Technology

Longer term it's going to be interesting to see what if anything RISC-V changes. Right now they're filling a role that ARM occupied about 20 years ago being primarily an alternative for cheap and medium power devices, but just like ARM they've got the potential to duke it out in the desktop space with the right backing. It would for instance be an interesting move if Microsoft partnered with a company like HiFive to produce a truly high end RISC-V CPU similar to Apples M1/M2.

Intel is fine. The fact that they are somewhat competetive on their dinosaur fabrication node is crazy by itsself.

You are forgetting cloud computing - all my workloads have moved to Graviton or will do very shortly.

RISC is good

How well does RISC compete with ARM in terms of power and heat though?

Microsoft will never beat apple when in comes to how well their system runs on ARM hardware

I dunno - cellular networking, touch screen, detachable keyboard... Apple is pretty easy to beat if you ask me. All Microsoft needs is an ARM chip that is "fast enough" and also has competitive battery life. Something Intel can't deliver on.

Windows on ARM will not be used by anyone unless AAA games or AutoCAD software is build for ARM

That's not how the transition went on a Mac. Software compiled for Intel is generally faster on ARM than it ever was on Intel Macs... not because the CPU is faster (it's not), but rather Apple Silicon Macs have faster SSDs, faster RAM, more L2/L3 cache, etc. Those aren't proprietary secrets, they're just expensive. Anyone can do the same. Intel has caught up but only on their expensive desktop processors. If Qualcomm can do it on with a reasonably priced laptop chipset, that could be pretty special.

Games aren't limited by compute performance, they're mostly limited by how fast textures can be read. And it's the same with AutoCAD.

Also you missed a massive use case - browsing the web. Chrome/etc is already optimised for ARM, since nobody uses x86 on a smartphone.

Microsoft Windows would need to support whatever ARM chip comes out which will be an overgrowing number.

Or they can do with producing, say, HaloPhones and HaloPads and only supporting what's used in them.

Windows on ARM will not be used by anyone unless AAA games or AutoCAD software is build for ARM and Nvidia and AMD GPUs can be easily coupled with it.

I suspect this is like weapons trade or big commercial integrations. There will be ARM versions of those when there will be a strategy of MS and its partners profiting from it. Same with hardware.

It's not that something happening naturally didn't happen, it's that there's no such strategy to turn in that direction. This market is so oligopolized that it even looks this way.

It would be nice to have the option of buying a printer which just accepts PostScript via ulpt. I mean, some Brother models do, I even had one working before it melted (don't ask me how).

For most consumers it doesn’t matter. What will is “Why does program X run so slow when program Y is fast?”. That can be solved with marketing, like calling the ARM version of Windows “Windows M 11” or something like that. Programs optimized for “Windows 11 M” will run faster and older windows 11 programs will run, but slower. Explaining that will be key to whether Arm windows will succeed.

Most users though use a small subset of programs. Like web browser, email, light office and some media consumption. Should work well enough for them.

Well I dont so thats anecdotal but No

Nothing runs on a processor it wasn't built for. That said you can paper over that somewhat using an emulator which is what Apple did on OS X to let you run x86 apps on ARM processors. There's a performance tradeoff though, you obviously can't run as fast in an emulator as you could natively, but if the native processor is fast enough you might not notice the difference. With games in particular they're not often CPU bound, so assuming a good enough GPU even in an emulator it might run just fine. That said games are also far more sensitive to minor timing fluctuations, so even if 90% of the time it runs fine if 10% of the time it has bad hitching you're going to have a bad experience.

For a slightly less extreme example of this you can look at Steamdeck. That's running games in an emulator but in that case it's a more mild form of emulation since it's the same CPU architecture, it's just emulating several APIs to make Linux look like Windows to the game.

According to the article:

Qualcomm also claims that most Windows games should “just work” on its upcoming Arm laptops, so we could eventually see some gaming laptops powered by Arm processors.