Qualcomm Halts Snapdragon Dev Kit 14
Chipmaker Qualcomm has indefinitely paused production and support of its Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows, citing quality concerns. Qualcomm says the product "has not met our usual standards of excellence." The cancellation comes shortly after the recent launch of over 30 Snapdragon X-series powered PCs.
Windows RT 2.0 (Score:3)
Seems to be a bust, but this time after 4 generations.
It isn't Windows RT (Score:2)
MS is no longer pushing Windows RT. Windows on ARM implements the full Win32 API, and can run x86 applications with a JIT compiler. You can even compile applications for ARM against a special ABI that allows an ARM application to load x86 plugins - stack frames are adapted and the plugin runs under the JIT compiler. Yes, Microsoft has reinvented Apple's Mixed Mode Manager that allowed mixing 68k and PowerPC code in a single application under classic MacOS.
The WinRT [wikipedia.org] APIs are available on all versions of W
It could be argued that... (Score:3)
...x86 is the worst possible processor architecture, but it wouldn't matter. It became the standard and there is LOTS of important, expensive x86 software out there. Backward compatibility is essential. Any new processor architecture MUST include PERFECT x86 emulation at reasonable performance. From what I've read, Snapdragon does not meet this requirement
Re:It could be argued that... (Score:5, Informative)
...x86 is the worst possible processor architecture, but it wouldn't matter. It became the standard and there is LOTS of important, expensive x86 software out there. Backward compatibility is essential. Any new processor architecture MUST include PERFECT x86 emulation at reasonable performance. From what I've read, Snapdragon does not meet this requirement
Yeah, Apple actually added an extension to the ARM spec — a special CPU mode that implements total store ordering [sciencedirect.com] for Intel emulation purposes so that you don't have to choose between unexplained crashes and performance that tanks.
Re: (Score:2)
ARM isn't exactly a new processor architecture (was using it for my desktop in 1987), and these days x86 is a rounding error by comparison. The idea of x86 compatibility being essential is a battle that was fought and lost many years ago.
Granted there might be good reasons for not running Windows on it, but some would argue there are good reasons for not running Windows on anything.
Re:It could be argued that... (Score:4, Interesting)
ARM isn't exactly a new processor architecture (was using it for my desktop in 1987)
I also bought an Acorn Archimedes 305 in 1987 (had it upgraded it to a "340" which involved desoldering the RAM chips), it was an amazing machine running circles around 80286 and 68000 systems.
It emulated x86 at release. I used it to run Prolog2 and the TopSpeed Modula-2 compiler on MS-DOS for programming assignments(*), and also for playing around with other software such as dBase II and WordPerfect. Speed on a 4 Mbyte Archimedes under emulation was comparable to an 8088: somewhat slow but quite usable. It worked fine for most text mode programs, I read at the time that somebody got an early MS Windows version working but that was too slow to be really usable, and DOS gaming was not an option since most games wanted to access the PC video hardware directly.
PC Emulator review in PCW, January 1988 [computinghistory.org.uk]
PC Emulator Installation Leaflet [computinghistory.org.uk]
(*) There also were the commercial AcornSoft Prolog X (I still have the box with manual and diskette - BTW, does anybody here know the easiest way to archive a native Archimedes formatted diskette?) and the free Humboldt University HU-Prolog running natively on ARM. A native ARM version of Modula-2 was used by Acorn internally, but they never released it.
Re: (Score:2)
... BTW, does anybody here know the easiest way to archive a native Archimedes formatted diskette?) ...
Probably not worth your while for one disk, but Greaseweazle [github.com] will do it. I've used it to archive all sorts of ancient media.
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I did not know FCFS [craig-wood.com], I'll try to experiment with it on a Raspberry running RISC OS Open 5, or on MiSTer FPGA running RISC OS 3.
Re:It could be argued that... (Score:4, Funny)
They literally have Google Drive not working. That is on the 4th and most hyped generation from the second coming of ARM Windows.
Re: (Score:3)
After correcting for process, the differences between these wide superscalar processors with massive caches is negligible ... and the PITA of switchin ISAs was a silly diversion for Microsoft, for the second time. Microsoft always copies Apple in the worst possible way, they don't play to their own strengths.
I feel sorry for Qualcomm, the architecture seems solid, but there is simply no market for it.
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I feel sorry for Qualcomm, the architecture seems solid, but there is simply no market for it.
A faster RPi?
Windows Dev Kit 2023 (Score:2)
Wow... I guess that Windows Dev Kit 2023 isnt' such a bad little machine after all... :-)