Microsoft Launches Windows 10 on ARM, with HP and ASUS promising 20+ hours of Battery Life

Windows laptops and tablets have traditionally run on X86 processors such as Intel and AMD. Microsoft experimented with the use of ARM-based processors when it launched Surface RT and Windows RT in 2012, and cost the company dearly. However, the Surface RT failure was mainly due to the software. The system could only run a small subset of applications that had been compiled specifically for it, so I could not install Chrome or Photoshop, for example. It did not help that Microsoft's marketing for Surface RT was confusing to many consumers.

Fast forward to today and Microsoft is ready to give ARM on laptops another chance. But this time, you can run any program you want. Windows 10 for ARM is officially launched today, and although Microsoft is not yet launching an ARM-based Surface device, the company has partnered with people like HP to launch a new class of laptops that Microsoft officially qualifies as "Always Connected." Dispositives ".

The promise of using ARM-based chips (and we're talking mainly about Qualcomm Snapdragon processors here) is that you get the kind of user experience you've gotten used to from your smartphones. That means that these devices will turn on almost immediately, they will have wireless LTE connectivity and, perhaps most importantly, they will offer the type of battery that will allow you to spend a day or two (and, in the future, maybe a week) of work . without having to recharge

Ideally, of course, that's exactly what users will experience who really should not worry about what processors sit on their laptops once the first ARM-based laptops go on sale. ASUS and HP, who worked with Microsoft to launch the first devices with Windows 10 for ARM, claim that their first entries in this market will offer more than 20 hours of active battery life and about 30 days in order to wait.

ASUS is entering this market with NovaGo, a Gigabit LTE folding laptop with Snapdragon 835 platform technology. HP is bringing the ENVY x2 Surface clone to the party. The HP inlet offers 4G LTE2 support.

The biggest difference between the failed RT experiment and these new devices is that users will be able to run any existing Windows application and that all modern peripherals will simply work as well.

As Erin Chapple, the Microsoft Windows general manager told me, the company recompiled the Windows 10 operating system for ARM. There is no emulation at the operating system level. However, the team spent a lot of time trying to decide where to set the boundary between the operating system and the emulated layer. In the end, Microsoft decided to compile all DLLs natively (that is, most Windows libraries) and set the emulation layer on that.

For everything that is above this and needs to be emulated, Windows 10 in ARM uses a dynamic binary translator to translate the X86 code to the ARM64 code on the fly.

Because of these design options, most applications should run with near-native performance, because most standard Windows applications tend to call directly the operating system APIs (including graphics) and, in order to accounts, all those libraries have been recompiled. Whenever it is an application that is very tied to the CPU, you will see a performance hit.

However, over time, Microsoft will surely make it easier to include precompiled ARM applications in its market, so that heavy CPU applications can also run at native speeds.

Rene Haas, the head of ARM's intellectual property group, told me it's worth remembering that his company started working with Microsoft in 2008 (and not just around Windows RT, but also around the Windows Mobile ecosystem) .

"We are very excited about where we are," he told me. "It has been a long commitment with Microsoft on this platform, but it has also changed a lot since the first time they looked at Windows in ARM."

He said that a few years ago, ARM only offered a 32-bit architecture, and that ARM-based chips have only now reached the point where they are powerful enough to allow performance similar to that of a laptop (in fact, Microsoft's Chapple also pointed out that is one of the motivations for Qualcomm here is that its chips are now so powerful that they eclipse the standard workloads of the phone and the company is looking for other places to use them).

"I have lived the journey of Windows RT and I think we have taken a series of lessons from the past to adopt a new approach that allows Windows in ARM to differentiate both in terms of the experience of the central platform and differentiated, due to the central promise of Windows, "said Sones.

He also stressed that he expects Windows on ARM to boost Intel as well, and expects that this category of devices will include machines powered by Intel in the future. "We have all seen that Intel is at its best when they are under pressure," he added.

ARM's Haas expects its company to continue to offer more powerful architectures with double-digit performance gains every year. From their point of view, we have now reached the tipping point in which ARM-based laptops can compete with Intel-based laptops. As the power of the ARM platform increases, he said, "it begins to take us to a class where we can be on par to offer an uncompromising experience on a portable PC."

Because we have not used any of these new devices yet, we just do not know if they are good. What we have seen, however, is that there is a PC market for snapshots in the form of Google Chromebooks. The goal of both Google and Microsoft is to offer their vision of what the future of mobile computing (and work) will look like beyond the smartphone. "We are competing around this new work culture," said Roanne Sones, strategy and device ecosystem manager at Microsoft. "That is what is changing and we have to make the experience of our device and our PC experience modern."

In this context, ARM's Haas also emphasized that this new architecture will also allow new form factors, simply because if you do not need a fan, you can put the CPU anywhere on a device (even behind the screen) to enable new ones. collapsible or removable products (or to put more batteries in these laptops).

It's interesting to see that Microsoft is launching this platform without a flagship device on its own Surface line. Maybe it is doing this to avoid the confusion that remains in Surface RT, but Microsoft's own team says that it does so because it wanted to work closely with its ecosystem partners to build, validate and strengthen this platform. Anyway, I hope we see a Surface device with ARM engine in the not too distant future.