Windows on ARM benchmarks show performance isn’t its strong suit

1. I’d like to see an ARM powered Ubuntu laptop with an Octacore processor, 4gb of RAM, 64gb of storage and a 12.1 inch screen for under $500.

2. I think this is nice progress. While I feel it’s not enough to generate a lot of sales, I hope MS continues their ARM work.

3. My guess is that the Chinese manufacturers will provide cheaper versions of these devices but it depends on whether there is a market or not.

4. Nobody needs UWP. The only chance for Windows especialy on ARM is if they make it natively run Android APKs through LXCore or some other way.

5. SD835 and LTE is killing them.
   So it’s not SD845 and 68$ or so, let’s say 50$ for this one vs a SD660 that would be maybe 25$, tending towards 20$.
   Then maybe 20$ for RF front end, PA and so on.
   And 20+$ for licensing.
   Add the margins for the PC maker, channel, retail to all that and this is what destroys price.

   If you had a 12-20$ tab SoC and no moronic LTE, you have better than Atom but , if you pay the high premium for this kind of SoC and you add lTE, it just kills the entire thing.

6. Half the performance for +20% battery life? Not very compelling.

7. I don’t know what a Snapdragon 835 costs manufacturers, but maybe the problem is they’re confusing the demand for computer devices with demand for smartphones. People will pay outrageous prices for high-end smartphones w/ SD 835s because they don’t realize the tech world has changed and that they don’t need that power on their smartphones. But people already realize that with desktop/laptop computers. Or more likely perhaps, Qualcomm is able to get very high prices for SD 835s because of that consumer demand for such smartphones, and these products need to be priced that high to cover costs.

   Perhaps Windows on Arm would be more attractive with SD 6xx series instead?

   1. Snapdragon 845 sells for $85-88 i believe, the top tier snapdragons go in the $80 range. The HP pricetag includes an awesome typecover with kickstand and a pen which is roughly $200 value comparing with Surfaces or ipad pros.

      So HP is selling for $799 the actual tablet portion. But they also used alot of premium parts like UFS storage which is basically the replacement of emmc yet as fast as nand SSDs. And that aluminum chassis which is 1 mm thinner than ipad pro and the gorgeous screen. If HP wanted they could easily bring price of such devices down to $499.

      The Asus NovaGo sells for $599

      1. Still triple the price of a cheap Intel Celeron laptop for the same performance. At $599 and above, you can get an Intel Ultrabook with at least an i5 CPU which is magnitudes above even a Snapdragon 845 in performance. Even if the price drops to $499 that’s still way too expensive for Atom/Celeron levels of performance. These Windows On ARM laptops belong in the $99-199 price range. Otherwise, they’re just setting it up for failure when consumers start questioning why performance is horrendous.

         1. Stop arguing with Toby…

            It’s not worth the waste of time unless it is your ego getting in the way. Arm as well as Windows S is dead on arrival.

         2. But maybe that means it’s the first part of my suggestion, that the manufacturers are confusing the demand for computer devices with the demand for smartphones.

8. The ARM processor isn’t the issue, its the platform. All of this is winRT all over again. Unless the apps are compiled to Arm then its a waste. MS has only itself to blame for “hinting” good win32 support. That is a lie. If it can’t even match a Celeron it has little reason to exist. The return rate on these will exceed the original SURFACE RT tablets.

9. This seems a lot like their XP Mode strategy for getting people to move to Windows 7. Sadly XP Mode sounds like a better solution than emulation that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t and is unsupported.

10. Since the SD845 is receiving Coreboot support, on the next line of Windows on Snapdragon computers, just throw away windows and run Linux and enjoy the swathe of natively compiled ARM programs.

    1. HP dont mind, they will make a sale regardless. Your pen might become useless though.

11. Well, there you have it. This was the first and the last time I was truly excited about Windows on ARM:

    https://i.pinimg.com/originals/af/62/21/af6221815c3865c86a4416e91bafaf97.png

    1. U mean the last time you were excited about an RISC architecture….MIPS isnt ARM.

       1. ARM has been around for almost as long as x86, and as always, ARM is still and will always be farrrr behind x86 in terms of performance.

          1. Arm has been around but i was correcting him… MIPS, ARM, PowerPC are all RISC architectures.

             1. Fair enough

          2. There are benchmarks showing ThunderX2 (32c) outperforming Broadwell (18c), and being competitive with Skylake (22c). So not far behind, though obviously none of those are low-power devices.

             1. That’s the thing though, it may be competitive with more mainstream Broadwell and Skylake CPU’s. But Intel has shown they can scale up x86 at a higher level than ARM can scale up. If that’s what ARM has to offer on the high end, Intel has Xeon Phi to offer on their high end which brings us into super computer territory, but still based on the same architectures in mainstream CPU’s. ARM simply isn’t meant to compete with Intel in the mainstream and high end computing market. ARM doesn’t scale up as well, but it scales down very well whereas Intel has struggled to scale down x86 competitively. ARM trying to enter the high end space and compete with Intel Xeon, is like Intel Atom trying to compete with Snapdragon and Tegra.

             2. “ARM” can scale up to whatever their licensees need it to. Most of their customers so far are in the embedded/mobile space, so that’s what the implementations have been optimized for. The ThunderX2 is one of the first implementations of the ARM architecture targeting HPC applications, and has been selected for at least two supercomputers; the EU Mont-Blanc (with 3000 ThunderX2 cores), and the British GW4 Isambard (over 10000 ThunderX2 cores).

                There is absolutely nothing about ARMv8 that would make it inherently un-scaleable, just as there is nothing about x86-64 that makes it inherently scaleable.

             3. It’s an architecture designed for low power/embedded computing. That’s what prevents it from scaling up as well as x86-64. Likewise, x86-64 was designed for the opposite, preventing it from scaling down well to compete with ARM in mobile. Idk about more recent ARM servers, but at least as of a year ago, ARM servers have always been more BUS limited compared to other competitors. x86-64’s pipeline can throughput more data through the different layers of caches faster than ARM can. Not to mention that the x86-64 and Xeon’s specific architectures contain numerous additional instructions that give significant optimizations to applications (eg JIT and AOT compilation). Not to mention a big use case of server farms these days is virtualization for cloud applications, which there’s no doubt the x86-64 architecture contains incredible instructions and optimizations for virtualization. It’s unlikely that will ever change for ARM either since adding more instructions defeats the whole purpose of that architecture.

                Outside of web servers, ARM still can’t compete with Xeons, other x86-64 CPU’s and even PowerPC CPU’s in the high performance computing and mass server market.

             4. ARM beats the xeons in performance per watt, that is what the giant server farms are interested in more than having extra performance that would never get used. They would save up to 50% in electricity costs right off the bat.

                The ultra high end Super Computing will belong to quantum computers soon. IBM and MS are both working on quantum.

             5. You totally misunderstand quantum computing. First of all, we’re still a long way off from quantum super computers. Second, quantum computers aren’t magically more powerful than classical computers. They’re able to crunch through certain algorithms magnitudes faster than computers today, but that doesn’t mean outside of specialized computing, quantum computers are faster at everything. Take cryptomining for example. The consensus right now is that quantum computers wouldn’t have much of an advantage over regular computers when it comes to mining crypto currencies.

                Intel does not need to worry about quantum computers cutting into the high performance super computing market anytime soon. And as for today, they also don’t need to worry about ARM. It’s the same situation as WoA computers. 50% less performance for 25-50% power efficiency. It’ll be an interesting experiment for some people, but the world will largely move on and stick with what they know works.

12. With Intel abandoning development of Atom chips and AMD not currently competing in that space, Windows on ARM could find a niche on the low end tablet space. The benchmarks of the Intel Celeron N3450 are roughly equivalent to the Atom x7-Z8750, which is the best the Atom line has to offer. So the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 has similar performance to the best of the Atom line when running Windows. If cheaper ARM chips can rise to this level of performance and Windows can optimize emulation performance, there might be a market for Windows on ARM in the future. Atom chips aren’t going to get any better and ARM chips are constantly improving, so at some point it might make sense to abandon Atom chips for ARM. Right now, though, I think sticking with Atom chips is best for OEMs and consumers. I wouldn’t take a cheap ARM powered Windows tablet over and Atom powered one, and I certainly wouldn’t pay $1000 for an ARM powered tablet over an Intel m3/Y series powered one.

    1. Atom brand was already killed for the tablets and mobile form factors… Atom architecture only exists as celerons and Pentium mainly for low tier laptops/hybrids and mini PCs like intel Nuc.

       Snapdragon 855 or 865 will already surpass everything on the atom architecture. Dont confuse Native ARM64 Performance with emulated x86. The applications can either be recompiled or UWP.

       1. I knew you’d be here spreading your false propaganda about Microsoft and ARM. Clearly you didn’t even read the article this time. If you did, you’d have seen native benchmarks were done and it shows that even native ARM64 performance at best is comparable to a low end entry level Celeron CPU.

          Once again, no one wants a watered down UWP experience. And no dev wants to waste time and resources to recompile for UWP when they’re already strapped for time and resources at it is. It’s cheaper, easier, and more profitable to just release applications like games on Steam and instantly reach a wider audience than UWP ever will. Why shoot yourself in the foot and release for such a limited audience?

          1. You love talking in absolute certainties don’t you, like you speak for the rest of the windows users. lets correct you on few things:

             1. The native ARM64 test done was only on Edge using Google Octane…..if you see nothing wrong with that…..i won’t say more.

             2. The difference in performance of a celeron n3450 vs core m3 on cpubenchmarks (passmark) is only like 1500 points. If as you say…SD835 is celeron n3450 levels, lets go with that base level, SD845 is 30% faster than sd835. SD855 coming next year in 10 months will be even faster, SD865 will be even faster in 22 months. ARM has been doubling in cpu and gpu compute every three years. and these are only snapdragon chips, the Nvidia ARM chips destroy SD in performance, their latest Xavier reaches xbox one level 1.3 teraflops in GPU single precision compute.

             3. There are 50 million xbox users who love xbox play anywhere mostly….except the ones salty about exclusives. Square Enix has one play anywhere game romancing Saga 2 on MS store and two non play anywhere games TombRaider and Final Fantasy XV. So lets see, a dev can create a steam and xbox game, or create one UWP that can run on xbox, MS store or any other storefront in future that will support UWP. UWP is completely open platform.

       2. What’s also hilarious is that you’ve been talking about UWP being universal and AAA UWP gaming on these Windows on ARM laptops, yet not a single AAA UWP game right now actually supports ARM or even 32 bit OS’s. UWP is not some magic universal platform. There are very good reasons developers only build for x64 or a specific platform.

          1. Well duh…devs wouldnt have a reason to compile for ARM64 because the devices weren’t there and support in Visual Studio is recent for ARM64, i think starting with Spring Creators Update.

             There are plenty of free to play GameLoft UWP games with ARM32 support… Age of Empires: Castle Seige has arm support. But those arent AAA games. MineCraft runs butter smooth on ARM64 Even though it is still only ARM32 support.

             1. Minecraft Windows 10 Edition (aka Pocket Edition) runs perfectly fine because that’s what the pocket edition was meant for. I’ve had Minecraft Pocket Edition running super smooth as far as my original HTC EVO 4G, back when the leading 4G standard was still WiMax instead of LTE. If we start getting into the actual full fledged PC version of Minecraft or even the console editions, the story changes there.

                As far as ARM64 support goes, I still don’t see it happening for most AAA games. The system requirements for many of the newer games make it unfeasible for even a Surface Book with a GeForce 940M to run it acceptably. Now with ARM devices, we are suddenly taking a nosedive in performance and TDP. Not to mention the RAM requirements.

             2. Lets not discuss the crappy java minecraft. The pocket edition is simply the C# edition. I didnt say you are going to see AAA games on Windows on Arm right away or automatically, my point was the potential is there for many games. Obviously the graphical detail would be reduced greatly and locked to 30 or 60 fps just like console but the Windows 10 SDK and unreal engine are designed to Scale from 20 teraflops multiGPU PC to 1.3 teraflops xbox one. ARM has to surpass atleast 1.5 teraflops to 2 teraflops gpu single precision compute before AAA gaming on ARM becomes more viable with UWP.

             3. As I mentioned on MSPoweruser, FLOPS is not an accurate measure of GPU performance. It doesn’t mean much at all. Even if it matched the Xbox One in TFLOPS, that really doesn’t mean anything. Let’s use a different metric for example. Cryptomining. My Galaxy S8 with the SD835 gets a hashrate around 30 at best for mining XMR, with crazy heat and battery drain. You say it’s not that far behind the Xbox One in FLOPS, but the Xbox One’s hashrate for mining XMR is around 400-500. The Xbox One’s FLOPS count certainly isn’t 10-15x higher than that of the SD835 though.

                You see, comparing TFLOPS between two difference architectures and using that to measure performance, is pretty much comparing apples and oranges. The metric is totally meaningless. You have so many other factors that affect performance ranging from transistor count, architecture, TDP and cooling, optimizations, even fab process. The GPU in the original Xbox One is still a desktop class GPU and is pretty beefy compared to a tiny mobile GPU, hence why it needs pretty good active cooling. Die sizes haven’t shrunk enough to the point where you can run an Xbox One GPU with passive cooling. It’s not THAT old yet. We’re still not at the point yet where transistors are small enough and in large enough of a quantity to fit an xbox one into a phone or tablet. Going back to the Nintendo Switch example, it runs DOOM at 720p and around 20-30 fps. The Xbox One can run it at 1080p 60fps. That’s a pretty big gap in performance that isn’t going to close in 1 generation of Tegra.

                Yes, I’ll agree that one day ARM64 can run AAA games from today reasonably well. But by the time that day comes, today’s AAA games will become old, obsolete games. It’s likely by then, another console generation like a PlayStation 5 or Xbox 2? will be released, massively pushing the goalpost further. And we’ll be back to where we started with ARM64 being able to run last gen games, but never being able to catch up and run current gen.

             4. I’ll give you one thing about UWP’s potential success though and that’s Windows Mixed Reality and VR Apps in general. SteamVR is still more popular, but it’s not totally dominant like Steam is for buying games, so there’s room in VR for UWP and the Windows Store to grow and thrive. And that’d be a great thing too since I’m all on board with WMR. I’m ordering a headset soon and already own a HoloLens. That being said, Windows Mixed Reality has pretty high system requirements. My 1st gen Surface Book, even with its i7 and GeForce 940M still misses a few minimum requirements. So with that in mind, you can forget about WoA devices being Windows Mixed Reality ready. Now you could say WoA isn’t meant for that. Ok, that’s fine, for today. But you can clearly tell that Mixed Reality is Microsoft’s vision going forward and they’re pretty committed to it too. If WMR and the Windows Store takes off, WoA simply won’t fit into Microsoft’s vision going forward. Microsoft’s choice to go with an Intel Atom SoC for the HoloLens speaks volumes about their commitment to the ARM platform. I don’t know what the 2nd gen HoloLens will use for its SoC, maybe they will actually switch to Snapdragon according to some rumors, or maybe they’ll go with a Core m3 or Celeron/Pentium CPU according to other rumors.

13. The technology/concept is not at fault, it’s MS and manufacturers who are trying to position this as something that it’s not, in a price range that makes no sense, regardless that the later kills any chance the former may have had at some point.

    They can thank their brainless business execs who thought they had some magical money-making concept for the market with these, when they really should have targetted this at schools and made an effort to go against Chromebooks.

14. In the meantime, I’ve repeatedly said that Windows on ARM laptops should only cost $100-200 considering the performance you get is comparable to an Intel laptop in that price range. If OEM’s can get down to that price point for ARM laptops, then they can go crazy with it and it’ll probably be somewhat successful. But pricing it as high as $1000? That puts it into Ultrabook, Surface, and even cheaper gaming laptop territory. You can definitely get laptops with Core i7’s, 8 GB of RAM, and maybe an NVidia GPU within that price range. Not even the Snapdragon 845 comes close in performance to a laptop Core i7. They’re setting up Windows On ARM for failure by pricing it this high.

    1. I agree the price is too high and i have explained in another comment that the hp also includes typecover and pen which is $200 worth and also has premium parts unlike most $300 laptops.

       But what you are suggesting for pricing is a joke at $100-200. The processor and UFS alone is $200 worth. The hp tablet shouldve started at $649 same as ipad pro, at the most.

       1. Then that’ll kill WoA if they don’t go down to that price point. At those higher price points, you’re paying 2-3x the price, for 50% of the performance at best, only 32-bit x86 apps, and no AAA UWP games or UWP apps compiled for x86/x64. That’s not going to fly with consumers. That’s free marketing for Intel right there too.

          1. And that’s precisely why MS isnt targeting these first gen at consumers. They are being targeted to enterprise with mobile workforce, business professionals who travel often and want something always connected, light, and long battery life. You know…the kinds of people with deep pockets. MS is setting the stage for better ARM processors in future. If any consumers or fans buy the devices, that is just icing on cake.

             1. It’ll fail in the enterprise as well, the most in fact. In enterprise, they NEED that support for legacy software and it’s been said time and time again that poor performance equals lost productivity which is a big no no in enterprise. And Microsoft has been heavily pushing Surface for enterprise customers for awhile now so they’ve already setup a huge roadblock of their own making. The newest Surface Pro models already have a 13.5 hour battery life. That’s already really good, more than enough for most people. And considering the performance you get at that price point too, I doubt anyone is in a rush to downgrade their performance for 20% better battery life. Oh and Surface Pro supports inking as well, the Surface Pen arguably being one of the best out there as well. And there’s LTE versions of Surface Pro now as well.

                If Microsoft truly wanted Windows On ARM to succeed, they need to start from the bottom. Price WoA at $99-199 to compete against Chromebooks. As a Chromebook competitor, WoA is perfect. Comparable performance, some compatibility with traditional windows apps, and better battery life. At that price point, and with the right marketing, WoA laptops would probably fly off the shelves. But instead, Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot again by targeting the wrong market at the wrong price point.

       2. You have to compare it against devices that match the use case – other laptops. The use case of an iPad is quite different. $400 is a difficult sell as is.

          1. The HP envy is a premium ARM tablet with inking…..how is it different use case from ipad pro??

15. Waiting for Tobi to come here and explain why ARM64 is going to outperform Core i7’s at the same price point and why UWP is the future and how everyone is jumping on UWP now.

    1. And he did not disappoint…

       1. You are bothered by something it seems. I’m trying to have a proper discussion but i’m not used to the discus type comments, i tend to type alot…why i’m more used to win 10 subreddit.

          1. The issue is that you have a very clear pattern of only commenting on articles about Microsoft and you really only comment when the article isn’t all sunshine praise about Microsoft. You’re quick to downplay anything not positive about Windows On ARM and the ARM architecture in general and you keep repeating the same borderline propaganda to any user that didn’t have something positive to say. A discussion is fine, but when I noticed you were consistently rushing to many news sites to post the exact same things in defense of WoA, that’s when it became apparent that it’s more about PR on behalf of Microsoft for you rather than an actual discussion. Hence why I accurately predicted you would be here to post your same comments for the most part as replies to others.

             1. I comment mainly on MS sites because i’m a fan of their ecosystem and i agree with their vision especially the new leadership, for the future of computing and gaming. I comment in order to help people understand and counter all the FUD and ignorance against MS perpetuated across the webs. Liliputing is a linux lovers den, i’m aware of that, that’s why it is more fun to go into the heart of the lions den. I have been reading this site for three years, brad is a great writer. But yea…i hang mainly on MS and tech related subreddits but just lately getting used to the discus comments cuz the all the clickbait garbage on mspoweruser and always negative comments without merit were very annoying.

                Anyways back to the discussion, i will try to give you a good response to your big post.

             2. I too am a huge fan of Microsoft and their ecosystem, but where you’re all in with their new vision, that’s where I diverge. I’ve always been an early adopter of all new Microsoft products for awhile now (Windows ME, Zune HD, Windows Vista (arguably really good), Windows RT, Windows Phone, and so on). I’ve had my fair share of experiences with Microsoft’s failures and I still stick with Microsoft, but that doesn’t blind me from what’ll be their future failures nor doesn’t it prevent me from accepting valid criticism of Microsoft.

                What you describe as FUD and ignorance against Microsoft, typically is true lately, especially in this very specific case of WoA. And whereas you want to “help people understand and counter”, I want to save people from making the same mistake of jumping on Windows RT and all the other previous failed products. It’s not just Microsoft either. Anyone, including Valve with their Steam Machines, but aside form Apple, that tries to sell a non-mobile, mainstream computing device without support for traditional Windows app is doomed to fail. No one has succeeded in that yet. Windows On ARM is doomed from the start, it’s poor performance across the board even with native apps, it’s high price, it’s lack of standard features, there’s no way you can justify Windows on ARM and I’m totally shocked that you continue to attempt to do so when everyone else can see through the charade.

    2. 1. Stop lying…i never implied or stated ARM64 will outperform intel i7….but Nvidia ARM chips ARE surpassing intel integrated Iris graphics (used with i7) in the GPU compute with the nvidia Xavier /tegra x3. Not all ARM is built equal.

       2. Adobe’s words: “UWP is the future of the windows platform.” they are already starting to build their core assets inside UWP for all their apps, not just Adobe XD.

       1. 1. You did, you keep going around telling people that WoA is going to be able to run AAA games as long as devs recompile to native ARM64 or that ARM devices will soon be equal to the Xbox One in performance which is spreading false information. The Tegra X3 is not surpassing the Intel Iris Pro. Most ARM devices are low TDP and wouldn’t have the cooling to run at a performance level similar to an Intel Iris Pro. I keep telling you that no dev is going to want to do that and not even Microsoft’s own first party AAA games can run on ARM64. WoA is dead on arrival and won’t go anymore.

          2. Companies say that a lot. I remember when EA said they were committed to the Wii U and how great of a console it was. After a couple launch games, EA never touched the Wii U ever again. I also remember many Microsoft partners saying Windows Phone would be the future too. Look where that ended up. Not a single main Adobe product supports UWP right now. Only watered down, lite versions of their products (eg Photoshop Express) are available on UWP. And that’s exactly what UWP is for, a watered down, mobile experience that can’t replace the full power of a desktop application.

          Maybe UWP would’ve had a future if Microsoft still had a mobile platform, but now that they’re essentially focused on their desktop OS again, UWP brings no value over desktop apps if you don’t have a mobile platform. That was the whole allure of UWP. Pretty decent desktop experience that automatically scales to a mobile phone. But now that Windows Mobile is dead, that defeats the purpose of UWP.

       2. About everything on the planet is faster than Intel’s integrated graphics. Intel’s integrated graphics never meant to offer performance. Compare Tegra with Ryzen APUs.

          1. I compared the Iris graphics because the context was regarding i7 15watt chips vs ARM. I dont know what the gpu compute of mobile rysen APUs is.

          2. Lol Tegra and Ryzen are totally different classes of APU’s. Ryzen APU’s not only come with a desktop class CPU, but also a desktop class GPU. Whereas Tegra is a mobile SoC that you’d find in a smartphone or tablet. It’s meant to be very low power with very basic cooling needed. The latest modern Intel integrated graphics, while nowhere near as powerful as Ryzen, are still more powerful than what you’d find in your smartphone for the obvious reasons of it being part of a desktop class package.

             To put it simply and to reference an old PC benchmark, yes, Intel integrated graphics CAN run Crysis just fine these days, but you won’t be running Crysis on your phone for awhile. The Tegra most certainly can’t run Crysis either. A better comparison to Ryzen/Radeon would be an Intel system with an NVidia GeForce GPU, a real desktop class GPU, not a smartphone mobile GPU.

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