HN Reader

I think this is incorrect. Specifically the Windows ARM support. Official hardware support page indicates that the Windows version requires x64. I unfortunately don’t have the hardware to confirm for myself. But Blizzard is the kind of company that would have made a blog post about that.

https://us.support.blizzard.com/en/article/76459

This is neat, and exciting that Windows emulation tooling is progressing! It seems like there’s a lot of work hardware vendors would need to do in order to make Win/Arm viable for game devs. I really wonder if that’s ever going to happen.

The high end model has a 192-bit memory bus, a 3 channel design. 12+6 cores but very big/big more than less big/little. 53MB L3 cache is quite healthy. 80TOps NPU (int8). 9533 MT/s 192-bit memory for 228GB/s which is nipping right at Strix Halo & Nvidia Spark's heels. 12x PCIe 5.0, 4x PCIe 4.0, and "3x USB-C" 40Gb/s (hopefully not some shared bandwidth cop out). And some kind of pretty big GPU. The specs here are quite promising.

And Qualcomm has started taking Linux drivers somewhat more seriously. Linux & mesa drivers are arriving now for previous Snapdragon X Elite & looking pretty promising. That said, this whole Device Tree world is hell, and never going to be good, and Qualcomm direly needs to get religion there & get some ServerReady type ACPI + UEFI compatibility standardized in the products, and stop OEMs from shipping these awful embedded-style non-PC things.

I'm excited to see ARM finally actually show up with something competitive. Alas though, those RAM prices. What a sad buzzkill, and man this is going to take forever to work out.

All I want is something like a Macbook Air, but running Linux - long battery life, acceptable performance, an OS that respects me.

Also curious if Battle.net client has the same bug as Apple Silicon where it consistently needs to run a game "update" after closing the game. The client is still x86 even on macOS so I'm wondering if this is an translation issue that could be fixed with a proper native client.

It’s the first Windows build with Prism and the first time they’ve introduced AVX(2) support, so I wonder simply if the performance isn’t there yet. I’ve found very little info online about this.

Besides, I'd look forward to testinf with the nea ARM emulation layer Valve is developing.

Though I am not skeptical of the authors methodology, I do suspect that the ARM64 build of WoW may not be as "optimized" as the x64 build. This is because in some of his workloads the emulated game actually outperformed the native game.