Apple is an existential threat to the PC

I'm not sure about this, but two power profiles were mentioned (80W and 23W), which sounds more like total SoC power than total device power.
The performance numbers released last year seems to suggest that it's similar to a full M3 Pro, which has the same core counts (12 cores). Even 80W SoC power does not sounds too bad as it's the peak power and we don't know how much power it actually consumes when running something like Geekbench. M3 Pro is ~30W when running some CPU benchmarks.
Of course, the main problem Microsoft will face is software. Right now most software on MacOS are already ported to ARM, but the majority of software on Windows aren't. This will take time.
Read here for instance: https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-x-elite-benchmarks-3380426/
Qualcomm had two Snapdragon X Elite reference devices to test, spanning high-performance and lower-power use cases. Configuration A targeted an 80W total device TDP, running a QHD screen and 64GB RAM, while config B is a more power-efficient 23W implementation with a 2,800×1080 display and 64GB RAM.

Anyway as usual I pick that with a grain of salt and will wait for consumer devices.
 
I'm super curious how microsoft will handle this going forward. Apple is fully switching to ARM over time. Windows is going to support both ... forever. Just not sure how it's going to work, but I'll admit I'm excited to see how ARM plays out. Will be really interesting to see performance comparisons between native ARM and native x86 versions of the same application in Windows.
 
Other than Office and browsers, what interesting Windows applications are there?

Most of the legacy software isn't likely to be ported to ARM?

So maybe a selection of the top games?

What else are heavily used apps these days, maybe Netflix and other video streaming clients?

Maybe some AI applications of some kind? Is Copilot it's own app or just invoked through Windows?
 
Other than Office and browsers, what interesting Windows applications are there?

Most of the legacy software isn't likely to be ported to ARM?

So maybe a selection of the top games?

What else are heavily used apps these days, maybe Netflix and other video streaming clients?

Maybe some AI applications of some kind? Is Copilot it's own app or just invoked through Windows?
Since nearly all professional applications have already been ported for Aarch64 on macOS you should expect Adobe, Serif Affinity, Davinci Resolve, Blender, Capture One, Python, Java etc.
 
Win10x had it.
AFAIK that was just one big sandbox for all win32 applications.

I want every application to have its own sandbox but when allowed by the user to still be integrated with the modern desktop (which requires a whole lot more new code for stuff which crosses security boundaries, file access, drag and drop, clipboard, context menu, file associations, etc etc). Not just for msix applications, but for legacy applications too (I don't expect the most invasive stuff to work, just the other 99%). A gargantuan task, but Microsoft is a gargantuan company.

Unfortunately Microsoft is a gargantuan company which is largely paralyzed by internal strife and the huge income generated by the cloud transition. They can't see the wall coming across the temporary piles of money.

They need to wake up and start work on win32-v2 (this time with a better thought out plan for ABI compatibility if they use C, ie. symver, transparant aliases, whatever). C++/COM/WinRT/WinUI is a disaster.
 
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Since nearly all professional applications have already been ported for Aarch64 on macOS you should expect Adobe, Serif Affinity, Davinci Resolve, Blender, Capture One, Python, Java etc.

I wouldn't be so sure of this. My day job is making Windows software, and we see zero traction towards ARM Windows.
 
They'd probably need tens of millions of devices sold and in active use before software developers are interested in porting.

But I think in Xcode, it's just a flag so people making OS X software could literally get ARM executables by checking the flag. Of course they may do more to optimize but the bar for outputting ARM binaries alongside Intel binaries wasn't that high.
 
They'd probably need tens of millions of devices sold and in active use before software developers are interested in porting.

But I think in Xcode, it's just a flag so people making OS X software could literally get ARM executables by checking the flag. Of course they may do more to optimize but the bar for outputting ARM binaries alongside Intel binaries wasn't that high.

If your software do not use some low level optimizations it can be just like that, but if you have, or some of the 3rd party libraries you use have, they may need to be updated (or if they have fallback mode, but of course it'll be slower).
Also you'll need to do QA on both platforms. This one of the beauty of MacOS going ARM only, because eventually you don't need to test for Intel Macs anymore. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that Windows will one day be ARM only.
So yes you are right, it can be easy to port but at the same time, as you said, many developers probably won't do that unless the incentives are good enough.
 
So that was fast.

We already have M4 after 7 months.

AppleM4.jpg

4 Performance cores
6 Efficiency cores

The new Display Engine is interesting, perhaps the base chip finally supports 3 monitors.

Unfortunately it is all wasted in an iPad and iPadOS.

It would be really great if they made a dock and gave it the ability to run both iPadOS and macOS.
 
So that was fast.

We already have M4 after 7 months.

View attachment 11270

4 Performance cores
6 Efficiency cores

The new Display Engine is interesting, perhaps the base chip finally supports 3 monitors.

Unfortunately it is all wasted in an iPad and iPadOS.

It would be really great if they made a dock and gave it the ability to run both iPadOS and macOS.

They better be planning to iterate the Macs soon.

But the dual OLED display may be more significant than the M4 at this time, especially for iPad sales, which was flagging.

Was M4 pushed out quickly to address some of those hardware-level security flaws?

Most likely because N3B sucks.

Hope they addressed the security flaw. If that is the case they need to roll out the M4 across their product lines this year.
 
I'm not that worried about an attack vector that requires physical access to the hardware in the first place 😅

Hopefully the Mac Studio and Mac Pro jump straight to M4 Max and M4 Ultra or Apple could have made a larger monolithic chip to replace the quirky Ultra.

We will likely see next month (June 10th) at the WWDC24 keynote.
 
Geekbench 6 benchmarks starting to appear.

This one shows us the M4 (base frequency 4.4GHz) in an iPad solidly trouncing the M3 series in single-core and matching the M3 Pro in multi-core.

Single-Core score: 3810 (20% increase over M3)
Multi-Core score: 14541 (25% increase over M3)

It seems that Geekbench 6.3 introduced support for the Arm Scalable Matrix Extensions (SME) and the M4 finally exposes that for applications.

  • Introduce support for Arm Scalable Matrix Extensions (SME) instructions. Geekbench 6.3 includes SME implementations of the matrix multiplication kernels used by the Geekbench 6 machine learning workloads.
*Systems with SME instructions enabled will score higher in Geekbench 6.3 than in earlier Geekbench versions

It's the fastest single-core performance in any hardware available in any form factor today, be it server rack, desktop computers or anything else for that matter. This is just in a 5,1mm thin tablet 😅

The performance per watt is really great.
 
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