Windows ARM64 Build

[Rachael]

I didn't say NVidia/AMD/Intel specifically, I meant actually any vendor, but mostly SoC's.

[Blzut3]

Happened to stumble across this today, you can apparently as of a few days ago download the ARM64 image of the just released Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 openly: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcen ... prise-ltsc (This is the LTSC version of Windows 11 24H2.)

Given the non-LTSC evaluation is behind a give marketing your contact info wall I wonder if this being an open download is temporary. Now it looks to be a single edition ISO, for an edition you can't just purchase outside of Visual Studio subscription (and while IoT Enterprise is full featured its license terms is technically super restrictive), so not super useful, but thought it was interesting enough to post.

Also kind of weird they released the IoT Enterprise version early relative to the non-IoT and non-LTSC versions. Don't know off hand if they've done that in the past.

[Rachael]

Windows IoT is a Store-App-only edition of Windows that's been openly available for a very long time, and it has nothing to do with the traditional desktop builds. I'm surprised they're still working on those - I thought they abandoned it.

Well according to the Overview it's a "binary equivalent" - don't know what that really means, though, but that seems to allege that it is actually compatible with traditional win32 apps. There's an AMD64 version so it's easy enough to just throw that into a Hyper-V instance to see what it's all about, I'll try it later.

[Blzut3]

IoT Enterprise is more or less exactly the same as Enterprise just with different licensing terms. So no catch with software compatibility. It's the real deal. Specifically it's only licensed for fixed use devices and ideally devices which start their fixed experience automatically. These terms are not enforced by technical measures that I'm aware of. For Windows 10 LTSC 2021 the IoT Enterprise version also gets the full 10 years of support instead of only 5 for regular Enterprise. Which means it's a version of Windows 10 21H2 that's supported until 2032.

Not to be confused with IoT Core which is what you were thinking of and is now some cloud subscription thing. Microsoft has always been confusing with embedded edition naming. Before we had Windows embedded and Windows for embedded systems which was a similarly important distinction.

[Blzut3]

Qualcomm released some architectural details of their new chip, and it appears they've announced native Vulkan 1.3 support is coming to Windows (also D3D 11? Not sure if that was there before).

Details: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21445/qu ... eep-dive/3

Mostly unrelated but Apple Silicon is getting Vulkan 1.3 support on Linux soon: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/vk13-on-the- ... month.html Technically nothing prevents Apple from packaging up Mesa's drivers on macOS, the reverse engineering efforts at one point at least even had the ability to run on macOS, but since the kernel ABI is unstable/private it's not realistic for Mesa to do that officially. I doubt they will though.

[dpJudas]

That's pretty nice. I can't wait to see the benchmarks for these chips.

[dpJudas]

Finally some benchmarks for this thing from Dave2D. Still waiting for a review from one of the more reliable sources (i.e. Hardware Unboxed or Gamers Nexus), but sounds really good if its true that the x64 emulation hit is only 10%.

Edit: as expected, they show in the beginning how its 10%, but then later in the video they show Blender Classrom where it only runs at 37% when emulated compared to what a x64 AMD laptop did. The older Qualcomm ARM ran at 31% emulated. Really need more benchmarks on this thing.

[Blzut3]

Edit: as expected, they show in the beginning how its 10%, but then later in the video they show Blender Classrom where it only runs at 37% when emulated compared to what a x64 AMD laptop did. The older Qualcomm ARM ran at 31% emulated. Really need more benchmarks on this thing.

Unless I missed a part, how did you calculate 37%?

[dpJudas]

Oops - I was looking at the graph at 3:17 where they have a Premiere Pro + Blender Classroom comparison. However I totally misread the graph, thinking the Qualcomm bar was the AMD and that longer was better! Never mind.

In any case, my curiosity got the better of me and I ordered one - it should arrive sometime today. Now to figure out how to avoid creating a Microsoft account! Last I read Microsoft blocked the most common method.

[Rachael]

Join a domain, except don't actually join one, that's the option that lets you create a local account.

Of course, if you're on Windows 11 Home ... you're fucked ... but not really, there are ways around that, too. Microsoft's overreach has gone a bit too far with this one though.

[dpJudas]

I used this guide. The TL;DR: is that you press shift+10 at the country/region screen, run OOBE\BYPASSNRO in a prompt, reboot, press shift+10 again at same screen and then run "ipconfig /release". Was easier than I feared it would be, actually.

Now if only I could say the same about installing the language pack! That took 3 hours of pain, a PC factory reset and a recovery reinstall! For once Linux won big time in the installation on my hardware.

[Rachael]

Shift+F10 -> oobe\kindly-go-fuck-off-oobe-and-never-come-back.cmd

[dpJudas]

OK just a short update for this thread now after I've been playing around with the Snapdragon X Elite on the Asus Vivobook S:

It does indeed have a true vulkan driver and nothing is locked down. The display driver is rather unstable unfortunately. The Firefox render process crashes once in a while. The entire screen also blinks in some rare situations. VKDoom crashes if you switch between full screen and windowed. You can't debug it since there's no Vulkan SDK available for ARM64 (no validation layer).

For general performance, battery time is rather nice. The GPU seems to be almost fully featured (except for anisotropic filtering not supporting nearest) - it even did raytracing okayish for what you can expect from an iGPU. Every ARM64 process on the system seems snappy. I'm a bit more unsure about x64 emulation performance though. Discord is visibly laggy. All in all I'd say its pretty nice compared to my Dell XPS 15.

As a developer its been a fun thing to try out. As an end user there's still too many rough edges for me to recommend it. Maybe if they fix the display driver issues and more software gets an ARM64 build.

[Blzut3]

Did it ship with Windows 11 23H2 or so these have an early release of 24H2? Only ask since the marketing kind of makes it sound like key features are coming in 24H2.

Also can you collect the driver version numbers? I would be curious, if Rachael still has one of the older machines, if native Vulkan is exclusive to the Snapdragon X driver.

[Rachael]

If you are curious this is approximately the model that I have - except I think it has double the RAM (which still isn't much)
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-ga ... Id=6466552

It's an excellent client for RDP and Moonlight. But not much else.