Windows runs on ARM just fine, it’s the legacy apps that are holding the industry back. Just like some institutions are still running AS/400 machines because nobody can port the programs they’re using.
I blame MS because they have repeatedly failed to light a big enough fire under app devs to get them to migrate to modern APIs and write more arch agnostic code, nor have they provided the tooling to get it done. Why isn’t the default on every MS compiler for Windows to produce fat binaries for x86 and ARM? That alone would help adoption greatly.
Lemmy bitches nonstop about Apple out of nowhere. Then, they’ll be excited about something like this and pretend it wasn’t Apple that is the reason this is happening.
I had a buddy who was a Linux ARM laptop fanatic back in like 2014. Microsoft had been trying to make Windows on ARM a thing for years before that.
Apple was the first to popularize it but it’s been a work in progress if you’ve been paying attention for a LOT longer. What helped Apple is all the work they did on their own ARM chips for iOS. They managed to get pretty close to x86 performance in an ARM chip. They also had an app store of apps that could run on them and an emulator for things that wouldn’t.
Every time Microsoft tried nobody would release ARM builds… People just bought the x86 laptops. It’s the same chicken and egg problem desktop Linux has had for years.
Look, the difference is in the language. One company hasn’t “done it”, the industry as a whole moves, sometimes cooperatively other times in a tug of war.
As the commenter above mentioned, Apple was in a unique position of being able to leverage all the work done in the phone and tablet spaces to push for an ARM laptop. This helped other manufacturers which already showed an interest in doing the same.
On the other hand, with the lock in mechanisms apple has in their products they also stifles competition and innovation in other areas.
They can both help push and hinder innovation. Just like any company. It’s not about hating or loving a corporate entity.
i see the downvote but you got to admit companies tend to follow whatever apple decides to do. Remember how we used to have headphone jack before apple removed it ? remember the numerous android phone with a big notch (pixel was the winner here) after iphone switched to faceid ? Remember the focus on privacy from google after apple made it’s pop up about not being tracked between apps ? I probably forgot others, but whatever succesfull (or not) apple does, other companies follow. always has been.
M1 arm macbook have been a quite a hit for apple, very successfull. Guess what, it probably pushed competition to make their own, but they couldn’t because who the hell can make their own processor and then force almost the entire developper on their operating system to write software for it ? Even if we get arm windows laptop, good luck getting most of your software to run on arm. You’d be lucky to even get big ones like photoshop. everything will be run through translation layer, will sucks performance and battery.
To be fair, x86 was held back a long while when intel was the dominant market force without competition. And arm is starting to stagnate too, even apple have not meaningfully improved their arm-based cpus since the m1
ARM is not a GPU-architecture, but a competitor to x86, which is what intel and AMD are basing their CPUs on. Through a very confusing web of patents and deals, only those two corporations are able to use it. ARM was developed to be slimmer than x86, but only recently cought up in performance, while retaining an advantage in efficiency. They’re not compatible with each other though, which is why apple had to create an emulation layer for x86 software when they switched from intel to arm for their cpus. Microsoft will (and have) need to do the same thing, but it’s not clear yet what performance will look like for things like gaming. Microsoft largely want to make windows on arm a thing for battery life and so that they can create their own processors.
How does x64 architecture play in this? I that x86 was out dated and not used. Something about fat32 and ntfs hard drives? Man I know so little of computers even thought I’ve been tinkering with them most of my life.
AMD-64 is an upgrade to x86 that allows it to work with (I think) 64 Bit lntegers. The most obvious consequence is the jump from being able to use 4GB of RAM to whatever absurd number 64Bit are able to handle
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