Latest news with #WindowsonArm
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Yahoo
I spoke with Arm about PC gaming and was told that Windows software compatibility is 'largely a solved problem'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Last week, I got the chance to speak to Chris Bergey, Senior VP and General Manager for the Client side of Arm Holdings, and after picking his brain about Windows on Arm for PC gaming, I'm carefully optimistic about the future. Emphasis on carefully, though, because the proof will ultimately be in the pudding (or rather, in the eating of the pudding, if you're gonna be all pedantic about it). Windows on Arm has been around for a while, but in many ways, it made its real entrance last year with the Snapdragon X chips. Upon these chips' launch in some Windows on Arm laptops, however, it was quickly noted that there were many apps that just didn't work at all. I was keen to hear what Arm thinks about this problem today, so I asked Bergey. He told me in no uncertain terms: "The compatibility thing, in our mind, is really something that's largely a solved problem." The word "largely", of course, might do a lot of the legwork here, as it depends on what kinds of apps we're talking about and the kinds of users we're considering. Bergey explains: "I think that there's a lot of concern about [software compatibility], but what we're actually seeing has been quite exciting. I mean, I think Microsoft put out quite a few kinds of proof points there—you know, they obviously have a lot of telemetry. You know, the average users spend about 93% of their time now, with native Arm apps, and the other ones that are not native are quite performant." After rooting around online, the closest I could find to that 93% figure was Microsoft saying one year ago that "Nearly 90% of the total app minutes that users spend in apps today have native Arm versions, providing the most efficient and performant experience. And if they need to run apps in emulation, they'll experience a significant performance boost with the new Prism emulator for app compatibility and performance." It's important to note that 90% of time spent in apps, of course, doesn't mean 90% of apps—people might spend most of their time in a minority of apps. But native Arm app coverage does seem to be quite large, now, for the general user, whether it's browser, communication, or even creative software. And Prism can at least render non-native apps usable. But of course, I was keen to move on to talk about gaming, as that's what we're most interested in, here. Regarding this, Bergey seems well aware of some of the problems with using an Arm chip for gaming. One of the primary compatibility problems with gaming and Windows on Arm comes from anti-cheats. The client VP explains: "The way [these anti-cheats are] written is they're actually looking for some registers … Well, those registers don't exist in the [Arm] architecture. They're kind of like some legacy registers that are not actually required. So that's why that kicked over the anti-cheat stuff. We had to work with Microsoft and partners on just kind of getting those things addressed … I think it's a journey, but I think for a lot of users the experience is quite good." Despite working on addressing those issues with partners, we know that gaming is still far from perfect on Arm. Just a few months ago our Ian Evenden took a deep dive into Windows on Arm for gaming and found that while performance tends to be surprisingly good in games that do work, there are still a bunch that don't. Bergey hinted at what seems to be the crux of the matter and the crux of the future for PC gaming on Arm, if there is to be such a future: "I think that generally, there's becoming more and more value for game developers to be, I guess, instruction set agnostic … As there becomes more of these kind of cross platform [integrations, eg, between Android and Chrome], it's going to become more and more important or interesting to developers say, you know, of course, we'll do an Arm build as well as our x86 build." I pressed Bergey a little on this, and he explained what this might look like moving forward: "I think what happens is that developers just say, 'I'm going to go support the arm ecosystem and the x86 ecosystem,' right? I don't think that they're going to have to do this kind of like, pick one, right? I think what you'll just see is developers say, Hey, I'm just going to go support both. Your next upgrade Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and gaming motherboard: The right graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest. "And of course, there's extra work, and of course, there's going to need to be some industry incentive and stuff to make that happen. But that's the same thing with, you know, supporting an AMD graphics card and an Nvidia graphics card, right? … But at the end of the day, it's in the game developer's best interest to support [both]." In other words, then, it looks like Arm sees the solution to Windows on Arm gaming compatibility to be in the hands of game developers choosing to make that choice to build in native Arm support. I'm unsure whether that future will pan out exactly as Arm envisions, but if the popularity of SteamOS and increasing Linux adoption is anything to go by, it seems PC gamers might be a little more willing to try something new. To the extent that Windows sitting on top of a different architecture is new, perhaps that's something that game developers will indeed keep in mind. No crystal balls here, though. We'll just have to wait and see.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Yahoo
Qualcomm gambled on repeating its own ads at Computex, but did it pay off?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. As predicted, Qualcomm's Computex Keynote focused more on AI and AI-powered features on the Windows on Arm ecosystem rather than new announcements. Qualcomm is turning 40 this year, but as CEO Cristiano Amon stated, "it's a new Qualcomm," thanks to the company's investment in computing. Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon X series at Computex last year, but despite that timeline, Qualcomm's Computex presence did not revolve around chip announcements. Essentially: Qualcomm spent the entire 60 minute keynote dodging around the rumors of the second Snapdragon X Series chip generation to instead focus on their often-repeated performance claims, new systems, and Windows on Arm ecosystem updates. At a rather slim Computex for computing news, this could have been a moment for Qualcomm to shine with the second gen of it's Arm chips. Instead the company chose to gamble and focus on its partnerships with various manufacturers including Microsoft. But, did Qualcomm's gamble pay off? Qualcomm now has 1,400 games optimized for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. The company showed footage of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II on a Snapdragon X Elite system, though its uncertain whether the game will play smoothly across all of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series. Qualcomm showcased a lot of early gaming performance on the Snapdragon X Elite chipset on custom hardware, running on 80W systems that were never released to the public. Considering that history, it's hard to take Qualcomm's announcements at face value. Qualcomm and Epic Games will also be bringing Fortnite to Windows on Arm, which makes sense considering Qualcomm announced Snapdragon support for Epic Games Online Easy Anti-Cheat back in March. Qualcomm has reached 9% market share in the laptop market, thanks to a large portfolio of devices, including newly launched computes like the new Acer Aspire 14 and 16 AI, HP OmniBook 5, and new Microsoft Surface Pro 11-inch and Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch. Amon also shared statistics on Snapdragon's performance compared to Intel's Core Ultra 7 processor. But this is a skewed comparison from the jump. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core chipset while the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V is a mid-range 8-core CPU. And some of the comparisons were calculated on specific workloads like DaVinci Resolve's SuperScale FHD to 4K upscaling technology. Amon also repeated the claim that Snapdragon has "leading performance on an SoC in the laptop ecosystem." While this was true during the Snapdragon X Elite launch cycle, it has been overturned by recent launches from AMD, Apple, and Intel. Qualcomm has also expanded its portfolio of applications to include the top 200 most-used Windows apps into the Windows on Arm ecosystem. Part of this is thanks to Microsoft's new Prism emulation software which helps alleviate the key pain-point of Windows on Arm. However, there are still limits to Prism emulation and the Windows on Arm ecosystem. After all, what are those 200 applications? And are they actually the most-used apps? Qualcomm makes this claim based on data from Microsoft that was collected by snapshots of aggregated app usage data as of August 2024 on Copilot+ PCs. Of course, the problem with that data is that in August 2024, only Snapdragon X systems were in the Copilot+ ecosystem. AMD and Intel's AI PC chips didn't get rolled into Copilot+ until the end of 2024. So it's a bit of a skewed sample set. As always with Qualcomm's claims, Amon's claims are technically correct, but the real context is always in the details Qualcomm doesn't share. That said, Qualcomm has put in some serious work to fill out the Windows on Arm ecosystem. Just over a year ago, the Windows on Arm software ecosystem was almost unusably bare. That is no longer the case. But if you need a highly specialized application, it may not run on Windows on Arm, even emulated. Some key examples are the Autodesk suite, Parsec, and Adobe DreamWeaver and Substance 3DStager. In fact, despite Qualcomm's partnership with Adobe, the only applications that run natively on Snapdragon are Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom. Other applications like Illustrator and After Effects are expected to make it onto Snapdragon platforms, but are still not available through emulation yet. Qualcomm deserves recognition for the work done to build up an ecosystem. But it will still be years before Windows on Arm can even come close to the level of app-support you find on x86 systems. Cristiano took questions during the keynote from audience submissions and had them spoken aloud by a Snapdragon AI PC. So these questions ranged from AI for business to a hybrid future that combines computing, AI, automotive, and mobile ecosystems. Because these questions were collected from the whole keynote audience including Qualcomm staff, guests, OEM partners, and Computex industry attendees, many fed straight into Qualcomm's usual marketing stance about Snapdragon X Series performance and Qualcomm's view of a hybrid future. The most interesting statement from Amon during this segment was "I'm very bullish about smart glasses" and the future of AR and how it will evolve with AI PCs and better smartphones to augment our lives. Amon also took questions from press and analysts after the keynote to expand on Qualcomm's portfolio from data center to DragonWing to robotics. 'Robotics is natural to Qualcomm,' Amon said. Claiming robotics will be a big market for Qualcomm similar to the automotive market. As robots require a high degree of performance and strong battery life, and 'that's our DNA.' As for the future of the Oryon CPU cores behind the Snapdragon X Series processors, Amon would only enthuse 'the CPU team is very busy,' and that those interested in the future of Qualcomm's computing portfolio should 'come to Snapdragon Summit, you're going to like what you're going to see.' Qualcomm sees the future of computing as a hybrid environment between computers and smartphones, where one is an extension of the other. This view of the future colors everything Amon and Qualcomm's OEM partners discussed at Computex. However, is it an accurate view of the future? You can already access your smartphone data on your laptop in the Windows and macOS ecosystems. While there are differences in functionality, with some combinations working better than others. But phone to computer communication has been in the works for years now. In fact, I distinctly remember crashing my 2010 MacBook Pro by adding macOS X Mavericks on it to control my iPhone from my laptop back in 2013. While Amon is also bullish about on-device AI features with Snapdragon, Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel are also pushing the same development. So it's hardly a unique feature to Snapdragon systems. To support this dream, Qualcomm is entering the commercial and data center spaces in the future. As for the highly anticipated Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2, it seems Qualcomm is holding all details on that chip for Snapdragon Summit in the fall. "It's not because we don't love GeForce, GeForce got us here": Nvidia brings the power of RTX 5060 to budget-friendly gaming laptops Apple REALLY doesn't want you playing Fortnite on iPhone Trump warns Apple over India: what it means for the next iPhone
