News No legacy app impact for Windows 10 on Arm, says Qualcomm

Claim can still be valid if performance is low enough that a 'comparable x86 processor' cannot scale down enough and hits a power floor. I'll believe magical on-the-fly 100% efficient transparent CISC-to-RISC instruction set translation at actually usable performance levels when I see it.

 

Am i having a dumb moment or are they saying the hardware translation will result in the same performance and battery life as if it was running on x86/x86-64, because if so why even bother running it on ARM in the first place.

 

That is what they want you to think.

But the truth is going to be a bit more complicated:

Essentially for the average facebook browsing grandma a modern x86 CPU is such absurd overkill that even when all the power saving features kick in and shut down parts of the CPU as well as severely undervolting and underclocking it, it is still far too powerful for what is being used. So in a scenario like that, yes it would be possible that the end user would get the same performance and the same battery life.

But there is precisely zero chance the same would apply to something that actually pushes a modern x86 CPU to its limits, fire up lets say handbrake and that claim from Qualcomm will be shattered quickly.

 

That maybe, I'm not going to guess on performance and battery life when running handbrake or whatever, however i don't understand why I'd buy an ARM powered Windows 10 devices if i could just buy a "normal" Windows 10 devices and get the same, according to Microsoft and Qualcomm, performance and battery life.

I mean shouldn't there be some sort of advantage that comes with using an ARM powered Windows 10 device like longer battery life, although I'm getting the feeling i must be missing something.

 

Because [reportedly] a couple of higher-ups at MS really, really don't like Intel, hence their repeated attempt to make Windows on not-x86 happen.

Also they're trying to recoup some market share, mainly in the in the US education segment, from Chromebooks.

 

Battery life is all about efficiency.
If you buy an Intel or AMD CPU you have tons of spare performance (the price of which is power consumption) at low loads as even downclocked to like 1Ghz they are still too fast.
Since ARM CPUs are inferior in performance (as power consumption was a higher priority in development) there is less performance going to waste, hence also less power being wasted.
In other words: The power efficiency savings are being used to run code compiled for something else with Qualcomm claiming that in the end it comes about even versus x86 CPUs.

So if we take the statement of Qualcomm at face value it means Intel and AMD are in deep sh*t as the x86 license is worthless as ARM has supposedly caught up.

Of course if that was anywhere near the truth then Intel bosses would be buying rope rather than just selling shares.
Luckily for Intel with any high load that'll all fly right out of the window.

 

Still seems like a rather pointless venture, especially as back in June when Microsoft announced it was working with Qualcomm on a ARM powered Windows 10 device Intel's signaled how seriously they take the protection of their x86 instruction set architecture license.

 

Because you can also run newer applications and applets that are ARM native at (presumably) a much lower power draw. As well as the old x86 classics like photoshop or whatever.

If I recall and I could be wrong on this because I don't do UWP apps. But when you code a UWP application you can just select the target platform and away you go. So it should be relatively easy to target ARM platforms as well x86 on new applications. Run the same code through different build configurations essentially.

 

It might give Intel a kick in the teeth to try harder, so not really pointless as more competition is always good (although any savings will be more than eaten up by the ever rising ram and nand prices so there won't be much immediate benefit to consumers).

 

Also expect a decent ARM laptop to cost the same as a half-decent x86 Laptop.

Something Snapdragon 835-powered will cost you several hundred quid, whether it's a phone or one of these windows-on-ARM laptops.

 

That seem to make more sense, longer battery life when running native UWP/ARM software, the same if running through x86 translation.