[Cshelton]

We were piloting the new Snapdragon X Elite Surface Laptops to roll them out to our org about 3 months ago. Loved everything about it, but when it came to software... things became messy. The MSFT Office suite was great, as well as any browser of course. Then we had to make sure some older Excel plugins worked for financial users, they didn't. Had to use some workarounds. We tried our front end app Node build pipeline.. we gave up and had to put it in a container to get it to build properly. Tried a few things through the cpu emulator, it was no where near Apple's at their launch of M1. Ultimately, we had to go back to the Intel Surface Laptops. It felt like the ARM laptops were rushed about a year too early...

[officeplant]

The really sad thing is the complete absence of support for WinARM when shit goes wrong. I've got one of Dell's Qualcomm 8CX Gen2 based inspirons that broke its windows install when it crashed on boot one day.

Its been sitting on a shelf for almost 8 months and I periodically take it down to see if shits been fixed for restoring its install.

Win11's built in self restore tools attempt to wipe and reinstall windows but ultimately fail and it reverts to the broken state. But this is actually better than 4 months ago when online reinstall function was ENTIRELY broken.

It took until a month or so ago for Microsoft to even offer Win11 ARM iso's on their website that weren't virtual machine files. But these images don't work on my inspirion, I'm guessing they don't bake in 8cx Gen2 support. I can get it to boot into the installer but usb is broken entirely and therefore it can't see anything on the installer usb once its booted. Keep in mind WinARM products have been on the market for years at this point. Its insane vs restoring an x86 laptop.

Dells tools for building a system restore usb are completely broken. I had to go into their text logs to get the web link and authkey to download the win11 iso. Even after building the boot drive it installs a broken version of win11 that can't successfully update, and has a constantly crashing explorer.exe.

I contacted Dell support about this and got strung along for 3 months of back and forth emails before they told me I needed to upgrade to a paid support tier to have a functional laptop again.

And then we get to linux where 8cx Gen2 support is a fucking void no one wants to touch because it has a different device tree than Gen1 or Gen3 which seemingly have some manner of linux support.

I really hope any IT squad that gets suckered into buying SnapdragonX laptops is ready for a world of pain when something goes wrong.

[tokinonagare]

> It felt like the ARM laptops were rushed about a year too early...

It's like this every year since the Windows RT laptops : 2012.

[canucker2016]

The Microsoft Prism x64 emulator on Windows ARM was updated in November 2024 to support more x64 CPU instructions including AVX, AVX2, et al. see https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/windows-on-snapd...

There were rumours that Intel was threatening IP issues for companies building Intel CPU emulators. I have no idea how Apple or Microsoft dealt with any Intel-specific issues. see https://mspoweruser.com/intel-may-block-microsoft-from-allow...

[canucker2016]

Here's an official post from the Microsoft Windows blog, https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/11/06/announc...:

    Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27744 (Canary Channel)

    Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27744 to the Canary Channel.

    We are also not planning to release SDKs for 27xxx series builds for the time being.

    What’s new with Build 27744
    
    New Processor Feature Support in Prism

    In today’s Canary Channel Insider Preview build, we’re previewing a major feature update to Prism, our emulator for Windows on Arm, that will make it possible for more 64-bit x86 (x64) applications to run under emulation by adding support for more CPU features under emulation.

    This new support in Prism is already in limited use today in the retail version of Windows 11, version 24H2, where it enables the ability to run Adobe Premiere Pro 25 on Arm. Starting with Build 27744, the support is being opened to any x64 application under emulation. You may find some games or creative apps that were blocked due to CPU requirements before will be able to run using Prism on this build of Windows.

    At a technical level, the virtual CPU used by x64 emulated applications through Prism will now have support for additional extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture. These extensions include AVX and AVX2, as well as BMI, FMA, F16C, and others, that are not required to run Windows but have become sufficiently commonplace that some apps expect them to be present. You can see some of the new features in the output of a tool like Coreinfo64.exe.