while using extremely low power
Microsoft, Adobe, NVidia, Valve and all the rest cannot retain valid patents to the application and streaming technology I created for EVERYONE (Including YOU)
A process that would require 600 years to complete on a tablet emulating x85 can be completed on a supercomputer on the ground and streamed to a tablet such as this in a few seconds making the tablet appear and operate as a much more capable machine
There is no need for $1000 Video cards in a tablet when streaming games from a tricked out desktop
This is just the beginning
There is also no need to emulate X86 to stream "limited" app content directly to a different OS
The benefit of using X86 emulation is that the actual app (Photoshop in this case) can be running on the ARM tablet while SERIOUS graphics processing far exceeding the demo Microsoft provides can be performed in what seems real-time
Again, This is just the beginning
Local Virtual effects (gunfire/explosions etc) can be overlayed onto super high quality renders from a cloud server farm giving you what seems to be realtime effects on a pro quality background without any noticeable latency problems NOT A JOKE!
I was referring to a low powered tablet as used on the Space Station streaming from a ground station in a few seconds what would take hundreds of years from the onboard tablet in space
The best thing untold in this news is that Microsoft finally has all the reasons to decouple itself from Intel. The original WinRT was a start, but then Intel reacted with its arrogant stance on mobile leadership which OEMs happily welcomed. We all know what happened. If Microsoft had the guts to continue supporting ARM we'd probably have major Win32/desktop applications ported to the platform by now. And we'd probably have decent ARM laptops with proper storage instead of the measly ones Chromebooks provide. And ARM probably would have put more effort in designing high IPC / big core chips.
Also, it makes sense for AMD to catch early on this.
Re: "It (Windows RT) also could not run Win32 desktop apps" I think it was an artificial limitation imposed by Microsoft. WinRT was ready to run Win32 apps recompiled for ARM, and people did that. Process looked like this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2...
All Microsoft had to do was to enable Win32 apps on WinRT officially. Many programs can be easily ported to different CPU architecture to avoid performance penalty for emulation. There will be x86-to-ARM emulation overhead.
> 2. They wanted to solve the malware problem once and for all.
I wonder, if they are going to use Hyper-V for emulation, wouldn't they just create the same kind of secure virtualization they're now offering for Edge on Windows Enterprise?
So, it could run win32 apps recompiled for ARM. This can run win32 apps not recompiled for ARM.
That is a huge difference. Many software devs will not update their code for ARM, especially in business. Everything moves at glacial speed. Windows 10 being able to run win32 without recompiling is awesome.
One whole day, and nobody cares. Only few amoebas showed up to comment. MSFT got but hurt by the concept of Android and iOS and now trying to move thru the ecosystem with the help of another 1 dimensional company called QCom. x86 can support Android and Intel is taking QCom lunch, scooping whats left in the Tablet business(besides iPad family), so they are putting now Server Chips, MSFT collaboration, Open Power consortium, all is dust. But no idiot is realizing that the SD830 is already choking on Nougat opening the contacts/phone caller app. I want to see how the arguments will start when MSFT will ask QCom to co-develop some drivers or invest in the upgrading the ecosystem as Intel did with Cortana to those idiots in the Win10. Windows is dead, buggy, old fashioned, never improved OS. NVDA said, hell no to Tegra and WinRT chocked up in those Surface 2 devices.
Going past the fact that it's like you're struggling to make your message impossible to read, I stopped at this "Intel is taking QCom lunch". Is it the same Intel who's mobile division is on life support? Geez, everybody's an expert just because they like something and hate something else...
This is really only interesting for laptops but Intel has that market pretty much cornered already. Even with Chromebooks ARM has gone nowhere. And why would I buy an ARM Windows laptop that has to do emulation to run x86, and suffer the performance and power penalty?
And nobody cares about running x86 apps or Windows 10 on a phone or tablet. Hopefully people have gotten over that lie by now.
If they'd done something like this 10 years ago and implemented it consistently (plus dealt with having adaptable UIs between phones and larger screens), it could have worked. But there have been so many mis-fires (Windows 8 UI, WinRT) by now...
Probably because of price. Intel's chips have gotten incredibly expensive for the performance they offer.
Core M in $1,000-$1,500 laptops, for instance, is a ridiculous proposition. ARM would be much better suited there, and it may even run better.
And the Celeron/Pentium notebook market should be wiped out by ARM-based laptops. If it's not then, OEMs are just brain dead masochists who don't know what's good for them and their customers.
Clearly, people DO like running windows 10 on a tablet, unless you vcompletely missed how well the surface line is doing.
As for why someone would want an ARM laptop, the vast majority of consumers dont need a powerhouse machine. Things like web browsers and office applications, and based on the video photoshop, all run really well. Unless you are a gamer, ARM on windows would satisfy your needs well. So you can buy a machine that is cheaper and gets better battery life then the x86 powered machine, since intel no longer has sole control of that market. So cheaper, better battery life, no discernible performance difference, seems like a few good reasons.
For laptops, ARM is also more efficient and easier to implement, which means higher profit margins and more sales. OEMs like AMD would have a better chance of succeeding in an ARM world, as intel wouldn't have a stranglehold on the ARM arket like they do x86.
The Surface tablet is really just a smaller ultrabook that can also play Angry Birds. Its appeal is mostly for those who are looking for a laptop function. Even then, it hasn't sold much.
I think it's great to see ARM in laptops but as far as I have seen, ARM companies (and ARM itself) seem completely uninterested in entering that market. Maybe Qualcomm will be different. But we have ARM Chromebooks and x86 Chromebooks and x86 clearly dominates that market, and this is on a platform where the ARM stuff is 100% native, not run through emulation. Maybe with Android apps coming to Chromebooks ARM will have a leg up there. But it seems to me that OEMs are -- for one reason or another -- attached to Intel.
When it comes to power usage, laptops are in a competitive market. I'm not sure I'd want to waste CPU cycles on emulation when I can just get an x86 laptop. Price would have to be dramatically favorable to make up for the hits to performance and battery. And for those who simply want to browse the web and check Facebook, they'd be better off getting a Chromebook.
"Clearly, people DO like running windows 10 on a tablet, unless you vcompletely missed how well the surface line is doing."
Just to throw out an example of how people see what they want to see: The Surface line ("doing well" according to the commenter above, and much of the internet) sells 1 million units a quarter. The Apple Watch ("struggling" and "a flop" according to much of the same internet) has been selling three x that number (a million a month) and is likely to shift to two million a month with the new models.
Keep that in mind next time any of you feel the urge to make wild statements about how various products are doing...
-- The Apple Watch ("struggling" and "a flop" according to much of the same internet) has been selling three x that number (a million a month)
you, or your source(?), is making that up. Apple doesn't tell anyone how many Watch are sold. lots of folks look at chicken guts to tell them how many.
More to the point, cheaper ($500-800) tablets are no longer really available because intel aren't making atoms for tablets anymore. Hello market that is underserved.
"but Intel has that market pretty much cornered already" This is not clear.
Obviously it is possible to ship an ARM core with better than Intel performance at Intel power levels and Intel MOBILE frequencies. (Apple is there with A10 and will be at about 1.25 Intel IPC at Intel mobile turbo frequencies with A10X). OK, so that handles the single-threaded part of the equation.
Next we have power. Again Apple and the ARM world have both shown that using a low power companion core brings SUBSTANTIAL power advantages to mobile devices. I can't speak to Android, but in the case of Apple the win is most obvious in terms of "idle" time --- basically when the screen is off but the phone does occasional scheduled background tasks, handles notifications, etc --- all stuff that can clearly run only on the low power core. Intel does not provide anything like this, and one consequence is that we just expect our laptops to do very little when idle (ie closed/asleep), unlike our mobiles which we expect to remain clearly alive when idle/asleep. in other words Intel's continuing unwillingness to broaden its technology portfolio substantially limits what PCs/laptops can do compared to mobile.
Third we have multicore. Intel has basically limited mobile to 2 cores (plus the minor 25% boost that is hyperthreading) except if you want to get a substantially thicker/higher power laptop. One suspects part of this is that Intel is ultimately driven by what's good for server revenues --- they want to charge server folks a lot of money for lotsa cores, which means they can't ships lotsa cores to the mass market at mass market prices. QC and ARM generally aren't constrained in this way --- they can add new cores to their dies on a sorta engineering rationality rather than a market segmentation rationality. This is significant insofar as MS has tried really hard to get more of Windows, especially the newer APIs, to exploit more cores more-or-less transparently.
Finally we have GPUs where obviously (again Apple) it's possible to provide GPUs that operate at the performance level of Intel's inbuilt GPUs while on what appears to be a somewhat lower power budget.
I suspect that if there were a compelling reason to do so, one could create a substantially more interesting PC based on ARM technology --- a PC that incorporates features like GPS and cellular connectivity, attitude and acceleration sensing, and the full panoply of features we expect from mobile. What's been holding us back is Intel's ridiculous slowness.
Obviously all these things are principle in possible today. But they require extra non-standard HW so can't be relied upon. People are calling this "making mobile more like PCs" but I think that's backwards --- the correct interpretation is making PCs more like mobile.
Well, Atom has quad core for mobile, but Atom is effectively dead with the cancellation of Broxton and Willow Trail.
Intel tried giving away chips for free with their contra-revenue program to get OEMs to use Atom, and they ended up losing $3-4 billion annually for 2 years straight trying to get into the mobile segment. I think they gave up and ceded the entire low-power processor market to ARM while hoping to have something viable in the future.
If this W10 on ARM isn't a flash in the pan, it'll make Intel soil their pants. We're talking about very portable phones and tablets running a full Windows OS, with low power idle and always-connectivity for 4G and WiFi, something Intel has struggled with for a long time. This is Microsoft saying to Intel, "Shape up or ship out!"
Well if we had laptop caliber arm chips I don't see why an ARM laptop running windows with x86 emulation would be bad. It might have great battery life and be $100-300 cheaper than the intel equivalent. Core-m/5/7 chips aren't cheap. My main tools are microsoft anyways, so presumably visual studio, office, skype for business, etc would all have native versions. Not that any of them are particularly cpu intensive anyways.
It would be really good news for ARM surface tablets and phones and whatnot as well. I think if you're app is really cpu heavy you'd want a native one but so many apps are more I/O bound than cpu bound that I think this could be pretty useful.
So this is basically still emulation and not a full hardware support? Will OEM's actually sell laptops with Snapdragons and emulated windows ? Seems half baked to me..
The critical bit is that OLD win32 apps can run - many businesses have orphan but critical programs (supplier ceased trading, source code lost etc) where moving to a more modern (win64) architecture is not an option due to cost and timescales. If the emulation runs with a typical 10 to 1 slowdown compared to native code, that is probably still faster than the systems that the code originally ran on. (Especially as the storage will be SSD instead of hard drives.)
Plus there is niche hardware interfaces that need x86 drivers, actually non-working on x64 systems. Not in W8,, neither in W10 The Audio world has plenty of that gear. My old -pristine sounding- portable DAC is one sad example: http://tascam.com/product/fireone/specifications/ If this news is an indication that Windows 10 x64 PCs, at some near future are going to be able to run those, it could be the first real compelling argument I have seen to switch from a W7 x64 reliable (and relatively free of latency-inducing MSFT´s "ET phone home" messages) System to the MSFT's yet obscure future for W10 garden.
This is an interesting next step in further consolidation of mobile and desktop Windows, and an impressive feat of engineering if what we see in the demo is anywhere close to reality.
I really hope Microsoft and Qualcomm will have the patience to continue to refine this over the next several generations (along with the Continuum) instead of expecting an immediate market response (and canning the project when it fails to live up to unrealistic expectations).
I wonder if x86 games are really able to run on this. They said it for Photoshop, but they did not mention if the WoT game was the x86 executable... seems quite likely it was just the ARM version and they try to fool us into thinking their emulation is all that performant, without technically lying.
"Of course, the performance of this solution remains to be seen. x86 is not easy or cheap to emulate, and an "emulator" as opposed to a Denver-like instruction translation makes that all the harder."
I wonder to what extend ARM's hardware accelerated virtualization will help to negate this issue.
I've written several hundred win32 apps. What happens if an activeX control is not registered? In windows, the app wont even start. It wont even tell you what went wrong. I shudder to think how an emulator would handle that. Also, almost everything I write involves some sort of hardware access. It is oftentimes the hardware that ties us to the older OS. Are we talking about emulating hardware driver support? Device manager? psapi? shellexecute?
Also the entire point of device drivers is to abstract it so user code doesn't have to care. But if you are writing the driver of course the hardware matters. There's no possible way to emulate that. If that was in any way a reasonable idea it would have been done for 32 bit drivers on AMD64 hardware.
I agree, these details are will make or break this. Tell me vb6 apps with activex, ole, dcom, dde etc will work and I think they've solved the legacy app problem. If none of those things work, then it's hard to say... There will be a lot of old apps that won't work. Lots will work of course, just it's not going to be obvious to people which ones will work and which won't.
They think this is going to rocket them to the top of the smartphone pile?
After the Surface Phone is out and this is "working" I see them picking up maybe 20,000 ultra fanboy sales, and maybe another 20K in enterprise where one of those fanboys works.
Meanwhile the phone will still be missing nearly all the apps a user has on iOS or Android. Not to mention the handset is going to be drab while apple can print money on name alone and Samsung crams every feature under the sun into devices. Between Samsung and Apple it's like 6 years minimum of device evolution just to hit parity.
"They think this is going to rocket them to the top of the smartphone pile"
Satya is a bit more realistic than you're suggesting.
Just curious ... what features does Samsung cram into their phones that missing on the Lumia phones? Top quality camera, biometric login, replaceable battery, SD card slot, wireless charging, USB-C fast charging ... am I missing something?
MST for pay on legacy magstrip readers, curved screens, pulse sensor, fast starting camera, not coming soon to everything, band 12, sales at all major carrier stores, ...
I guess Microsoft got pissed at Intel dropping <6W Atom, i.e. cheap x86 SoCs you could put in tablets and phones. The pair do seem to have fallen out.
I wonder if this will only work with Qualcomm chips, or if we'll see it on other ARM SoCs. That would really put the cat among the pigeons. Intel would lose badly...
Taking a long-term view, we may yet see a world where pretty much any computing device runs Windows again. Though it's hard to see Android and iOS going away quickly, anything is possible.
Well, I'd be pissed too if I were MS. Intel's strategy was basically "Let's release subpar CPUs and hope for the best." When the market didn't respond as they wished they pulled out from one of the biggest CPU markets (and growing).
Not to mention Intel's instance on keeping Atom around while at the same time having a ~4watt Core M that they price just the chip more than the devices it would make sense using in...
Well Intel has been screwing around and costing Microsoft market share. Intel didn't have an answer so eventually Microsoft makes windows RT. Then intel releases cheap atoms and microsoft drops windows RT, then intel drops cheap atoms, so microsoft is back to windows on ARM.
Microsoft totally screwed windows RT though, and that's on Microsoft. The home version with home licensing and home office and no option to rebuild classic windows apps as arm versions. Forcing the store, etc. Maybe if they kept the home and pro options, had a working store, allowed desktop apps to be recompiled, signed, and in the store from day 1, and had given things like x86 compatiblity a serious thought.... windows RT would not have tanked.
It sounds like they are addressing almost all of it this time, which is great, but of course years later than they should have.
From the article: "In any case, Windows 10’s ability to scale and adapt to essentially any hardware platform is a remarkable feat of engineering..."
I disagree here. Having to do software emulation to run on another architecture shows a fundamental weakness in the platform.
When you consider that ChromeOS or Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever can run the full stack natively on x86 or ARM or even MIPS and PowerPC, you can see the correct approach. If your applications are built with compilers and systems that are generally ISA-independent, you're in a lot better shape. Because of the Wintel marriage, Microsoft never laid a good foundation here. They became dependent on Intel and Intel on Windows, and when the market changed around them they were left out.
I feel you're misunderstanding the problem here. Microsoft could easily (and has in the past) simply recompile Windows to run on different architectures like you're describing with Linux. The problem is with 3rd party closed-source software not allowing them to also recompile off of their programs as well. In Microsoft created a Windows ecosystem than included nothing but own-source programs they wouldn't have this problem.
The problem is open vs closed source and not any design issue.
The funny thing is MS designed Windows ecosystem exactly this way: plenty of closed source, no way to recompile and move anywhere else. If everything would be open source why would people be tied to Windows at all?
Only win32 apps are using emulation. The entire OS and store apps will run natively on arm. Thus, as people stop using win32 apps over time... There is nothing less native about this vs w10 on intel
I notice that Photoshop CC starts suspicously fast - much faster than you would normally see on a fast desktop PC with SSD. I'm wondering if they haven't sped up the video in places.
Photoshop doesn't take that long to open if you're not running on an HDD on a bloated system. A cold start for me takes only a couple seconds, and a hot start with things already cached is <1 second.
That's what could be happening. The application was already cached in memory when they ran it. That means that the x86 to ARM translation is also cached. I would consider that to be cheating.
Why would it be cheating to have an optimization? That's like saying video games cheat by precomputing lighting and visibility sets to improve performance.
I really doubt the translation itself is even that costly. Cross compiling between two types of machine code is certainly tricky, but it shouldn't be computationally expensive. There is no lexical parsing, no linking, probably very little work needed to optimize most of the code (the compiled x86 code already includes high level optimizations from the C++ code). It's probably just as fast if not faster than most JIT compiled applications like running .NET applications.
Precise emulation is very costly. If your translated code behaves even tiny bit different to the actual hardware things will break and reproducing exact behavior with different instruction set requires plenty of extra steps. Handling self-modified code is also tricky AND quite expensive as you can't cheat with any caching there. Expect to see such things in plenty in protection code.
Just thinking the other day that I could have really used a low cost HDMI stick type Windows machine to drive remote displays, but all those are ARM based and the software I need to run is only X86, this could be exactly what I need.
oh god i'd love to see the face of the Intel Exec's right about now..... all those greedy and arrogant marketing and design decisions are coming back to haunt them.
windows running on snapdragons from here on out, yeah that's gonna provide intel nightmares for years to come.
What stops Intel from licensing ,customising and producing ARM chips themselves? I don't understand why Intel did not do that 5 years ago when first Android phones arrived.
Another non-sequitur move by Microsoft. The problem with Windows 10 on small devices is not the support for desktop applications but the whole experience/application support in general. Nobody is going to buy an ARM tablet/laptop to run Photoshop, trust me.
What should MS do? Make the third-party developers work FOR you, not the opposite. How can this be accomplished? One word: Trust.
a) MS market share in small factor devices is inexistent. Companies have spent money creating apps for Android (and iOS). Protect their investments. Instead of emulating x86 desktop apps, emulate Android apps on MS hardware.
b) At the same time create tools to lure the developers back into the MS platform and toolchain. You sold everyone out with Silverlight, try to redeem yourselves with WebAssembly/UWP.
c) It's time for a real Windows update. Remember project Singularity? Windows written from scratch using managed language like C#/Sing#. That's the true revolution. Windows Core on ANY hardware. (And please, make the OS's UI layer modular to third parties. I'm tired of hearing people nagging about how suck-ulant Windows 10 UI is, even though I like it.)
Sadly, it seems --yet again-- Microsoft is caught in a loop, chasing the tail of it's competitors (iP ad, Chromebook) instead of being the true market leader.
Any Atom tablet currently on the market with Bay Trail or Cherry Trail Atom SoCs can do this. Maybe Intel killed Atom because they preferred selling $200 Core M chips than $20 Atoms, even though performance for most daily tasks is comparable. I can even run Linux VMs on a tiny Atom Windows tablet.
A Snapdragon phone running full Windows with the ability to load Ubuntu ARM Linux VMs... Can't wait :)
They have had this portable core thing for a while now. But you can`t realistically expect them to leave UI to the third parties, it will only lead to the epic clusterfuck everyone can see on Android right now. Could get better designers though.
This is what surface rt should have been... Full windows 10 on ARM with x86 emulation when necessary. Sounds good.
I'm curious how many legacy apps will actually work. DX9? DX10-11? ActiveX and COM? Maybe they've figured all that out... if so then this is pretty cool. If not I suspect it will frustrate people when their app doesn't work.
I can't speak for ActiveX (I'm not terribly familiar with it), but at least for directx (and COM should be similar), MS has stated that all system binaries are native ARM code, and that the only thing they do is translate the application code from x86 to ARM machine code. The dynamic calls into the dll should "just work" so d3d9 and d3d11 (and even d3d12) should all be supported just fine.
Now, when those applications try to do "fancy" stuff like injection precompiled x86 code into their process or detouring certain functions to try and perform anti-debugging or anti-piracy logic... that may be another story for compat (especially for games).
So this emulation is not great, as it is 32 bit only. IT is interesting if everything including OS is emulated, or only per apps> It may be also that these apps must be packaged as appx, than just single exe files. Best way to MS is go to AMD and pay trhem for develop x86+ARM CPU.
This will be huge for Microsoft. Only condition is that all the native windows32 applications need to run on it. if it does then. Microsoft will be the only platform which has all the one OS for all devices in the market. For a lot of people who want to have one device that can do it all. Every one needs a mobile and a desktop, it is a nuisance to have 2 devices- one desktop/laptop and a mobile. Ideal use case is your mobile need to be able to plugin to a larger case to become a laptop. Only issue with this is Android devices are the only ones that attempted this, but android was never a desktop os. I believe this will be the start of the decline of android. Apple will attempt something similar but will wait until this gets traction as they will avoid anything that will make people buy less.
Windows 10 Arm will run AMD-64 (x64) apps without emulation. Most apps today are x64, so no worries there.
I think Microsoft need to fully support the installation of native Android apps from Google's Play Store, aka project Astoria.
Microsoft also needs to support more and more Qualcomm based hardware and make it dead easy for users to upgrade their aging Snapdragon 835 (or, 820 and above) generation hardware.
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mxnerd - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
Very good news. Just wondering how good can Win32/Win64 apps actually run on ARM platforms?boskone - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
I don't believe it supports 64-bit x86 emulation, just 32-bit. I think most Windows software (including games) is still 32-bit, though, so that shouldn't be a huge issue (assuming the emulation runs tolerably in the first place).BillyONeal - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Based on.... ? Wouldn't amd64 be easier to implement on aarch64 since the bitnesses match?basroil - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
"Based on.... ? Wouldn't amd64 be easier to implement on aarch64 since the bitnesses match?"Actually it's far more difficult since you would need to add in BOTH 64 and 32bit instruction emulation rather than just 32bit. ARM doesn't play nicely with mixed bit situations
BillyONeal - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
>you would need to add in BOTH 64 and 32bit instruction emulationWhy would you have to do that? Windows does not allow 32 bit code in a 64 bit process or vice versa. They would need only to implement support for long mode.
kuttan - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
ARM64 is not much different to AMD64 regarding the implementation of 64 bit support. Both architecture supports 64 bit as an extension to 32 bit support.Senti - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
> Windows does not allow 32 bit code in a 64 bit process or vice versa.It's completely false. Actually there are only 64 bit processes on 64 bit Windows and all of them have 64 bit ntdll.dll. "32 bit" processes then load WOW subsystem that creates appropriate 32 bit environment and translation layers. So you can use 64 bit code in "32 bit" processes if you know what you are doing.
Samus - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
I suspect the obvious reason for sticking with 32-bit x86 over x86-64 is for legacy 16-bit execution compatibility. As the article emphasized, this move is a purely legacy-focused one where performance is not the key metric, compatibility is. 64-bit windows environments can not run 16-bit code, and presumably emulated 64-bit windows environments have the same restriction.This is actually the ONLY reason why Microsoft still even has a 32-bit SKU. Virtually every 32-bit program and piece of hardware from the last decade supports x86-64 windows environments, but 16-bit programs that were still being written as late as 2010, do not.
inighthawki - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Or, far more likely - time. It takes time to implement a feature like this, and x64 adds a lot to the ISA. Given that 95% of applications (and 99.99% of legacy business applications) are still 32-bit or have 32-bit versions, they probably decided to start with that. I'd bet good money that x64 support will come some time after first launch.JHBoricua - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Someone correct me but wasn't the windows 10 build shown on the video a 64-bit Os?Drazick - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
I think there must be support for 64 Bit as (I think) Photoshop is 64 Bit only in its latest edition.K_Space - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
32-bit and 64-bit:https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/system-requireme...
valinor89 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
"3D features are disabled on 32-bit platforms and on computers having less than 512MB of VRAM. Video features are not supported on 32-bit Windows systems."Not really fully functional photoshop then.
ddriver - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Photoshop struggles even on core m with 8 gigs of ram, now add a slower cpu + less ram + emulation, and you will have yourself one hell of an experience.TekDemon - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Yes today it probably wouldn't provide good photoshop performance but my guess is that they're looking at upcoming ARM chips that'll be able to provide passable performance even with the emulation hit. If they're being used in a laptop a lot of the thermal limitations that hold back these chips won't matter.JoeMonco - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Right because professionals who complain that top-of-the-line x86 processors aren't able to always keep up performance-wise are going to switch to something that's barely as fast as a Core M or a 6-year-old MacBook Air. Hahahah, no.ddriver - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
They will run like cr@p. Desktop applications have already been getting progressively bloated and with very inefficient runtimes, both in terms of CPU time and memory usage. Emulation is only going to make it worse, while throwing it at a very underpowered platform. Not to mention user experience, good luck hitting buttons, menus and pretty much any GUI element at a 1080p 5 inch display.close - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Continuum? Tablets? It just says "Qualcomm device" and "Qualcomm processor". Also the device in the video has mouse and pen attached, we can assume the guy is not running on a 5" screen.But you sure have a lot of "informed" opinions about emulation performance for a guy who thinks "ms" stands for "microseconds".
ddriver - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Still failing on common sense and hard LOLBullwinkle J Moose - Sunday, December 11, 2016 - link
They don't need to run on ARM platforms!ALL desktop Apps, (32bit as well as 64bit) can run at full speed on a nearby desktop and be streamed to a 32bit tablet making the tablet perform at desktop speeds while using extremely low power
Microsoft, Adobe, NVidia, Valve and all the rest cannot retain valid patents to the application and streaming technology I created for EVERYONE (Including YOU)
A process that would require 600 years to complete on a tablet emulating x85 can be completed on a supercomputer on the ground and streamed to a tablet such as this in a few seconds making the tablet appear and operate as a much more capable machine
There is no need for $1000 Video cards in a tablet when streaming games from a tricked out desktop
This is just the beginning
There is also no need to emulate X86 to stream "limited" app content directly to a different OS
The benefit of using X86 emulation is that the actual app (Photoshop in this case) can be running on the ARM tablet while SERIOUS graphics processing far exceeding the demo Microsoft provides can be performed in what seems real-time
Again, This is just the beginning
Local Virtual effects (gunfire/explosions etc) can be overlayed onto super high quality renders from a cloud server farm giving you what seems to be realtime effects on a pro quality background without any noticeable latency problems
NOT A JOKE!
Bullwinkle J Moose
Bullwinkle J Moose - Sunday, December 11, 2016 - link
X85??Obviously meant X86
Bullwinkle J Moose - Sunday, December 11, 2016 - link
I was referring to a low powered tablet as used on the Space Station streaming from a ground station in a few seconds what would take hundreds of years from the onboard tablet in spacewe really need an edit function here!!!!!
negusp - Monday, December 12, 2016 - link
Yeaaah, this is completely irrelevant until normal people have access to high-bandwidth, high-latency networking.Which won't happen for a while due to the monopolistic control of major ISPs.
trparky - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
I watched the video, holy crap. Mind blown.MrSpadge - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
+1Wondering if the HP Elite x3 will already support this, considering the demo also used an SD820.
MrSpadge - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Actually: nope. They seem to explicitly target SD835 and maybe other newer ones.OEMG - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
The best thing untold in this news is that Microsoft finally has all the reasons to decouple itself from Intel. The original WinRT was a start, but then Intel reacted with its arrogant stance on mobile leadership which OEMs happily welcomed. We all know what happened. If Microsoft had the guts to continue supporting ARM we'd probably have major Win32/desktop applications ported to the platform by now. And we'd probably have decent ARM laptops with proper storage instead of the measly ones Chromebooks provide. And ARM probably would have put more effort in designing high IPC / big core chips.Also, it makes sense for AMD to catch early on this.
babadivad - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
Why is this not a bigger deal?osxandwindows - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Because M$ is using a 17 year old API, maybe?TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
And which API would that be?arrakis_oasis - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
What API? Windows was rewritten almost from scratch when Win8 came out.Meteor2 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
It's a very big deal.micksh - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
Re: "It (Windows RT) also could not run Win32 desktop apps"I think it was an artificial limitation imposed by Microsoft. WinRT was ready to run Win32 apps recompiled for ARM, and people did that. Process looked like this:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2...
All Microsoft had to do was to enable Win32 apps on WinRT officially. Many programs can be easily ported to different CPU architecture to avoid performance penalty for emulation. There will be x86-to-ARM emulation overhead.
BillyONeal - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
I'm assuming it's because1. They wanted people to use the store.
2. They wanted to solve the malware problem once and for all.
(disclaimer: I work for MS but not in the Windows group -- no inside information on this for me :))
Krysto - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
> 2. They wanted to solve the malware problem once and for all.I wonder, if they are going to use Hyper-V for emulation, wouldn't they just create the same kind of secure virtualization they're now offering for Edge on Windows Enterprise?
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
So, it could run win32 apps recompiled for ARM. This can run win32 apps not recompiled for ARM.That is a huge difference. Many software devs will not update their code for ARM, especially in business. Everything moves at glacial speed. Windows 10 being able to run win32 without recompiling is awesome.
Vlad_Da_Great - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
One whole day, and nobody cares. Only few amoebas showed up to comment. MSFT got but hurt by the concept of Android and iOS and now trying to move thru the ecosystem with the help of another 1 dimensional company called QCom. x86 can support Android and Intel is taking QCom lunch, scooping whats left in the Tablet business(besides iPad family), so they are putting now Server Chips, MSFT collaboration, Open Power consortium, all is dust. But no idiot is realizing that the SD830 is already choking on Nougat opening the contacts/phone caller app. I want to see how the arguments will start when MSFT will ask QCom to co-develop some drivers or invest in the upgrading the ecosystem as Intel did with Cortana to those idiots in the Win10. Windows is dead, buggy, old fashioned, never improved OS. NVDA said, hell no to Tegra and WinRT chocked up in those Surface 2 devices.close - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Going past the fact that it's like you're struggling to make your message impossible to read, I stopped at this "Intel is taking QCom lunch". Is it the same Intel who's mobile division is on life support?Geez, everybody's an expert just because they like something and hate something else...
doggface - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Oh dear. It's the stream of thought that makes this absurd, but the content that makes it laughable.JMC2000 - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
I think a rambling, drunk, homeless war vet is far more coherent than that comment.JMC2000 - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Seriously, what am I reading here?jwcalla - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
This is really only interesting for laptops but Intel has that market pretty much cornered already. Even with Chromebooks ARM has gone nowhere. And why would I buy an ARM Windows laptop that has to do emulation to run x86, and suffer the performance and power penalty?And nobody cares about running x86 apps or Windows 10 on a phone or tablet. Hopefully people have gotten over that lie by now.
stephenbrooks - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
If they'd done something like this 10 years ago and implemented it consistently (plus dealt with having adaptable UIs between phones and larger screens), it could have worked. But there have been so many mis-fires (Windows 8 UI, WinRT) by now...Krysto - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Probably because of price. Intel's chips have gotten incredibly expensive for the performance they offer.Core M in $1,000-$1,500 laptops, for instance, is a ridiculous proposition. ARM would be much better suited there, and it may even run better.
And the Celeron/Pentium notebook market should be wiped out by ARM-based laptops. If it's not then, OEMs are just brain dead masochists who don't know what's good for them and their customers.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Clearly, people DO like running windows 10 on a tablet, unless you vcompletely missed how well the surface line is doing.As for why someone would want an ARM laptop, the vast majority of consumers dont need a powerhouse machine. Things like web browsers and office applications, and based on the video photoshop, all run really well. Unless you are a gamer, ARM on windows would satisfy your needs well. So you can buy a machine that is cheaper and gets better battery life then the x86 powered machine, since intel no longer has sole control of that market. So cheaper, better battery life, no discernible performance difference, seems like a few good reasons.
For laptops, ARM is also more efficient and easier to implement, which means higher profit margins and more sales. OEMs like AMD would have a better chance of succeeding in an ARM world, as intel wouldn't have a stranglehold on the ARM arket like they do x86.
jwcalla - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
The Surface tablet is really just a smaller ultrabook that can also play Angry Birds. Its appeal is mostly for those who are looking for a laptop function. Even then, it hasn't sold much.I think it's great to see ARM in laptops but as far as I have seen, ARM companies (and ARM itself) seem completely uninterested in entering that market. Maybe Qualcomm will be different. But we have ARM Chromebooks and x86 Chromebooks and x86 clearly dominates that market, and this is on a platform where the ARM stuff is 100% native, not run through emulation. Maybe with Android apps coming to Chromebooks ARM will have a leg up there. But it seems to me that OEMs are -- for one reason or another -- attached to Intel.
When it comes to power usage, laptops are in a competitive market. I'm not sure I'd want to waste CPU cycles on emulation when I can just get an x86 laptop. Price would have to be dramatically favorable to make up for the hits to performance and battery. And for those who simply want to browse the web and check Facebook, they'd be better off getting a Chromebook.
name99 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
"Clearly, people DO like running windows 10 on a tablet, unless you vcompletely missed how well the surface line is doing."Just to throw out an example of how people see what they want to see:
The Surface line ("doing well" according to the commenter above, and much of the internet) sells 1 million units a quarter.
The Apple Watch ("struggling" and "a flop" according to much of the same internet) has been selling three x that number (a million a month) and is likely to shift to two million a month with the new models.
Keep that in mind next time any of you feel the urge to make wild statements about how various products are doing...
sorten - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
You're comparing watch sales to mobile computer sales? The standards for success are different.FunBunny2 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
-- The Apple Watch ("struggling" and "a flop" according to much of the same internet) has been selling three x that number (a million a month)you, or your source(?), is making that up. Apple doesn't tell anyone how many Watch are sold. lots of folks look at chicken guts to tell them how many.
doggface - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
1 surface 4 pro = ~$2k1 apple watch = ~$400
I would hope they sell at least 2 times as many
More to the point, cheaper ($500-800) tablets are no longer really available because intel aren't making atoms for tablets anymore. Hello market that is underserved.
Speedfriend - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
name99An apple watch costs $299, a Surface costs $800-2000. Shifting 1m Surface units is doing well given Apple shifts only 3-4m MacBooks a quarter.
name99 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
"but Intel has that market pretty much cornered already"This is not clear.
Obviously it is possible to ship an ARM core with better than Intel performance at Intel power levels and Intel MOBILE frequencies. (Apple is there with A10 and will be at about 1.25 Intel IPC at Intel mobile turbo frequencies with A10X).
OK, so that handles the single-threaded part of the equation.
Next we have power. Again Apple and the ARM world have both shown that using a low power companion core brings SUBSTANTIAL power advantages to mobile devices. I can't speak to Android, but in the case of Apple the win is most obvious in terms of "idle" time --- basically when the screen is off but the phone does occasional scheduled background tasks, handles notifications, etc --- all stuff that can clearly run only on the low power core. Intel does not provide anything like this, and one consequence is that we just expect our laptops to do very little when idle (ie closed/asleep), unlike our mobiles which we expect to remain clearly alive when idle/asleep. in other words Intel's continuing unwillingness to broaden its technology portfolio substantially limits what PCs/laptops can do compared to mobile.
Third we have multicore. Intel has basically limited mobile to 2 cores (plus the minor 25% boost that is hyperthreading) except if you want to get a substantially thicker/higher power laptop. One suspects part of this is that Intel is ultimately driven by what's good for server revenues --- they want to charge server folks a lot of money for lotsa cores, which means they can't ships lotsa cores to the mass market at mass market prices. QC and ARM generally aren't constrained in this way --- they can add new cores to their dies on a sorta engineering rationality rather than a market segmentation rationality. This is significant insofar as MS has tried really hard to get more of Windows, especially the newer APIs, to exploit more cores more-or-less transparently.
Finally we have GPUs where obviously (again Apple) it's possible to provide GPUs that operate at the performance level of Intel's inbuilt GPUs while on what appears to be a somewhat lower power budget.
I suspect that if there were a compelling reason to do so, one could create a substantially more interesting PC based on ARM technology --- a PC that incorporates features like GPS and cellular connectivity, attitude and acceleration sensing, and the full panoply of features we expect from mobile. What's been holding us back is Intel's ridiculous slowness.
Obviously all these things are principle in possible today. But they require extra non-standard HW so can't be relied upon.
People are calling this "making mobile more like PCs" but I think that's backwards --- the correct interpretation is making PCs more like mobile.
serendip - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Well, Atom has quad core for mobile, but Atom is effectively dead with the cancellation of Broxton and Willow Trail.Intel tried giving away chips for free with their contra-revenue program to get OEMs to use Atom, and they ended up losing $3-4 billion annually for 2 years straight trying to get into the mobile segment. I think they gave up and ceded the entire low-power processor market to ARM while hoping to have something viable in the future.
If this W10 on ARM isn't a flash in the pan, it'll make Intel soil their pants. We're talking about very portable phones and tablets running a full Windows OS, with low power idle and always-connectivity for 4G and WiFi, something Intel has struggled with for a long time. This is Microsoft saying to Intel, "Shape up or ship out!"
doggface - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Sigh. Apple a10 /= intel m7.Sorry, but no. Keep dreaming on.
andrewaggb - Thursday, December 15, 2016 - link
Well if we had laptop caliber arm chips I don't see why an ARM laptop running windows with x86 emulation would be bad. It might have great battery life and be $100-300 cheaper than the intel equivalent. Core-m/5/7 chips aren't cheap. My main tools are microsoft anyways, so presumably visual studio, office, skype for business, etc would all have native versions. Not that any of them are particularly cpu intensive anyways.It would be really good news for ARM surface tablets and phones and whatnot as well. I think if you're app is really cpu heavy you'd want a native one but so many apps are more I/O bound than cpu bound that I think this could be pretty useful.
Arnulf - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
My my, what a catchy slogan. I think I've seen it before:http://www.ww2incolor.com/d/40488-5/grp202
darkich - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
So this is basically still emulation and not a full hardware support?Will OEM's actually sell laptops with Snapdragons and emulated windows ? Seems half baked to me..
Krysto - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Only the Win32 programs will be emulated, not the OS, and not the majority (if any) of Microsoft's own apps - as well as none of the store apps.Duncan Macdonald - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
The critical bit is that OLD win32 apps can run - many businesses have orphan but critical programs (supplier ceased trading, source code lost etc) where moving to a more modern (win64) architecture is not an option due to cost and timescales. If the emulation runs with a typical 10 to 1 slowdown compared to native code, that is probably still faster than the systems that the code originally ran on. (Especially as the storage will be SSD instead of hard drives.)Nexing - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Plus there is niche hardware interfaces that need x86 drivers, actually non-working on x64 systems. Not in W8,, neither in W10The Audio world has plenty of that gear.
My old -pristine sounding- portable DAC is one sad example:
http://tascam.com/product/fireone/specifications/
If this news is an indication that Windows 10 x64 PCs, at some near future are going to be able to run those, it could be the first real compelling argument I have seen to switch from a W7 x64 reliable (and relatively free of latency-inducing MSFT´s "ET phone home" messages) System to the MSFT's yet obscure future for W10 garden.
Varezhka - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
This is an interesting next step in further consolidation of mobile and desktop Windows, and an impressive feat of engineering if what we see in the demo is anywhere close to reality.I really hope Microsoft and Qualcomm will have the patience to continue to refine this over the next several generations (along with the Continuum) instead of expecting an immediate market response (and canning the project when it fails to live up to unrealistic expectations).
MrSpadge - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Yep, this is what's needed to make Continuum fly.Visual - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
I wonder if x86 games are really able to run on this.They said it for Photoshop, but they did not mention if the WoT game was the x86 executable... seems quite likely it was just the ARM version and they try to fool us into thinking their emulation is all that performant, without technically lying.
Senti - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Will be able to run? Yes.Will have decent fps and power consumption? Extremely unlikely.
milli - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
"Of course, the performance of this solution remains to be seen. x86 is not easy or cheap to emulate, and an "emulator" as opposed to a Denver-like instruction translation makes that all the harder."I wonder to what extend ARM's hardware accelerated virtualization will help to negate this issue.
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
I've written several hundred win32 apps. What happens if an activeX control is not registered? In windows, the app wont even start. It wont even tell you what went wrong. I shudder to think how an emulator would handle that. Also, almost everything I write involves some sort of hardware access. It is oftentimes the hardware that ties us to the older OS. Are we talking about emulating hardware driver support? Device manager? psapi? shellexecute?Zan Lynx - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
You're either using a really bad wrapper library or never check error codes. You can always find out what went wrong.Zan Lynx - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Also the entire point of device drivers is to abstract it so user code doesn't have to care. But if you are writing the driver of course the hardware matters. There's no possible way to emulate that. If that was in any way a reasonable idea it would have been done for 32 bit drivers on AMD64 hardware.andrewaggb - Thursday, December 15, 2016 - link
I agree, these details are will make or break this. Tell me vb6 apps with activex, ole, dcom, dde etc will work and I think they've solved the legacy app problem. If none of those things work, then it's hard to say... There will be a lot of old apps that won't work. Lots will work of course, just it's not going to be obvious to people which ones will work and which won't.Gunbuster - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
They think this is going to rocket them to the top of the smartphone pile?After the Surface Phone is out and this is "working" I see them picking up maybe 20,000 ultra fanboy sales, and maybe another 20K in enterprise where one of those fanboys works.
Meanwhile the phone will still be missing nearly all the apps a user has on iOS or Android. Not to mention the handset is going to be drab while apple can print money on name alone and Samsung crams every feature under the sun into devices. Between Samsung and Apple it's like 6 years minimum of device evolution just to hit parity.
sorten - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
"They think this is going to rocket them to the top of the smartphone pile"Satya is a bit more realistic than you're suggesting.
Just curious ... what features does Samsung cram into their phones that missing on the Lumia phones? Top quality camera, biometric login, replaceable battery, SD card slot, wireless charging, USB-C fast charging ... am I missing something?
Gunbuster - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
MST for pay on legacy magstrip readers, curved screens, pulse sensor, fast starting camera, not coming soon to everything, band 12, sales at all major carrier stores, ...SaolDan - Saturday, December 10, 2016 - link
Lumias dont have the burst feature. As in burst into fire.Meteor2 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Wow.I guess Microsoft got pissed at Intel dropping <6W Atom, i.e. cheap x86 SoCs you could put in tablets and phones. The pair do seem to have fallen out.
I wonder if this will only work with Qualcomm chips, or if we'll see it on other ARM SoCs. That would really put the cat among the pigeons. Intel would lose badly...
Taking a long-term view, we may yet see a world where pretty much any computing device runs Windows again. Though it's hard to see Android and iOS going away quickly, anything is possible.
baka_toroi - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Well, I'd be pissed too if I were MS. Intel's strategy was basically "Let's release subpar CPUs and hope for the best." When the market didn't respond as they wished they pulled out from one of the biggest CPU markets (and growing).Gunbuster - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Not to mention Intel's instance on keeping Atom around while at the same time having a ~4watt Core M that they price just the chip more than the devices it would make sense using in...Senti - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
> I guess Microsoft got pissed at Intel dropping <6W AtomThey just got what they deserved for the Windows RT.
andrewaggb - Thursday, December 15, 2016 - link
Well Intel has been screwing around and costing Microsoft market share. Intel didn't have an answer so eventually Microsoft makes windows RT. Then intel releases cheap atoms and microsoft drops windows RT, then intel drops cheap atoms, so microsoft is back to windows on ARM.Microsoft totally screwed windows RT though, and that's on Microsoft. The home version with home licensing and home office and no option to rebuild classic windows apps as arm versions. Forcing the store, etc. Maybe if they kept the home and pro options, had a working store, allowed desktop apps to be recompiled, signed, and in the store from day 1, and had given things like x86 compatiblity a serious thought.... windows RT would not have tanked.
It sounds like they are addressing almost all of it this time, which is great, but of course years later than they should have.
jwcalla - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
From the article: "In any case, Windows 10’s ability to scale and adapt to essentially any hardware platform is a remarkable feat of engineering..."I disagree here. Having to do software emulation to run on another architecture shows a fundamental weakness in the platform.
When you consider that ChromeOS or Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever can run the full stack natively on x86 or ARM or even MIPS and PowerPC, you can see the correct approach. If your applications are built with compilers and systems that are generally ISA-independent, you're in a lot better shape. Because of the Wintel marriage, Microsoft never laid a good foundation here. They became dependent on Intel and Intel on Windows, and when the market changed around them they were left out.
Senti - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Intel is way less dependent on MS than the other way around. For example Intel dominates server space while MS share there isn't anything major.Flunk - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
I feel you're misunderstanding the problem here. Microsoft could easily (and has in the past) simply recompile Windows to run on different architectures like you're describing with Linux. The problem is with 3rd party closed-source software not allowing them to also recompile off of their programs as well. In Microsoft created a Windows ecosystem than included nothing but own-source programs they wouldn't have this problem.The problem is open vs closed source and not any design issue.
Senti - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
The funny thing is MS designed Windows ecosystem exactly this way: plenty of closed source, no way to recompile and move anywhere else. If everything would be open source why would people be tied to Windows at all?skiboysteve - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Only win32 apps are using emulation. The entire OS and store apps will run natively on arm. Thus, as people stop using win32 apps over time... There is nothing less native about this vs w10 on intelSenti - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
"as people stop using win32 apps over time..." they will stop using Windows!Michael Bay - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Ah, stale loonixoid dreams, always the same. If you want to actually do things, it`s Win or nothing.lefty2 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
I notice that Photoshop CC starts suspicously fast - much faster than you would normally see on a fast desktop PC with SSD. I'm wondering if they haven't sped up the video in places.inighthawki - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Photoshop doesn't take that long to open if you're not running on an HDD on a bloated system. A cold start for me takes only a couple seconds, and a hot start with things already cached is <1 second.milkod2001 - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
They could have opened it before presentation. Then if re-opened again it starts much fasterAnato - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
One product family, platform and store -> no competitionlefty2 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
That's what could be happening. The application was already cached in memory when they ran it. That means that the x86 to ARM translation is also cached. I would consider that to be cheating.inighthawki - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Why would it be cheating to have an optimization? That's like saying video games cheat by precomputing lighting and visibility sets to improve performance.I really doubt the translation itself is even that costly. Cross compiling between two types of machine code is certainly tricky, but it shouldn't be computationally expensive. There is no lexical parsing, no linking, probably very little work needed to optimize most of the code (the compiled x86 code already includes high level optimizations from the C++ code). It's probably just as fast if not faster than most JIT compiled applications like running .NET applications.
Senti - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Precise emulation is very costly. If your translated code behaves even tiny bit different to the actual hardware things will break and reproducing exact behavior with different instruction set requires plenty of extra steps. Handling self-modified code is also tricky AND quite expensive as you can't cheat with any caching there. Expect to see such things in plenty in protection code.djc208 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Just thinking the other day that I could have really used a low cost HDMI stick type Windows machine to drive remote displays, but all those are ARM based and the software I need to run is only X86, this could be exactly what I need.Morawka - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
oh god i'd love to see the face of the Intel Exec's right about now..... all those greedy and arrogant marketing and design decisions are coming back to haunt them.windows running on snapdragons from here on out, yeah that's gonna provide intel nightmares for years to come.
Meteor2 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Lol, yep. Intel are clearly very good at what they do, but maybe they got lazy or arrogant, or both.solnyshok - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
I bet Intel learned about this project about a year ago, hence, killed Atom, culled headcountmilkod2001 - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
What stops Intel from licensing ,customising and producing ARM chips themselves? I don't understand why Intel did not do that 5 years ago when first Android phones arrived.hyperspaced - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Another non-sequitur move by Microsoft. The problem with Windows 10 on small devices is not the support for desktop applications but the whole experience/application support in general. Nobody is going to buy an ARM tablet/laptop to run Photoshop, trust me.What should MS do? Make the third-party developers work FOR you, not the opposite.
How can this be accomplished? One word: Trust.
a) MS market share in small factor devices is inexistent. Companies have spent money creating apps for Android (and iOS). Protect their investments. Instead of emulating x86 desktop apps, emulate Android apps on MS hardware.
b) At the same time create tools to lure the developers back into the MS platform and toolchain. You sold everyone out with Silverlight, try to redeem yourselves with WebAssembly/UWP.
c) It's time for a real Windows update. Remember project Singularity? Windows written from scratch using managed language like C#/Sing#. That's the true revolution. Windows Core on ANY hardware. (And please, make the OS's UI layer modular to third parties. I'm tired of hearing people nagging about how suck-ulant Windows 10 UI is, even though I like it.)
Sadly, it seems --yet again-- Microsoft is caught in a loop, chasing the tail of it's competitors (iP
ad, Chromebook) instead of being the true market leader.
Meteor2 - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Well, I'd buy a tablet that can run Photoshop and Avid and Office etc. I've not seen them on an iPad or Chromebook recently. And I like a file system.Many people have bought Windows tablets; just imagine if they didn't cost $1,000 because the OEM had to buy Core M.
serendip - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
Any Atom tablet currently on the market with Bay Trail or Cherry Trail Atom SoCs can do this. Maybe Intel killed Atom because they preferred selling $200 Core M chips than $20 Atoms, even though performance for most daily tasks is comparable. I can even run Linux VMs on a tiny Atom Windows tablet.A Snapdragon phone running full Windows with the ability to load Ubuntu ARM Linux VMs... Can't wait :)
Gunbuster - Monday, December 12, 2016 - link
Atom is slow, try using one for a while. It will drive you insane. (Cherry Trail)Michael Bay - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
They have had this portable core thing for a while now. But you can`t realistically expect them to leave UI to the third parties, it will only lead to the epic clusterfuck everyone can see on Android right now. Could get better designers though.andrewaggb - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
This is what surface rt should have been... Full windows 10 on ARM with x86 emulation when necessary. Sounds good.I'm curious how many legacy apps will actually work. DX9? DX10-11? ActiveX and COM? Maybe they've figured all that out... if so then this is pretty cool. If not I suspect it will frustrate people when their app doesn't work.
inighthawki - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
I can't speak for ActiveX (I'm not terribly familiar with it), but at least for directx (and COM should be similar), MS has stated that all system binaries are native ARM code, and that the only thing they do is translate the application code from x86 to ARM machine code. The dynamic calls into the dll should "just work" so d3d9 and d3d11 (and even d3d12) should all be supported just fine.Now, when those applications try to do "fancy" stuff like injection precompiled x86 code into their process or detouring certain functions to try and perform anti-debugging or anti-piracy logic... that may be another story for compat (especially for games).
TristanSDX - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
So this emulation is not great, as it is 32 bit only. IT is interesting if everything including OS is emulated, or only per apps> It may be also that these apps must be packaged as appx, than just single exe files. Best way to MS is go to AMD and pay trhem for develop x86+ARM CPU.sharath.naik - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
This will be huge for Microsoft. Only condition is that all the native windows32 applications need to run on it. if it does then. Microsoft will be the only platform which has all the one OS for all devices in the market.For a lot of people who want to have one device that can do it all. Every one needs a mobile and a desktop, it is a nuisance to have 2 devices- one desktop/laptop and a mobile. Ideal use case is your mobile need to be able to plugin to a larger case to become a laptop. Only issue with this is Android devices are the only ones that attempted this, but android was never a desktop os.
I believe this will be the start of the decline of android. Apple will attempt something similar but will wait until this gets traction as they will avoid anything that will make people buy less.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, December 14, 2016 - link
"Ideal use case is your mobile need to be able to plugin to a larger case to become a laptop"HP X3.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, December 14, 2016 - link
"So how Microsoft and Qualcomm are able to (for lack of a better way to put it) get away with this is a big question"Are you forgetting the past? Android running on many, MANY, intel based machines. if Intel can do it then so can MS.
yhselp - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
Forgive my ignorance, but how can a version of Windows be fully-featured if you can only run apps specifically designed for it?gxtoast - Saturday, April 15, 2017 - link
Windows 10 Arm will run AMD-64 (x64) apps without emulation. Most apps today are x64, so no worries there.I think Microsoft need to fully support the installation of native Android apps from Google's Play Store, aka project Astoria.
Microsoft also needs to support more and more Qualcomm based hardware and make it dead easy for users to upgrade their aging Snapdragon 835 (or, 820 and above) generation hardware.