Living with Windows on ARM - discussion, tips, etc

I have an SQ2 based Surface Pro X with 16GB as my daily driver. My usage needs are heavily skewed toward Office and the web. For those needs, it's been perfectly useable.

rek said:

I don't think Intel/AMD don't have too much to worry about just yet - Windows on ARM is for an appliance laptop at best, and no more. Given this experience, and modern Ryzen Mobile's excellent power/performance, I get the impression the "Fabled ARM Wonderland" of high performance/low power consumption is actually TSMC's process node doing wonders, rather than any inherent magic in the ARM64 architecture.

Click to expand...

Keep in mind that the SQ1 is, at this point, a five year old phone design. The difference between that and X Elite is massive.

I have no idea what happened to the PX I got for work eval. I very much doubt anyone's using it at the office. As with WP, Microsoft is just moving too slow to play catchup.

The fabled X Elite itself is not going to drive adoption as fast as it needs to at this point for it to actually be viable. Never mind development of consumer tech like the Vision Pro (yet another thing Microsoft threw away by default) only accelerating the irrelevance of a particular desktop OS in the next decade as these start to encroach on desktops without taking up a desktop.

As you allude a bunch of stuff that is out there that is x86 needs to be ported for the benefits of ARM to actually be realised and not bring the whole thing crashing down to an experience that's worse than a budget laptop once you try anything actually productivity orientated. Microsoft's commercial dev base needs to move as fast as, if not faster than Apple's " " pro " " sumer dev base for something new. That's never happened in the modern post-90's history of desktop computing.

Short of Intel/AMD pulling a magic x86 compatible, ARM-strengths-equivalent thing out of the hat, I really don't see this going well. I will definitely look at X Elite machines out of interest tho in the hope that like in the Windows 8 days some adventurous maker will do something interesting with it. Damn I miss 8 when it had potential, and I was prodding an RT thinking ARM might actually be the future of Windows.

From what I understand, Qualcomm's WoA exclusivity is ending in 2025, and it's rumored that AMD and Nvidia are both waiting in the wings. The problem will continue to be application support, though enough power for emulation may make a reasonable difference...

I don't know, my work laptop is a 6th gen Ryzen 7 with 32GB of RAM, and I really struggle with performance at times. I'm not doing anything crazy - Edge with 6-20 tabs (usually 8-12), Outlook, Teams, OneNote Terminal with PS7/WSL, Notepad++, and Kusto Explorer. But I still spend a lot of time annoyed by speed. Then there's Defender, which can make my life hell when it decides slow is too fast. A couple people on my team accidently ordered Surface Pro X devices, and had to trade them in for 2-3 year old machines from terms.

I love the prospects for quieter laptops with longer battery. I like the M1 MBA I'm typing this on, aside from the OS, and look forward to the next gen ARM Thinkpad ultraportable to run Linux on. And honestly, I think ARM will probably be great for most home users, and some sales and other lighter office worker types. But it's going to be awhile for those of us with even middling needs, unless Nvidia just knocks it out of the park right away. They might, they've been designing similar ARM chips for other markets for awhile.

I think the major issue is the premium prices being charged. The ARM Surface Pro should have been a premium SKU of the Surface Go, it simply can't compete with the x86 SKUs. The same goes for the Thinkpad X13s, it's essentially a companion device. I've considered picking one up on deep discount, but there's no way it was worth the asking price.

Ethyriel said:

I don't know, my work laptop is a 6th gen Ryzen 7 with 32GB of RAM, and I really struggle with performance at times. I'm not doing anything crazy - Edge with 6-20 tabs (usually 8-12), Outlook, Teams, OneNote Terminal with PS7/WSL, Notepad++, and Kusto Explorer. But I still spend a lot of time annoyed by speed. Then there's Defender, which can make my life hell when it decides slow is too fast. A couple people on my team accidently ordered Surface Pro X devices, and had to trade them in for 2-3 year old machines from terms.

Click to expand...

Something doesn't make sense - I have a laptop with a 16Gb 6650U on which I do almost a carbon copy of the above and I can never call it slow. The only thing I could call slow in that context from my PoV* is something like the 8th gen i5U with 16Gb I have connected straight to the office, and that's with the weight of everything the MSP crams onto it.

*My regular everyday workstations for normal stuff are Lenovo P620's with 5995wx's

Might be something very specific to what @Ethyriel is doing in the browser? I'm actually replacing a dual-core Kaby Lake web browsing and Zoom laptop (32GB, NVMe) myself* with an otherwise identical Raptor Lake laptop and I don't expect to see any real world performance difference 99% of the time...

* my daily use boxes are a pair of 5950X setups...

It's possible it's my workload in Edge, I work with a Dynamics 365 tool, some query tools that do a good bit of work on the client side to create dashboards, and others that aren't exactly lean. But I don't have anything in my browser working constantly in the background. I think it's Teams more than anything, combined with Defender, and general Windows bloat and inefficiency. We use Teams for an absurd amount.

I had to use a temporary machine with 16GB for a few months (T14s g1), and it was damned near unusable if I had to load any reasonably large packet captures, in addition to my other tools.

Packet capture was pretty much dedicated boxes earlier in my career, from your work load as described so far I can easily imagine even a 32GB or 64GB memory system bogging down.

Yeah, but again, nothing is really constant. I have some moments of high CPU or memory, but they're momentary. Whereas things always seem slow.

It might also be the pace of my day. I spend a lot of time actively loading dashboards, running queries, collecting data, etc; and then doing it all over again based on the previous round of findings. I'm pretty much always working on a short deadline because something, somewhere is down, and I'm being relied upon to troubleshoot it. I suppose that might make me more sensitive when things chug because Defender stole some CPU cycles, or Teams did Teams things.

Maybe I'll throw Windows on my P14s with 64GB of RAM and a faster SSD, for science.

Back on the topic, I do wonder if a larger amount of cores, like ARM affords, would make a difference for my workload. But until we actually have something like an M Pro or Ultra, we won't really know if the Windows schedulers are up to the task.

That doesn't sound like a typical laptop workload nowadays, with more and more cloud based tools most laptops are just a fancy screen and input for a browser.

Windows on Arm is aiming at that light workload group. Flagship SoCs on phones and tablets don't come even near Apple's A-whatever CPU, never mind the M series, and WoA is a tiny segment not worth heavy investment just like watches and get repurposed parts and leftovers.

w00key said:

That doesn't sound like a typical laptop workload nowadays, with more and more cloud based tools most laptops are just a fancy screen and input for a browser.

Windows on Arm is aiming at that light workload group. Flagship SoCs on phones and tablets don't come even near Apple's A-whatever CPU, never mind the M series, and WoA is a tiny segment not worth heavy investment just like watches and get repurposed parts and leftovers.

Click to expand...

This is only true to a point in the past and is becoming less true by the day. The M-series was a wake-up-call.

According to Qualcomm the Snapdragon X Elite, due out later this year should beat the M3 by something like 20% in raw compute, and it looks like they have more credible Windows support for ARM going into the next revision of Win11. The proof will be in the benchmarks when it comes out, don't trust company claims blah blah, but it's not likely to be a flaccid also-ran CPU. That increased Windows support indicates that Microsoft believes that they're unlikely to be an also-ran for long. For mobile in particular now that ARM is hitting x86 level performance, the power savings are hard to ignore. I'm not saying that I'm lining up to be an early adopter of Snapdragon X, but if everything lines up, it could be a really compelling product against at least the M1 and M2 MacBooks in the market for those who want Windows.

Meanwhile the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has pulled ahead of the A17 Pro in benchmarks, with the exception that single-core performance on the A17 Pro beats single core Qualcomm 8Gen3. The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 is neck and neck with the 8Gen3 and the Exynos 2400 is only barely behind. Qualcomm and MediaTek are already pointing at new designs/new cores and saying that their Q3/Q4 2024 releases will be another very large performance increase. I haven't tried DeX on an 8Gen3 and I don't expect it to be as usable as a decent laptop or even Chromebook, but the hardware is definitely making progress.

Hmm this Snapdragon Gen 2 phone released a few months ago certainly doesn't feel as fast as the latest (or last few) iFruit, but good that they are finally catching up. Mobile Firefox with uBlock origin feels laggy compared to a many years old Intel Macbook. Maybe it's the hardware, maybe OS and software, in raw compute it can't be that far from each other.


Interesting that Windows on Arm is getting more serious, we shall see if it is any good in real life. There's a weird situation now that MacOS on Arm is pretty much the fastest developer laptop for compilation and local workloads and Intel has trouble catching up, AMD otoh does pretty okay but is hard to find/buy. It would be something if Qualcomm suddenly grabs the gold medal next year.

You can argue that the A17 Pro is a lackluster improvement over the A16 Bionic, or that Apple has been resting on their laurels since ~A14 or so as well if you like. Apple has better ability to tune software to the hardware as well but just looking at raw benches, Apple no longer holds a commanding lead in the phone/tablet SoC market. A few years ago that was not true. Qualcomm has been trying to push fairly large generation-on-generation upgrades with the 8Gen1 -> 8Gen2 and again with the 8Gen2 -> 8Gen3 and it's possible that the 8Gen4 will be and even larger improvement with the Oryon cores (based on the ones from the Snapdragon X laptop-class SoC.)

There's a lot of moving pieces with Microsoft + Qualcomm + every other software developer, but the point is that I don't think the manufacturers of these laptops will be positioning them as a "good enough" solution if you need more battery life but not a lot of compute or broad software support. I think they're going to try really hard to position them as premium products.

Ethyriel said:

I suppose that might make me more sensitive when things chug because Defender stole some CPU cycles, or Teams did Teams things.

Click to expand...

Highly unlikely for anywhere near an undemanding workload. My org are Teams junkies as well, tho we run telephony outside it and again, only the oldest machines I have lying around are actually slow.

Ethyriel said:

Maybe I'll throw Windows on my P14s with 64GB of RAM and a faster SSD, for science.

Click to expand...

Maybe what you do is actually computationally intensive after all and you didn't account for it.

rek said:

Has anyone had a go at the new Prism emulator in Windows 11 24H2?

I'm guessing it's available via the insider channels, but maybe not for all Windows on ARM machines yet?

Click to expand...

Not I. IT controls my installs. I’m hoping they upgrade me to an Elite X before that happens.

However, The Verge has a Prism focused article this morning: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/26/...-arm-qualcomm-copilot-plus-pcs-prism-emulator