Microsoft & Qualcomm -- Blame for Broken Arm Promises?

ARM Architecture is good, but Qualcomm's Snapdragon is not our friend! Join Wendell as he covers the disappointing reality of Microsoft's collaboration.

0:00 - Intro
2:13 - Windows on ARM
5:12 - Qualcomm vs ARM and the ARM ecosystem
10:02 - The developer experience on ARM (featuring Matt from Alderon Games)
11:39 - Anti-cheat issues on Snapdragon
13:21 - Dev kit woes
16:43 - How accurate is "ARM Ready"?
17:58 - Should devs port to ARM?
20:23 - Microsoft's plan for Snapdragon (or lack thereof)
23:31 - MS crunching to improve ARM
24:45 - Lack of driver support from MS
27:08 - Snapdragon is a mess for devs
30:13 - Has Microsoft completely lost the plot?
41:27 - What can Microsoft do to make things right?
43:31 - Closing thoughts

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Music: "Earth Bound" by Slynk

Edited by Autumn

[JeffGeerling]

I'm honestly amazed the Snapdragon Dev Kit is still not here... it seemed like the key component to getting devs to start working on their Arm builds for Windows. It feels like Microsoft shot first, and everyone's asking questions later—the consumer laptops shouldn't have launched yet with the state of Windows on Arm and Qualcomm Snapdragon X support today.

So far I haven't found a person who bought a Snapdragon X and said "this laptop is so much better" yet. When Apple launched the M-series laptops, tons of people felt like it was a completely different and better experience than the laptops that came before.

[tobiasstamenkovic]

"We support Linux since we dont want to use Windows ourself..." Thank you sir!

[whalemonstre]

I'm an IT professional and I've been a Windows user since 3.1 / 386 days (about 30 years) and have just switched to Linux Mint. This vid is spot on. I'm sick of the data mining, the ads, the burying of privacy toggles, the erosion (or constant overriding) of user choice. Recall was the final straw for me (even though I'm not buying one of those PCs, and even though MS reneged on its being on by default) because the mere fact they tried to launch such a feature tells me something about the kind of company they have become; quite simply, a company no longer listening to users, that doesn't respect our choices or opinions, and one that has therefore forfeited my trust.

[N....]

I'm a professional developer for a game engine. Porting to Windows on ARM was trivial for us. Literally just added the ARM64 build configuration to the projects, it built first try, ran first try, hasn't had any ARM-specific bugs. Basically free. We have published games that have ARM64 ports running fine. The real holdup is the Xbox stuff - Microsoft has failed to port their Xbox game platform stuff to ARM64, and you can see this for example in how Minecraft Bedrock Edition has an ARM32 port but not an ARM64 port. Their latest and greatest "Game Development Kit" still does not have any ARM support (not even through emulation), whereas UWP has supported ARM32 and ARM64 and emulation for years. It is baffling. So, porting games to ARM64 is trivial right up until you want to actually integrate with Xbox Live on PC, at which point you're stuck waiting for Microsoft to port their stuff. For a long time I thought the Qualcomm exclusivity deal was what was holding back Microsoft, but it seems they're both failing each other since it was Qualcomm recently telling game devs how to port to ARM while Microsoft's GDK still refuses to even run through emulation on ARM. I don't get what the holdup is given how trivial the porting process was for our engine and games. In fact Microsoft has even broken things that used to previously work, for example the Xbox app and Xbox Insider Hub both used to work fine on ARM and let you install and play games. But over the years they've been updated to a point where they're completely unusable, the Xbox app on ARM only does cloud streaming now and the Xbox Insider Hub on ARM doesn't even launch anymore. How are they making things worse over time?? At least we did get Vulkan support on ARM finally, that's the one major thing I was wanting for years.

[wehavetogoback]

Getting ads in an OS I paid for. Getting nagged about OneDrive. Search failing to exist as a functional part of the OS. Periphs trying to auto launch and install software. Recall.

I made the switch to Linux. It works. It does what I want. It doesn't pester me. I have not booted into Windows in weeks. I'm debating on if I even need it installed on my next major build.

[subrezon]

If battery life and sleep were the main issues - desktop users wouldn't be pissed about Windows too. The main issue with Windows is that Microsoft is still coasting on the last time they had put in any thought and creativity. W11 is just Vista in 5 trenchcoats, the outermost one having ad posters glued onto its back.

[ffp]

Thanks a lot for the comprehensive talk. I started to feel paranoid, because I was reading similar feedback from the advanced users/developers, while all the reviewers are praising and misreading charts. Thanks for the reality check.

[Genoisme]

MS is just stuck with their cloud-first agenda since Nadella took over (similar to how Amazon is running in the wrong direction under AWS Jassy). But they've realized that Win11 hasn't worked to get people into the MS cloud (for various reasons), now they think that "AI" is something that people want and want to use that as leverage (which clearly also won't work). Made obvious by talking about getting CoPilot also on Win10. From their point of view this is just a marketing stunt for CoPilot. Don't think they care about the underneath platform, Qualcomm just had what they wanted from an NPU before Intel and AMD. The engineering resources at that point were available for free basically as clearly they're not doing anything useful anymore (WSA canceled among others).

And of course they want to mimic Apples business model and more importantly profit margin for a long time (again, completely the wrong move).

[jamescampbell]

Java: "we work on any platform!!!"
*looks inside*
*x86 assembly code*

[lllongreen]

Almost all of the big youtube reviewers literally where praising the QC Elite while their own performance slides in the background told a completely different story. Never seen anything quite like this before 😂 The amount of QC marketing money and propaganda for the QC Elite is unreal 😂

[SamOnKBD]

Installing OS, 10 years ago:
Windows: click a couple of buttons, enter username and password.
Linux: Terminal hacking, downloading shell scripts from github.
Installing OS today:
Linux: click a couple of buttons, enter username and password.
Windows: Terminal hacking, downloading shell scripts from github.

[Tuhar]

Microsoft: "People hate Windows - what could it be?"
Honest Guy: "The ads and bloat?" - thrown out the window meme
Pitch guy: "x86 battery life! That's the enemy!"

[LordApophis]

Dave Cutler and his team built amd64 Windows on spec. When they received the first 64bit test system from AMD they put in the disc and booted it. Really think Windows 2000 was peak Microsoft.

[blafasel]

@33:49 Not only does the Start Menu go to the Internet. Periodically, the Internet access will stop working and as a result, the search function will stop working. As in completely not working, not even for local stuff. The result display is just empty because some error during Internet access completely broke it.

[TheBrokenEclipse]

Microsoft is the sole actor making me consider Linux more and more - and I'm finding less and less reasons as to why I shouldn't switch

[apefu]

The company I work at switched almost completely to Linux server side in the 90s. On the Client side Windows still reigns supreme even if there clearly is a movement to Linux/Mac going on in the client space. I ask the team every year if we shouldn't go all in, but they just laugh. I find this so interesting giving the increasing pain they experience managing the windows platform. Every other month something breaks with the platform cloud integration for licenses (we need to anonymize the users, so we have a "special" solution) and it is always a kerfuffle with information leakage.

When are the big companies going to start saying "Enough!"?

[Liatin]

Microsoft definitely lost the ball with windows in general

[RaidOwl]

But wait...when I said in my video that my Snapdragon Surface Laptop had a terrible user experience I was told I was wrong!

[tschorsch]

The move to ARM is concerning. Microsoft has been trying to lock down windows hardware for decades. We need to make sure that this hardware is open to other operating systems.

[chx]

ARM claims they gave Nuvia better terms because they wanted more server market share. This contract they wrote apparently had a clause to terminate when Nuvia got acquired. Qualcomm interpreted they have a broad ARM licence, ARM counters the Nuvia licence specifically excluded those.