How did Microsoft screw this up? - Surface Pro X (SQ2) vs M1 Macbook Air
Linus Tech Tips0 HN recommenders · 2021–2022
2.8M views · commentary · dated · Uploaded 2021-01-05
Linus Tech Tips compares Microsoft's Surface Pro X (SQ2) with the Apple M1 MacBook Air, focusing on how Windows on Arm and x86 emulation perform against Apple's Arm hardware. The verdict is that the Surface falls well short.
Cited as evidence of how poorly Windows x86 emulation on Arm performed in 2021 compared with Apple's M1 and Rosetta.
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11 comments from Hacker News
Linus Tech Tips actually just released a video a couple of hours ago where they compared the Surface Pro X SQ2 with the M1 MacBook Air. It was not pretty. [VIDEO]
Legacy x86-64 app emulation has only just appeared in alpha form and still has massive compatibility issues. I'd still call it something we hope to see in the future, instead of a working proof of concept. [VIDEO]
[VIDEO] windows in a VM outperforms windows PCs at the price point--plus like other commenters mention it comes with a native Unix shell
The comparison to Microsoft's more expensive 2020 Surface Pro X is especially stark. Windows runs at less than half the speed on Microsoft's own flagship ARM hardware. [VIDEO]
The raving in this thread is to me indicative of how far behind Intel has fallen behind ARM in technical terms. Now we just need more, better, faster ARM-based chips. Linux is ready, macOS is ready... but it looks like Windows is not yet ready: [VIDEO]
Samsung's custom cores haven't been competitive with Qualcomm so far, much less Apple. You only have to look at comparisons between the Surface Pro X and the M1 Macbook Air to see how far behind Qualcomm is. [VIDEO]
>This part of the article was particularly cringe. People don't seem to realize how much of a tech prowess it is that x86 builds of those two games are even running at an acceptable framerate. Spoken like someone who has never seen how poorly Microsoft's x86 to ARM emulation works. [VIDEO] They had difficulty getting programs to work at all, much less have acceptable performance under emulation.
They introduced x64 64 bit emulation in the Dev channel several months ago, but it didn't work well at all. It also was more performant running in a VM on last year's MacBook Air than running natively on Microsoft's flagship hardware. [VIDEO]
Has Windows gotten any better at running x86-64 Windows software on ARM hardware? The last time I saw this tested, it was more likely to fail than succeed, but it's been a while. [VIDEO]
> IMO Microsoft has put much more effort into a thoughtful x86 -> ARM transition than Apple did. Given that the Surface Pro X didn't support 64 bit x86 Windows applications at all, I'm not sure how you can think so. Even after developer channel support was added, it was unlikely to work. >How did Microsoft screw this up? - Surface Pro X (SQ2) vs M1 Macbook Air [VIDEO]
> It would be a huge embarrassment to have Apple hardware running Windows that much better than all the native PCs. That boat already sailed over a year ago. >How did Microsoft screw this up? - Surface Pro X (SQ2) vs M1 Macbook Air [VIDEO]