How Fast is Microsoft’s New PRISM x86-64 Emulator?
Вставка
- Опубліковано 27 чер 2024
- With the launch of Windows 11 24H2, Microsoft is promising an x86 emulation performance boost due to its new Prism x86/x86-64 emulator. Prism allows Arm-based Windows laptops to run Intel/AMD code, without modification. Windows has been able to do this since Windows 10, however Prism is a revamp that promises parity with Apple's Rosetta emulation.
---
00:00 Intro
01:19 Why is it necessary?
03:09 Arm native apps
04:45 Emulated apps now 2x faster?
05:49 How I tested it
06:32 Performance results
07:39 Conclusion and outro
Twitter: / garyexplains
Instagram: / garyexplains
#garyexplains - Наука та технологія
There needs to be more competition in the CPU space. Here's hoping MediaTek will release their own Arm desktop CPU as well
And Nvidia, Samsung Exynos, etc
@amermeleitor Exynos? Who need that, their manufacturing process is inferior, so even if the chip it a decent chip, it's actually less efficient because of the Samsung manufacturing node.
Compared to GPU‘s we‘re in a golden age of CPU‘s. We have laptops that can bench over 30.000 points in Cinbench R23.
@@TamasKiss-yk4st still Exynos work ok, and they are another player and other source of competition and innovation. Even more, the Google Pixel phones uses same node and same base architecture than Exynos. And that proves that sometimes software is more important than hardware. Fix your human software man
@@TamasKiss-yk4st The process is still fine and they don't have to use Samsung foundries.
If they can get a chip out there that's 90% as good for 80% the price then I see that as an absolute win.
This video crisply addresses one question that the ARM-advocates do *not* clarify; namely "holding ARM hardware constant, exactly how much performance improvement does the new Prism represent over prior attempts?" You answer it: between 5 and 10 percent. However i do not think that this question is the central one that buyers have. Those are primarily two: 1) "For the x86 apps that i still use, will they even run without 'surprises' at acceptable speeds?" and 2) "Assuming that these x86 apps do run, how much of a performance hit will i take compared to running them on a comparably priced Intel or AMD device?" THOSE are the key questions, and we still do not have answers. -- gary ray
Yeah some will run worse, some about the same, and some with major glitches. And in 5 years no one will even remember x86. So it's just at what point in the river you want to make the crossing. There's no real hurry for desktop computing. It will be laptops that start the inevitable death of x86 because 5x battery life is killer like a one-shot sniper, RIP x86. Majority of all PC's are laptops, remember.
I'm probably 10 computers into my journey at 52. A Vic 20, a C-64, an Atari 1040-STE, a HP-386-SX33, a custom Pentium-100, an AMD K6-266, a Toshiba laptop, an iBook, a 2007 MBP 13", a 2013 MBP 13", an M2 MBA 13". I've spent a pittance compared to the power I've had at my disposal at any minute.
That is my reality as well. Gaming consoles have become so good that I don't play games on my computer anymore. I use my smartphone most of the time and only use the laptop when I want to type something. I also never worry about charging, since USB-C become universal on smartphones and laptops. I live and work in the city.
I’m sad for you that you never experienced the power of an Amiga. 😉
Looks like once you went Mac you never went back. Can you tell why?
😮
@@freecivweb4160 Once you go black, you never go back!
Great analysis as always Gary. I went ARM with the Apple M1 processors when they launched. The emulation / recompiling under Rosetta was great but here we are 3/4 years on and looking at my task manager I have only Apple Silicon processes and no Rosetta processes. The Windows ecosystem for ARM is more mature at this stage than when Apple Silicon launched and the early tests of the Snapdragon Elite processors show a compelling product in performance and efficiency. I have no need or desire to upgrade my M1 processor Mac Mini and would suggest that with the Snapdragon Elite is more than powerful enough for 90% of use cases (and far more powerful than the M1). Choice is great and it's about time Windows had a performant and energy efficient processor. I'd have no issue going to Windows on Arm if I was a 'standard' windows user
Totally agree. This windows ARM relaunch looks more complete than what Apple offered on M1 launch day.
In work we picked up an M1 Mac Mini at launch and had swapped the whole company to M1 series chips within a year. We also migrated our cloud workload to ARM via AWS graviton. I haven’t touched an x86 system in my work life for years at this point.
With WSL on W11 on ARM hardware I could imagine future devs at the company using windows PCs again in the future.
On my Windows Dev Kit 2023 running 24H2, I typically saw a 10% performance uplift on many of benchmarks you mentioned, and Unigine Valley was 70% improvement for same settings, but this also reflects graphic driver improvements from when I originally run it some 15 months ago.
8-10% speed improvements is nothing to sneeze at.
No, but it’s also less than you’re likely to notice in use. Typically takes 20%+ to be perceived rather than just measured.
@@geoffstrickler Well considering the current Prism emulator results in about 10-15% performance loss while emulating x86-64 programs, if we add the additional 8-10% of performance loss of the old emulator on top of it, then it becomes quite a big performance degrading emulator.. so Microsoft, admittedly, has seemingly done a good job at increasing emulation performance.
Thanks Gary I was very excited when Qualcomm bought Nuvia. It has been a long wait for Windows on Arm, just as I thought I would make the jump, Intel announced Lunar Lake with a lot of big claims relating to efficiency.
Yeah i'm really curious to see what Intel will achieve with Lunar Lake, it looks promising and i hope they won't screw it up this time around. I feel like AMD won't have the edge over Intel and Qualcomm when it comes down to efficiency and battery life in everyday workloads, but i'm sure they will have the best iGpu and multicore performance, at least until Arrow Lake laptops will be out, but that's another story. My guess is: X Elite laptops will sell great, especially among students at the end of the summer thanks to the incredible marketing, the battery life, and the discounted prices. AMD will have a small time advantage over Intel and in that period they will achieve big wins in performance over Qualcomm and also efficiency over the previous gen Core Ultra. But Intel might be the sweet spot between the two, with faster single core performance and better battery life compared to AMD and Qualcomm. It will be a very interesting tech summer, let alone the Black Friday and the Christmas holidays deals for who need to upgrade the laptop 😂
Finally we can compare apples to apples x86 vs arm with intel finally not using the ancient 10 nm ++++ aka intel7 process
@@Antagon666 word on the ground is Intel 3 is looking good. Intel just released a bunch of info. Intel seems to be making good progress on the manufacturing business.
I do appreciate that they decided to use TSMC N3B for their Compute Tile on Lunar Lake.
It will be great to compare the Apple M3 with Lunar Lake as both are on TSMC N3B.
5-10% improvement in the emulator is decent. Nowhere what Microsoft seemed to imply, but a it’s “free”
Snapdragon and native apps are what will make Windows on ARM finally useful.
5-10% improvement is on older hardware.
@@hermanstokbroodExactly. The idea was to benchmark the improvements in the operating system’s emulation layer *separate from* the improvements brought by Qualcomm’s new hardware. It should be noted that the performance improvements that Windows 11 24H2 brings to other old ARM hardware might vary, but this video is useful nonetheless.
@@drewneilson9157 Yes it's useful but especially when emulating the differences may be huge when the hardware differs.
It is nice to see an increase in emulation speed. What might be a more meaningful comparison would be to compare the performance of a x86-64 app on a ARM system versus running that app on a x86-64 system. That way we could know the performance hit while we wait for our apps to be updated for the ARM systems.
But which two systems would you compare, which x86-64 laptop compared to which Arm laptop?
@@GaryExplainsI was looking at these today and I think HP might offer the closest comparisons. The ARM based HP Omnibook x 14 lineup offers something useful as it seems to compete with the HP EliteBook G10 14” for fairly similar specs, price & target market. A head to head comparison would be fascinating :)
Yes, I remember the Surface RT. I purchased one spent over $1000 on it, and within 2 years Microsoft said we are ending support for it. That killed all the development for it. I said I would never purchase another Microsoft hardware product or Microsoft ARM based product.
Can I just say what a lovely background that is!
Thanks for this analysis! One issue though is that the new Snapdragon chips (supposedly) have new features specifically for emulation (for example: memory ordering on x64 is stricter than it is on arm, so hardware features can help there to make the job for Prism easier).
Those speedups would only show up on new hardware.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to test that unless someone manages to run 23H2 on those new devices.
I see you have SQL server is listed in the native applications section in the developer tools box. I'm not able to find an ARM supported version of Microsoft SQL - even the Azure SQL edge version has dropped ARM support - where did you get that information?
These improvements are compared to the previous emulator, but what will the performance of these emulated apps be when compared to when running them on say an i9 185h or whatever is the equivalent x86 chip to the Arm.
Lots of Corporate customers still struggling with the move to Windows 11, nevermind ARM, but for consumers it should be a much simpler transition and if the early benchmarks from the Snapdragon processors hold up, could be a no-brainer. The Apple M processors are fantastic, although running macOS so not a like for like comparison.
It does seem to me that reviews were much easier on M1 when it launched without native apps. Also Rosetta was almost presented as a zero penalty way of running x86 apps which was not really the case. I suspect a lot of the reviewers personally used Macs so were swayed by the new technology.
I mean to the average Windows user it’s probably more of a question of “can it run games the way my old PC could?”. Most of my friends that I talk to only still stick to Windows because that’s the easiest way to game. Linux and Proton are incredible but not perfect. There’s no guarantee that a game will run on your machine. So they stick to Windows.
What was your source for the Arm slide? Does anyone know the easiest way to see a live (running) list of native Arm64 Windows apps? I know one can check the architecture field in specific app pages in the Microsoft App Store, but that is manual and time consuming so an aggregated list that is updated regularly would be appreciated.
An improvement for older devices but as you imply the limiting factor for the SQ3 and older WOA chips is the poor architecture.
It is apparent that the new X-Elite chips improve emulation and translation and from what I have been seeing, non-ARM software loses between 10-15% via emulation. I suspect for most of us that probably use mostly native ARM apps this is easily acceptable.
Look forward to some more deep dives; thanks!
I'm going ARM for sure 👍
This morning CNBC has been trumpeting the advent of the AI pc. They completely missed the point of the ARM transition.
Battery life is the big selling point of the XElite.
I am glad you did this but it doesn’t give me much confidence. The way you explain it it is ~10% better than what we judged in the past to be intolerable.
Still looking for more performance, stability, and compatibility reports.
What I would be super interested in is Linux on the XElite. The impending end of Win10 has me worried.
Glad you pointed it out. To be honest both AI and ARM are big, but ARM is delivering NOW and there's no chance it's going to be stopped. Qualcomm is a way safer bet than these soft-ware AI companies.
@@MadafakinRio The snapdragon is out now and it is not impressive. more like my iterpretation than yours.
I will wait for the new Ryzen intro next month.
Linux on the other hand is now supporting more RISC-V chips, even the Framework folks are releasing a RISC-V mainboard for their laptops. There is no "X86" compatibility issue when the source code is available for recompilation.
That's why FOSS is the best.
To me there is an amusing "history repeats" side to this "transition", if I can call it that.
Back when Windows NT was being first talked about, Microsoft was deep into the OS/2 project with IttyBitty, and was still trying to push all the DOS users that way. At that time the differentiation between OS/2 and NT was that NT was intended to be "portable", able to run on at least some RISC CPUs as well as the then current 80386.
It was to be the same high-level code compatibility through a recompile (expected to be normal program choice quite quickly) + emulation of old programs that is now being promoted for the ARM transition.
The modelling done suggested that performance running the X86 code through the emulation would be acceptable; as the code transitioned into native RISC whenever a system call was made. With the possibility of NT moving to RISC as an incentive, Intel accellerated the development of the 80486, promised and introduced it earlier than originally projected, and at 25MHz, which was enough to derail the RISC NT direction, and shelve the RISC PC hardware development.
I have seen one of the prototype boards made to make a PC server with a MIPS CPU in it!
I doubt that Intel can pull off the task of beating ARM with a lower-power demand X86-64 this time. Plus there is already an ARM Linux competitor running, or rather a range of distro choices to run on ARM, complete with entirely viable (even superior) software.
@@John.0z Even if Intel can't do it, I'd be willing to bet some money that AMD can do it. They've been more energy-efficient than Intel for multiple generations now, so it does bode well that they might be able to match ARM-designs blow for blow.
@@predabot__6778 Perhaps. We will have to wait and see. 😁
I was disappointed when AMD dropped development of their intended ARM line. The projection was to keep the high speed interconnects, and the PCIe interfaces and replace the AMD64 CPUs with ARM64 CPUs. But the effort required to get the Zen line into production was a bit much. Not that I am complaining as I now have two Zen series.
I have to wonder if that ARM project is back in development, with added RAM interface(s)?
I always love to watch your videos. I think what would be most beneficial to “the average user” is to have these stats shown as real life demos of things like:
1. How long does it take to boot up and be ready to do something ?
2. How long does it take MS Word to start and be ready for typing?
3. How long does it take to save a document as a PDF?
Etc etc.
A before and after picture of these activities and other “daily ordinary tasks” would be massively more informative.
Do you mean "how long does it take" in actual seconds or how much faster is it compared to the previous emulator? The thing is that I am using a Surface PRo X (as I said in the video) and not one of the new Copilot+ PCs with the new Snapdragon X Elite processors. So the start up times aren't really that useful.
I'd love to see a Linux on Snapdragon X Elite test. Supposedly they promised support is there with recent enough kernels, and assuming the sometimes less well supported bluetooth, wifi, sound & GPU and video encoding acceleration weren't scimped out on, the actual ARM CPU part should be great under Linux. SBCs and ARM servers have made more than enough distros have full ARM package support, heck even most proprietary tools have been ported. The only thing missing natively is likely Steam for Linux, which I don't care that much on an ultralight laptop, especially one maybe provided from work, and I have fundamentally seen someone emulate, even if that typically for Linux may be a little more complicated than Rosetta or even Microsoft's solutions.
live the competition:-)
It could be an evolutionary pathway leading to pairing risc and cisc architectures since we’ve been seeing those multicore SoC systems. I’m sure there are labs testing its feasibility, perhaps in the winter time.
Pairing RISC and CISC in one system is absolutely possible, but it gets mega complicated on the software side unless there’s a task separation. A system with both a RISC and CISC CPU would be very tricky to manage.
Arguably this already happens with APUs but the two domains of software are kept separate with the CISC style CPU being used to feed the RISC style GPU compute requests…. Kinda. Most x86 CPUs are decoding CISC instructions for a RISC internally anyway, but that happens away from what a software engineer can access.
It’s all a bit of a muddle with each abstraction adding more oddness.
I think what is really going to matter to consumers is the final price of the devices versus the kind of performance people get out of them, and I can see Qualcomm setting themselves up for failure there on two counts. The first is that it seems like they want to get into the laptop/mini-desktop market because they expect to be able to charge for and earn higher margins (which inherently implies devices as expensive as Intel/AMD). The second is that they bafflingly decided to use the same name for several different chips of varying performance (I think I've seen benchmarks that have one "X Elite" beat another "X Elite" by something like **75%** in single and/or multi-threaded) with only the un-intuitive model number differentiating them. So now we have a situation where a consumer could pick one up thinking they are getting a top-of-the-line Windows machine for a cheap price -- only to discover that they got the lowest end system -- and coming to the conclusion that Windows on ARM is still slow garbage, even after Microsoft put all this work into it (which I applaud by the way).
Battery life is an extremely important differentiator for laptops as well.
Honestly for starters I think they should have done away with the elite for starters.. I know there are plans to release new chips without the elite tag but for this..I thought it would have been better
But they must use a big margin (at least Qualcomm) on the sales, they are working on this for more than 3 years, this is the answer to M1 from 4 years ago.. so they needed to pay the engineers for 3 years, now they want back the money..
It isn't the engineers salaries for 3 years that are the problem, it is the $1.4 billion Qualcomm paid for Nuvia.
If Arm processors come anywhere near the x86 alternatives, they will be stillborn. They need to be aggressively priced or corporates will stick with what they know and that is the vast majority of the laptop market.
What’s the speed difference between running arm vs x86 versions of software on arm? Is it nearly the same speed? For example what’s the speedometer3 score on emulated chrome vs arm?
Speedometer 3.0 scores 2.5 under emulation and 7.0 native.
@6:14 - they said 2x faster than "Windows 11 22H2"
so, what was or is the score on "Windows 11 22H2" vs "Windows 11 24H2"????
But how is the speed compared to Firefox arm version?
And the emulated speed, what x86 cpu could that be compared to?
Native Firefox scores around 7.0 on Speedometer 3 using the same Surface Pro X laptop, compared to 2.5 under emulation.
@@GaryExplainsthat’s extremely useful. Thanks for sharing:)
@4:26 - i don't see word on the list, i see that they will port over OneDrive, Excel, Teams, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote.
you think they should have had these from a long time ago.
Gary, I hope you can test to see which of the office apps will use native arm or emulated x86.
I like windows on ARM because it means we can run the apps natively on Apple silicon with Parallels.
For a better comparison you need to use the new snapdragon x chips. Qualcomm has, similar to apple, hardware to switch to the x86 memory odering, this should increase the performance and i dont know if the 8cx gen 3 has that already.
Emulation is just the first step of migration, once user base is so high then developers will develop native arm programs
A minute less to transcode a video, okay, but is that going from something like 7 minutes to 6, or like going from 27 minutes to 26? What was the time that it took to run that in emulation?
You can do the maths, you know it takes 1 minute less and you know the percentage change. But it is an irrelevant calculation as it depends on the speeds of the laptop and the size of the encoding. I could have just encoded a 3 minute video file or a 3 hour one. The time taken would be very different on any platform. That is why I give relative numbers and not absolute ones, the absolute ones have no meaning.
definitely look into arm pc-s, hopefully lenovo x13s comes soon with that new chip
From memory, the biggest difference between x86 and ARM is - x86 has more memory addressing modes.
You can perform function on memory values, without storing them in a register first.
Has this changed? Or are many new programs simply not taking advantage of those particular instructions?
Arm is still a load-store architecture, making it different to the x86.
How good is the arm compiler? Isn’t it better to compile for both arm and x86?
Yes, producing binaries for both platforms is the recommended way forward.
Totally agree. We swapped to ARM servers a while ago but we still have a regular x86 build just incase. Even tho we don’t use it, having it build + run the tests can alert us to potential barriers in the future.
Native support ensures optimal performance, but emulation inevitably leads to a decrease in efficiency.
Obviously.
Yes, but if the new ARM processor is faster than your old computer’s x86 processor, even emulated execution might be faster on the new computer. Each program will be faster still if it gets recompiled for ARM.
@@davidbangsdemocracy5455 Yes it may happen but it very unlikely this quickly.
Really exciting indeed. Hopefully this will open competition with over dozens of CPU and GPU manufacturers competing. Samsung, Qualcomm, Mediatek, Rockchip, Nvidia, Huawei, Xiaomi, Broadcom all will be competing in consumer PC chips. Exciting times. As for me personally, I'll be waiting for at least one more generation of Arm chips to make a switch.
finally found your channel
Welcome
Is prism an emulator or a translator?
They always show Facebook Messenger as a native Arm64 app but currently there is no such version and I know nothing of such plans.
what about raspberry pi, does it work on raspberry pi?
in my case, I wanna move my laptop task to ARM definitely, no.1 windows x86/64 laptop are notoriously bad at battery consumption so there's no brainer moving all of those task to ARM basically. for gaming Laptops im betting there will be some ARM based gaming PC in the future for sure.
Just moved to the new copilot plus and I love it. Performance is top notch, so is battery live. Truth is, I spend most of my time in office and Teams which run flawlessly. The old x86 Kindle app runs fine, but to be honest, it does not need performance. What is someless suboptimal are Windows drivers that use the emulation. I'm using a Dragonfly cobalt USB DAC paired with Headphones. This one does not have a ARM driver and runs on the emulated windows driver. It generally works, but since a DAC is really time critical it comes with a lot of hisses and artifacts in sound. So that needs a bluetooth headphones. But generally speaking - Performance is excellent.
Thank you for the comparison test. Looking forward to the 24H2 update for my Windows 11 Pro on ARM. It is Downloading & Installing now. BTW - I have this legally installed on a M3 Max MacBook using Parallels VM (with Microsoft’s blessing & a legal license key). I have the Microsoft’s ARM native stack (Office 365, Teams, etc). The VM has 32GB of RAM and I can tell you that this Windows on ARM feels & performs faster then all the Dell & Lenovo computers I have used at work (both laptops & desktops).
Have fun!
That’s a fun setup, potentially very useful for folks in accessibility land as testing NVDA / JAWS on ARM Macs is a bit of a mess last time I looked. I never found a good solution to making it all work smoothly.
I preordered one of the X Elites. Performance has been fine running the OS, but the notable lack is still software compatibility. Had trouble with most docker engines, Minikube and Rancher Desktop won't run at all. Docker Desktop had a beta download that worked, but the integrated autoupdate borked the install right after. And Windows Subsystem for Android just hangs when you install and run it. I would think we could run Arm Android apps without emulation anymore (still in a Linux VM or WSL obviously though). Couldn't get BlueStacks or LDPlayer working either.
Thanks for sharing this. It answered a heap of questions I was wondering about :)
Windows Subsystem for Android runs fine on SPX... it should definitely work on the new systems. It is, however, being depreciated by Microsoft and will no longer be available soon. Bluestacks announced an ARM version was ready years ago, but has never made good on it, and has not commented on what happened to it that I have been able to find. They just keep vaguely saying "it's coming...'.
I have been waiting since from day 1 announcement ARM development on both hardware and software level. I am as a consumer wants is a pure window platform that supports not only just ARM also the legacy hardware.
Looking forward more big hardware company do give us more choices to choose from a laptop to a 2 in 1 tablet design..most importantly is the battery can last longer like a handphone.
Is it better than box86 on Linux?
I just bought my new Asus Ryzen 5 laptop earlier this year, so I think I will stick with X86 for the time being. Currently, I use a Surface Go 2 for working outside. If I have money, I may replace the Surface with either a Win on ARM machine or an Apple Silicon Mac.
So we know the improvement in the emulator is about 5% to 10%. It would be interesting to see the difference in running a native ARM app and a x86-64 app (via Prism) because that is what really matters to the end users who are thinking about moving from x86 to ARM: can x86 apps without ARM versions actually run at a decent speed? For example, how long do it take to render the same project in Blender (ARM) vs Blender (x86)?
So Speedometer 3.0 scores 2.5 under emulation and 7.0 native, both on the Surface Pro X.
ngl that sapphire chassis alone is tempting me to buy it but i wanna wait for lunar lake to see how they compare
I don't see a compelling reason to move to Windows on Arm. Maybe a tablet in the future
This
I view Arm Windows like how I viewed 63 bit back in the day. Went ahead and got 64 bit Windows on new laptop figuring it’s going to be future proof not knowing anything about it.
Would an ARM based PC outperform my i7 12700 system? And how would they compare on price? Surely these kinds of questions are going to be at the forefront of people's decision making process? Aside from the battery life issue of course.
How can I install a x64 program on my Snapdragon processor? I am trying to install Insta360 studio but it doesn't let it and says it can only be installed on systems with x64 architecture
For some reason, some software has been hard locked by the developers to error rather than allow emulation. Many games seem to do this, and even the Windows store itself will not allowing many of the games that DO emulate when run from Steam. It's very bizarre, and hopefully this practice will end soon. I feel like MS needs to add an option to report that the processor is x64 to the application to avoid this. Something like the "Run as administrator" option when starting apps.
I like the effort MS is putting into ARM but personally for me x86 is the way to go for now.
For laptop use the ARM processors are attractive because of their lower power demands. On desktops and servers there is no compelling case for ARM processors. There are no ARM only Windows applications so x86-64 will continue to be the architecture of choice. If ARM processors offered competitive performance to x86-64 at a lower price then there might be a reason for them outside of the laptop space.
For servers there is no compelling case? Really? 🤔 You had better tell Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle quickly! Amazon is on its 4th generation of Arm server chip already and they haven't yet noticed that there is no compelling reason... Oops.
Is it possible to use prism in mobile architecture too?
Windows mobile?
I am more interested to see how this pans out with respect to desktops, gaming, using a dedicated graphics card, upgradable RAM etc
the emulation basically needs to be flawless
So what’s the endgame here, will these new architectures ever play DCS faster than a 14900k or is it strictly just for low and mid tear applications the foreseeable future?
it ain't, x86 still has its strength on computing complex numbers than ARM which is made for short execution codes to lower the power consumption per compute, the good thing about ARM windows is that Windows laptop user now has better battery life like macbooks does which I also dreamed of for many years, because x86 is just too inefficient for mobile computation.
I predict that Intel Will smash ARM again. Their Next revision of x86 is the x86s that essentially remove the legacy 16-bit and 32-bit, making a bootable 64-bit CPU with User Mode support for 32-bit. (Essentially no changes for 64-bit Windows and Linux, as 32-bit games Still Run natively. The only loss are no more native DOS or OS/2 boot or any 32-bit OS).
App minutes. Now that is a novel way to tweak metrics.
I wonder if Android Studio is available for Snapdragon devices. And if Android virtual machines can be created.
It appears it is not available.
Sticking to x86 until gen3 of Prism and equivalent ARM hardware. Very happy for the battery savings made but still not enough for me. (To be clear I'm sticking to my existing hardware, not buying new x86)
Is it me or does 90% of the 90% of the total app minutes that users spend in apps have apps available on linux
Highly use-case dependent. For a typical normie user it's closer to 100%. For special professional things, that can creep way lower to 20%. The final blow for Linux victory is going to have to be a head-smack realization that GREAT software needs developers to be getting paid. Well, and a critical mass of pro-software developers to do simple rebuilds for Linux. It will come but 2025 won't be the year of Linux yet.
@@freecivweb4160 this just makes me wonder how much of that 90% of the total app minutes that users spend in apps are actually "professional" programs xd
p.s. i disagree that just getting devs paid will bring "great" software, microsoft is a trillion dollar company but their software is uhhhhhhh
But is the emulator fast enough to run Digital Combat Simulator?
When will java runtime environment (not micro) environment be available on snapdragon X? 🙏
Can you not compile it?
@@happygofishing I don't have the source code
@@martin777xyz openjdk?
@@happygofishing I see, thanks. I don't really want to set up the whole dev environment. Really I'm an end user, but it's good to know it's do-able 🙏
@martin777xy @happygofishing I think OpenJDK was available for Windows on Arm when I did my Surface Pro X review a couple of years ago. Try here www.microsoft.com/openjdk
I might buy one, when I can install the Linux distro of my choice.
You already can install Ubuntu, not sure if that's your choice, but others support Arch64. It's a killer. My build times went from 5 minutes to 0 minutes, 17 seconds. Yeah, way better than these other benchmarks. AMAZING
@@freecivweb4160 That is very good to hear! I got excited when Tuxedo release a statement that they were working a Snapdragon Elite X laptop. Thanks for telling me. It looks like the day is coming when you can install the Linux distro of choice on these machines.
@@freecivweb4160 comparing what computers' time? that's quite out of context
Would be cool to see a comparison with Mozilla natively compiled for ARM on Windows as well. Would this be possible?
I can do cool! Native Firefox scores around 7.0 on Speedometer 3 using the same Surface Pro X laptop. It was 2.5 under emulation.
that’s less than half the speed. does the speed decrease that much on all apps?
Yes, but for context, that is normal and it is the same with Rosetta on Apple devices. I did a whole video about it.
@@GaryExplains I would expect around 25 if you are using Mozilla Arm64 version. Maybe power settings are affecting scores here?
@sunefred You saying that the Surface Poo X should score 25 on Speedometer 3.0 with a native version of Firefox? Where did you get that number from?
I'm running Linux on my Laptop , so my choice is not directly influenced by this emulation.
I also fairly recently bought a Framework 13 (Intel 12th gen) so I'll wait longer until I consider changing platforms.
Gonna wait. I use a lot of CAD so I have to see that there will be no performance hits. Most CAD tools are crafted to benefit from the underlying architectures and cpus.
I mean how long it takes in seconds, and to show that as part of the video, and not just a table. Seeing these things makes it more real (as opposed to just a PowerPoint-like slide with a chart or table). The fact that you’re using an older device doesn’t matter that much, as your audience won’t all be using the latest and greatest either. By using your existing kit will mean that what when the CoPilot+ laptops are released, they should actually be better.
Hmmm... I think I see your point. But most people with existing Arm laptops know exactly how long it takes as they are using them already. People looking to buy a Copilot+ PC won't care that it is faster by n% compared to a laptop from 2019. However the emulation tech is relevant to both groups, hence the video.
I think it would be interesting to compare speed improvements vs rosetta. For example, compare x86 firefox under rosetta vs native arm improvement against x86 firefox under arm windows vs native arm improvement.
I did that in a previous video but using the older emulator. Now we know the new one will be around 10% better. BTW, Firefox native on the same laptop gives a Speedometer 3.0 score of around 7.0.
@@GaryExplains Thank you. I'm going to check out the older video.
@@GaryExplains Also curious about a comparison vs linux emulators like box64 and FEX
I want a gaming/productivity laptop with an Nvidia/AMD high end GPU and an ARM cpu. I also want to have upgradeable RAM, SSD, Wifi and battery, just as I do on my current Legion laptop. Hope this will be available in 2 years.
Interestingly, Intel has not banned this type of use of its ISA. Without x86 emulation, migration would be a real pain.
On what legal grounds could Intel ban it? It would equally need to ban compilers, debuggers, virtualization.
@@GaryExplains I'm not a lawyer, but I assume they could start some sort of legal battle, accusing Microsoft of patent infringement or something, just to buy themselves a little more time. Although that would probably only mean a complete PR disaster in the end.
That'd be like England banning reading English books outside of the UK.
It's simply not possible to ban reading things.
If you can read the code, you can follow the instructions.
I think the x86 parents ran out? So they cannot.
Now, AMD may have grounds as they license their instruction set (x86-64) to Intel, for example.
@@GaryExplainsthey’ve got no basis to do it but they did hammer Transmeta on x86 emulation saying they enforced patents a while back but I don’t know the content of them or what “enforced” entailed.
Wasn’t PRISM what Snowden blew the whistle on? How ironic.
😲!!!!! "Recall" "AI" 😱
Yes he did.
What if Nvidia made an ARM CPU for desktops as well...
I’m glad Microsoft and Apple are both continuing to improve emulation. It’s the type of thing you’d expect the transition itself nullifies their desire to invest in it after a *good enough* initial release.
Microsoft HAS to emulate x86 in order to transition to ARM in order to keep up with Apple in the laptop market which is now the majority of PCs.
Apple SHOULD emulate Microsoft to get rid of the nagging itch that dominance in gaming is the one thing holding it from a rapid coup d'état over Microsoft marketshare.
So, yeah, they are both just motivated by the invisible hand and nothing philanthropic here.
The invisible hand will continue to motivate. The joker wild card is Linux which will throw all kinds of spice into the polar duopoly competition model. Strap on tight, the roller coaster is coming.
@@freecivweb4160 I run games in Crossover and used to run them in Proton (since on my PC I’m not bound to it) and can confidently say emulation of environments is not the future. There is just too much to support. Cross compilers, toolchains and APIs have gotten that much better since the earlier PC/Mac era and that is the correct, faster, easier and most reliable way to port resource heavy software like games. It’s that much more effective and performant to spin up a VM on a Mac to run Windows game, or to run Windows on a Mac, but Qualcomm’s licensing has prevented that. But in saying that I don’t know if by emulate Microsoft you’re still talking about emulating environments or about practices. That said, Rosetta 2 and x86-64 Windows-on-Windows are both stellar. I wouldn’t have been disappointed even if they didn’t keep improving them. I’ve found two individual pieces of software that don’t work. One is due to it tripping a security warning on Windows and the other is a game from 1998 on an ancient version of DX. But these are not cross platform systems, they are cross ISA. The truest multi platform toolchains are APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan, and Apple wants nothing to do with them.
Linux will never happen mainstream. It’s just not what it’s meant for. In fact emulation tools on Linux just aren’t that great compared to commercial offerings and no wonder, it’s geared around access to sources. Proton is interesting, but dual booting because 90% of games run poorly or have issues in one way or another is not the future.
Your opinion gave me only 2 choices... I'm going to ARM on Mac; virtualization will be Multipass/Ubuntu. All my headaches are gone.
Wonder if Prism could be used in Linux systems as a WINE alternative (for ARM systems that is)? :)
Prism is an x86 emulator not a Windows emulator.
So it's basically a VM then. :)
@@lylek8933 No, not at all.
I’m waiting for Windows subsystem for TempleOS, until I change back to Windows, myself.
Well done report, thx Gary! Would be good to compare how much performance is being lost in emulated vs native apps and also how much advantage has similar x86 SoC with performance per watt. It's pretty much clear that X-Elite even it's an excellent (exApple/Nuvia) design will never reach same efficiency as Apple (console like) tightly integrated HW&SW design, however Qualcomm is getting very close. Also would cool to compare it to Intel's Lunar Lake and similar AMD SoC. PRISM is a definitely good move for M$ however true innovator before them was once again Apple and M$ is just copying the approach which is kind of bummer. Also I wonder where is dump is Google with all of this, it's a shame they missed the opportunity with the ChromeOS and custom Arm SoC design. ChromeOS could be so much more even on x86 and even more on the Arm SoC. Too bad Google is no longer consumer focused innovator and instead focuses on the enterprise datacenter projects with AI.
NICE! We have a turtle speed on emulation, now we have a 2x faster turtle!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
liked that you used a normal slide template from google slide and used it rather than using fancy AI generated background and slides that looks shit
Notebook check got the vivobook for testing and it seems very pricey. Battery life and gaming is not very good. Only CPU, WiFi are very good. Thermals seems to be decent
Unless Blender/V-ray/Cinebench GPU has a native ARM version on Windows, this wasn't an exhaustive video.
When you say it wasn't exhaustive, what do you mean?
ARM support is a big deal. But still not convinced for Microsoft's case. They are known to be commit to stuff and forget it soon after. 🤔
I would absolutely update my surface pro 9 to the ARM based CPUs but I have stickers on this machine that I can't replace. I know it's silly. But these are sentimental from vacations and projects I've worked on and I'm not ready to let them go.
Also, it's a 9 and there's literally zero generations between mine and this gen. So it would be foolish to upgrade so fast.
My question is that are windows prism similar to Virtual Box machine? Like if the game or program needs xp/vista os does prism install it without os requirements!? And what if the x86x64 program or games need some directx files does prism have installation for directx? Just curious just in case If x86 or arm based windows to choose.
This is an OS level feature and in theory it should work for something like virtual box.
It depends lot on how much is being done before execution (like Rosette on the Mac) and how much is being done dynamically.
In theory it should work, but we will have to wait and see.
And what a surprise Linux was ready for arm way way faster than windows
Well that isn't a surprise is it. Arm created Linaro expressly to make sure that Arm CPUs are supported by open source. Plus Linux supports just about everything because you just need an engineer who has an interest in a particular platform to develop the code and submit it. It isn't a commercial consideration.
I have been using the previous emulator and I have no complaints: it was really fast enough. It has an advantage over Apple’s X64 emulator on MacOS which doesn’t support 32-bit.
I mean, macOS doesn’t support 32 bit apps any more so there isn’t much reason for Rosetta to support 32 bit
@@pilkycrc There is; there are a substantial number of 32-bit x86 apps still available for MacOS, especially games. Apple can say that their M-series machines won’t support 32-bit ARM apps without causing much trouble, but their Intel emulator not supporting 32-bit removes the ability to run thousands of existing apps.
Apple dropped support for running 32-bit apps in macOS 10.15. Given macOS 11 was the first to run on Apple Silicon there are no 32-bit apps that need to be translated
@@pilkycrc There are thousands of 32-bit MacOS apps. On intel architecture it was possible to dual-boot Macs with an older version of MacOS, or to run older MacOS in a high-performance VM. That’s not possible on their ARM architecture. On the same ARM architecture I am able to run Windows 11 for ARM and both 64-bit and 32-bit x86 apps at what seems like high speed. What I can’t do is run my 32-bit Mac games on this hardware.
@@sjzara I doubt it’s 1000s. Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit machine in about 15 years and hasn’t supported running macOS on 32 bit hardware in well over 10 years. The vast majority of software was recompiled for 64 bit long ago. It was only a few lagging apps and games that were affected by Apple dropping 32 bit support (something they’d done several years before on iOS). Not supporting 32 bit allows them reduce memory and disk usage, better share code between iOS and macOS, and not have to deal with translating 32 bit apps. Microsoft takes a different approach to backwards compatibility, but it comes with its own downsides
This 90 % of native app support plus very low game support reminds me of Windows phones. It was promising at first but we all know what happened. Hope Windows on ARM stays.
OUTLAW Closed Bootloaders.
The Arm "trusted computing" dystopia Must be prevented!
Intel does crazy things when they are desperate. They almost went fabless. What’s the likelihood Intel and AMD will start licensing out their x86 and x64 patents? On second thought it’s gonna be useless when ARM native apps take over.
ARM definitely.
With cpus, gpus, mpus, etc, why not x86 specific cores instead of emulators? The would sit idle on low power most of the time!
I don't understand. Are you saying these Arm based chips should also contain x86 cores?
Mozilla should recompile their Firefox browser to ARM64
There is a ARM64 version of Firefox, has been for quite a while.
@@GaryExplains Good. So, people should use it instead of emulating inefficient x86 version
Of course. But that wasn't the point.
The point is: he used an older version of Firefox which was x86-64 yet (not ARM) to see how much the Prism emulator improved the emulation when compared to the previous emulator.
Ya people on Windows ARM do spend 90% of their time on native ARM apps because the emulator is terrible, especially with older software. I am on second Windows ARM computer and I am going to be switching back to AMD for my next purchase.