How did Microsoft screw this up? - Surface Pro X (SQ2) vs M1 Macbook Air
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as evidence of how poorly Windows x86 emulation on Arm performed in 2021 compared with Apple's M1 and Rosetta.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2021 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Cites Hamuko · 2021-01 · on “Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project”
Linus Tech Tips actually just released a video a couple of hours ago where they compared the Surface Pro X SQ2 with the M1 MacBook Air. It was not pretty. [this video]
Cites GeekyBear · 2021-01 · on “Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project”
Legacy x86-64 app emulation has only just appeared in alpha form and still has massive compatibility issues. I'd still call it something we hope to see in the future, instead of a working proof of concept. [this video]
Cites porcc · 2021-01 · on “The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned”
[this video] windows in a VM outperforms windows PCs at the price point--plus like other commenters mention it comes with a native Unix shell
Cites GeekyBear · 2021-01 · on “The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned”
The comparison to Microsoft's more expensive 2020 Surface Pro X is especially stark. Windows runs at less than half the speed on Microsoft's own flagship ARM hardware. [this video]
Cites pmarreck · 2021-03 · on “M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari's experimental WebGPU”
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]
Cites GeekyBear · 2021-05 · on “Samsung to jump into laptop processor market with Exynos chip in H2”
Samsung's custom cores haven't been competitive with Qualcomm so far, much less Apple. You only have to look at comparisons between the Surface Pro X and the M1 Macbook Air to see how far behind Qualcomm is. [this video]
Cites GeekyBear · 2021-10 · on “Dropbox Sync does not natively support Apple Silicon”
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]
Cites GeekyBear · 2022-02 · on “Lenovo announces the first Arm-based ThinkPad”
Has Windows gotten any better at running x86-64 Windows software on ARM hardware? The last time I saw this tested, it was more likely to fail than succeed, but it's been a while. [this video]