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Posted on 09/01/2018 9:24:32 PM PDT by dayglored
Full Windows on new Qualcomm silicon at last
IFA Microsoft's long journey away from Intel reached escape velocity this week, as the first traditional laptop machine with Qualcomm's Arm processor was revealed by Lenovo, in the shape of the Yoga C630 WOS.
"WOS" stands for "Windows on Snapdragon", how Qualcomm prefers to call "Windows on Arm", and since it's Qualcomm Inside, not Intel Inside, it gets to call the shots.
This is the second "always connected" PC from Lenovo to run a Qualcomm chip, but the first to run the Snapdragon 850 processor. Officially announced last year, the Microsoft-Qualcomm alliance Always Connected was created to produce chips with support for legacy x86 instructions into an Arm processor, which should result in full blown Windows running on devices with greater power efficiency than Intel could manage.
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How much more efficiency? "25+ hours of local video playback on a single charge," says Qualcomm. The proof's in the pudding, though: once the x86 instructions are tapped, and the Yoga is put through a real-life work day, we'll have a better idea.
This particular Yoga is a smart but generic 1.2kg machine with 13.3-inch touchscreen convertible display. Naturally, there's an LTE modem built in: no more hunting around for dodgy hotspots, Lenovo stresses. The Snapdragon 850 (2.90Ghz) is supported by 4GB of RAM.
Many more devices are to come, with Lenovo bullish about the prospects of customers running legacy software on cheaper or more mobile gear. And that explains the pricing. At €950, or around £850 in the UK, this isn't cheap.
Lenovo's Windows on Snapdragon is fairly expensive, $850 I think, company says people will pay for 25 hr battery life. However I think it is over-priced. — Tim Anderson (@timanderson) August 30, 2018
But Lenovo reckons those enterprise users will pay for that longer battery life. Expect lower cost models to come.
Over two decades Intel has sought to move away from x86 and nurture low-power architectures, well ahead of the big shift to mobile computing. Despite some fine assets, particularly StrongARM, these attempts never achieved critical mass.
And for its part Microsoft was always keen to hedge its bets. Like most in the industry, it expected Intel's CISC to wither and die, and so promoted Windows NT heavily as a highly portable, RISC-friendly platform.
However, Intel proved more durable than anyone expected. Microsoft's last attempt to put Windows on Arm, post-iPad, acknowledged that most legacy applications were so deeply reliant on x86 quirks that only a subset could run, and customers didn't want a subset. Windows RT was short-lived.
Now all Intel can do is watch from the sidelines. ®
I think the ARM Snapdragon is a great machine, and I'm pleased to see Intel finally take a back seat.
The only thing I don’t like is Lenovo. The Chinese manufacturer has done some shady things that compromise security. My company doesn’t allow use of Lenovo computers for sensitive work.
My department has had to fight tooth and nail to convince our traveling people to go from 17” laptops to 15”. We will never get them onto 13.3”.
My headline comment isn’t exactly true — the ARM is enhanced with some x86 instructions.
We bought a Lenovo Yoga machine that was supposed to take the place of both my laptop and tab when traveling.
The Bluetooth didn’t initialize right until the store replaced the machine twice. This was evidently a common issue with machines. It didn’t have enough RAM to really run applications and the HD was so small if you had Windows and Office installed there was little room for anything else. They expected you to save everything to a cloud which, if you are traveling is not always feasible and is often expensive.
After a couple of months, I literally took the worthless piece of junk to the backyard and attacked it with a 5-pound sledgehammer threw the mangled pieces in the trash and went back to the old Tab and purchased a new HP laptop with a 15-inch screen.
The Yoga was the crappiest piece of crap that was ever crapped.
I will never recommend a Lenovo Yoga to anyone.
Unfortunately the devices aren’t as open to modifications as their Intel equivalents.
Window on Apple chips. Funny.
ARM is starting to attack the server market as well. Last November, Cloudflare benchmarked a Qualcomm Falkor ARM server against Intel Broadwell and Skylake servers. The Broadwell and Skylake servers had 20 and 24 cores, respectively, with hyperthreading. The Falkor had 46 cores.
The Falkor lagged on single-core tasks, but did passably well on multicore tests. Software played a role in some of the tests, to the Falkor's disadvantage. E.g., a few of the tests were based on the Go language. Apparently, its ARM runtime needs work.
But the most interesting test was a web-serving benchmark using Nginx (btw, FR uses Nginx):
Server farms are notorious for consuming inordinate quantities of electricity. The Falkor came in a close second, but used less than half the power to do it — 214 requests per sec per watt, compared to 99 for Skylake and 77 for Broadwell. That has to make it attractive to large parts of the server market.
Comment: I wish the author of this article would write/speak in plain English for us peasants who don’t speak Computerese.
Haven’t personally looked at it, but Windows 10 IoT will run on the raspberry pi 3b/3b+ (Arm CPU’s). And the RP3B/3B+ are quite efficient, so can see that this might be realistic.
Most of the silicon is modern machines in manufactured in China. Even Dell and HP machines are put together in China. On my last purchase, I was going to go Dell, even though they are overpriced and underpowered for the same money as Lenovo.
However, the fact was that Lenovo had the best prices, the best storage prices, the best heat dissipation, and the best flat out sustained performance for a laptop.
And since they are all made in China, I went with Lenovo.
I don’t design sensitive applications, but if I did, I would feel no more or less comfortable with any of the brands.
With any chip nowadays sporting billions of transistors, it would be easy to hide a few extra gates. Add in wireless on all of it, and there is no way to know what your machine is really doing, unless you want to invest your time watching the machine rather than using for its purpose.
I did interview a candidate in my day job once that implemented a OS in Intel processor SM mode. He could intercept anything the real OS was doing, without the OS knowing, had an IP stack and ethernet drivers in that OS, could CC any packet to anywhere he wanted too, no AV or firewall could stop it, since they had no clue the code was there and ran inside of both protected memory and processor execution state.
This was a hobbyist. Imagine what dedicated staff could do?
I have no idea if ARM has a similar mechanism (doubtful, at least officially).
Finally in relation this article, I look at ARM processors as lawn mower engines, and the XEON & AMD Opteron (or whatever they call their server/workstation chip now) as big HEMI’s or modern LS engines.
And not many people realize, but x86_64 added a lot of RISC like features to the old architecture.
The truth is the lawn more engines have been found fine for most people puttering on the internet (me included), but when we need to get real work done (building code), there is no substitute for the x86_64 processors. This will change over the next decade, of course, but it isn’t there yet.
One thing that will truly tilt the board is when it becomes monetarily beneficial to build ARM motherboards that fit into a PC case. PC’s don’t drive growth like they used too, but they still are the code building engine behind everything except Apple products.
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