Linus Tech Tips
11 HN mentions · mentioned in 7 months, 2021–2022
10:56 · 2.8M views · Jan 5, 2021
Linus Tech Tips compares Microsoft's Surface Pro X (SQ2) with the Apple M1 MacBook Air, focusing on how Windows on Arm and x86 emulation perform against Apple's Arm hardware. The verdict is that the Surface falls well short.
Cited as evidence of how poorly Windows x86 emulation on Arm performed in 2021 compared with Apple's M1 and Rosetta.
11 comments from Hacker News
>This part of the article was particularly cringe. People don't seem to realize how much of a tech prowess it is that x86 builds of those two games are even running at an acceptable framerate. Spoken like someone who has never seen how poorly Microsoft's x86 to ARM emulation works. this video They had difficulty getting programs to work at all, much less have acceptable performance under emulation.
> IMO Microsoft has put much more effort into a thoughtful x86 -> ARM transition than Apple did. Given that the Surface Pro X didn't support 64 bit x86 Windows applications at all, I'm not sure how you can think so. Even after developer channel support was added, it was unlikely to work. >How did Microsoft screw this up? - Surface Pro X (SQ2) vs M1 Macbook Air this video
The raving in this thread is to me indicative of how far behind Intel has fallen behind ARM in technical terms. Now we just need more, better, faster ARM-based chips. Linux is ready, macOS is ready... but it looks like Windows is not yet ready: this video
They introduced x64 64 bit emulation in the Dev channel several months ago, but it didn't work well at all. It also was more performant running in a VM on last year's MacBook Air than running natively on Microsoft's flagship hardware. this video
> It would be a huge embarrassment to have Apple hardware running Windows that much better than all the native PCs. That boat already sailed over a year ago. >How did Microsoft screw this up? - Surface Pro X (SQ2) vs M1 Macbook Air this video