This is a very Apple viewcentric point of view.

Windows on ARM is still largely ignored, everyone on the consumer level is more than happy with current Intel/AMD offerings.

Every single attempt to sell Windows ARM systems has been more or less a flop, including the recent CoPilot+ PCs.

Windows developer community also largely ignores Windows on ARM, unless there is an actual business value to support yet another ISA during development, CI/CD pipelines, and QA.

Only Apple gets to play the vertical integration game, our way or go away attitude, and they are the survivors of home computer vertical integration only because they got lucky when banks where already knocking on the door.

I did say "eventually", because I'm at the very start of "yet another ISA during development, CI/CD pipelines, and QA" work.

Which means that there is some business value on selling the software on Windows on ARM devices to budget such efforts.

Can you present data from sales numbers and developers showing this? Need to see the numbers of ARM vs x86 for sales and how many applications are currently one/both.

Walk into any random shopping mall computer shop and observe how many people care about buying Windows ARM, or are asking about them.

Those are my numbers.

If you prefer something more official,

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2816617/microsofts-copilot-g...

> Walk into any random shopping mall computer shop and observe how many people care about buying Windows ARM, or are asking about them.

Those still exist?

Yes, all over the place in Europe.

Media Market, Carrefour, Publico, Worten, Cool Blue, FNAC,...

> everyone on the consumer level is more than happy with current Intel/AMD offerings

They shouldn't be. Apple's chips changed the game so much that it was a no-brainer for me to choose them when I bought a new laptop - PCs just couldn't compete with that compute and battery life. Anyone with a decent enough budget is not even considering Windows.

I don't think any power user will be happy with Intel/AMD any more.

> Anyone with a decent enough budget is not even considering Windows.

Uhm, no. This is so totally dependent on your use case. I use my home box MOSTLY for gaming; it's just better on Windows. I also want a box I can upgrade. I never need to carry it with me.

Apple isn't even in the consideration space for me for that.

For work I don't have a choice, but the M[1-4] machines are _good enough_ for that; the battery life is nice, but I'm not mobile that often. I don't use its screen, mouse, or keyboard, so don't care there. The OS is close enough to familiar unixen that I like it fine, but WSL2 on Windows or native linux would be MORE THAN FINE, and closer to my deployment environment so would be better at way less cost, but our IT dept. doesn't want to support it so I get what I get.

> I use my home box MOSTLY for gaming; it's just better on Windows.

Don't you mean on x86?

Windows on ARM is no more suitable for running legacy x86 games at full performance than any one else's OS on an ARM chip.

I think that was implied, proving the point that many don't even think about Windows ARM.

Gaming desktop rigs prove otherwise.

As for laptops maybe when there is something able to compete with Razor laptops for e-sports, using ARM.

Snapdragon chips ain't it.

  > This is a very Apple viewcentric point of view.

Which also isn't great for Apple. I mean they're lagging Microsoft now. We've all felt this coming, right? The M series was great but it's hard to think of more innovation after Jobs. I mean... things got smaller/thinner? That's so exciting... now can we fix the very basic apps I use every day that have almost trivially fixable bugs?

In a way, Pantheon feels weirdly accurate. People not actually knowing what to do. Just riding on momentum and looking for the easiest problem to solve (thinner & extract more money from those making your product better) because the concern is next quarter, not next year, not the next 5 years. What's the point of having "fuck your money" if you never say "fuck you"?

Those of us that were around for when Apple was at the edge of bankruptcy can relate to a similar approach, where some products were great like the Newton, but the wind of the early days wasn't as strong.

They have plenty of money to burn, but unless they make their systems more affordable to the common man that doesn't live with tier 1 country salaries, they will eventually become the iPhone/iPad company.

There is no longer Apple hardware for servers, the way MacPro has been dealt with, it is clear that the professional desktop workstation is also not a market that they care about any longer, if the only PCI slots on studio are for audio cards.

So it doesn't matter how great the M chips are, if they don't have products on their portfolio that people care about buying, instead of having Windows/Linux/BSD systems for servers, and mostly Windows on consumer hardware (70% worldwide market share).

It sure seems like AMD is winning the x64 war?

https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-...

Maybe a semantic argument, but I'd say they are "on their way to winning", but once they have a higher market share than Intel, "they are winning".

> Despite Intel still holding the lead with 56.3% of systems validated through CPU-Z, AMD is closing in, now claiming 43.7% of the market.

I do hope intel comes back, while I prefer AMD currently (due to no avx512 on intel consumer cpus and me not being interested in having things scheduled on efficiency cores in my desktop pc), if there's no competition anymore who knows what AMD might become...

I'm a gamer, and for Intel to make a comeback for me, they need something that competes with AMD's X3D chips, which absolutely dominate all the gaming benchmarks.

The Core Ultra CPUs are an absolute joke for gaming, often being beaten even by the 14th gen CPUs. The Core Ultras had a major performance regression in L3 cache speed which destroyed gaming performance.

Games love large cache sizes. The Ryzen 9700X has the same number of cores, but a slower clock than a 9800X3D, yet the 9800X3D comes out on top purely because it has 96 MB of L3 cache compared to 32 MB. If Intel would have put out an i9-14900K with 96 MB of L3 cache, it'd probably come out on top.

> they're not winning the x64 war?

That's probably the strongest mis-statement I've heard this week. At least, it seems AMD have been the x86-64 leaders for several years now.

Why are you thinking AMD aren't winning?

By what metric? AMD is making headway fast but intel still controls 76% of the server market.[1]

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-records-...

By precisely what metric are AMD the leading x86-64 vendor? Intel still outsells them.

EPYC?

I don't think I even know anyone (including in businesses) who buy Intel for anything any more, and it's been that way for a few years.

That's why you want to look at data rather than people you know https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-9005-turin-turns-trans...

I think Epyc will get there within a few years, it has great momentum and Intel's response has been pretty weak.

Stock price delta over the past five years is a good metric since the market is efficient and traders themselves use all available information.

Heh!

Imagine being this naive in 2025. The market isn't rational.

Poe's Law in action. I can't tell if this is serious or satire.

EDIT: Though I'm leaning towards satire.

I think Intel's been losing for a while now. I would rather have RISC-V over ARM, though.

I was pretty pleased to see a news article on the x86/x86-64 emulator for RISC-V, felix86, recently, where they've had success running Steam and playing relatively complicated 3D games using a PCIe graphics card.

Dealing with MCUs for projects, RISC-V Espressif chips and boards are no-brainers now; I buy big bags of ESP32 boards from Seeed. I get some free ARM boards at work, which are neat - I always love playing with MCUs - but they're relatively power-hungry and expensive without a lot to show for it. I'm either using a ~$6 ESP32 board or a ~$1 ATTiny in a DIP package for home/fun projects. ESP32s are starting to show up in consumer electronics I find, too, along with the relatively pared-down ESP8266s which I'm not as fond of, though I can still flash them easily over USB-TTL at least, so whatever.

In the SBC space, ARM is competing with x86. RISC-V exists but only really for enthusiasts. RISC-V may start making inroads here soon. I picked up some Radxa Rock 2F boards (using ARM-based Rockchips) for ~$12 shipped a few months ago, they run Debian, and these have been fantastic for projects (though now ~impossible to source the cheap 1GB variant of). It's difficult to imagine it being worth getting involved in this nightmarishly competitive space, though obviously some still do. Most seem to try finding some obscure niche to justify a high markup.

In many workloads, it's more the GPU that matters. I need an MMU, a PCIe slot, and driver support. Most of us don't really need these outlandishly complex and CPU-centric $100+ ATX motherboards, or even CPU/RAM sockets/slots; just solder it on. -Like, how often do people even upgrade the CPU on a motherboard anymore? I'm more liable to throw the whole thing out because it doesn't have any 10PB/s 240GW USB9 quantum ports, so cut materials, decrease surface area, lower cost, and make it disposable.

> Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility.

I wouldn't say that Microsoft's Prism x86 to ARM translation layer has been anywhere near as successful as Rosetta was at running the majority of legacy software on day one.

Prism is improving, but the Windows on ARM reviews are still bringing up x86 software that didn't work at all.