Microsoft Made an Arm-based Mac mini

this is an arm-based mini computer made by Apple and this is an arm-based mini computer made by Microsoft it has now been over two years since this Mac Mini and the M1 MacBook Air the first Apple silicon based computers shipped to the public going into 2023 Apple users view them as old hat outpaced by M2 and soon to be M3 computers using a chip too dated for even an iPad but let's rewind because this 5 nanometer eight core big little design chip was inarguably groundbreaking upon its release never before had someone achieved the same performance in such a narrow power envelope it surpassed comparable offerings from Intel and AMD in both single core and multi-core performance in addition to graphics performance all the while using less energy and producing less heat than the incumbents and that ignores the fact that Apple sold the M1 as its entry-level chip meaning that if you could even find a better dollar per dollar performance you certainly couldn't do it in the same form factor as these Ultra tiny machines but that was over two years ago and the rest of the consumer Market has been desirous to catch up so could this box codenamed project Volterra be the fruit of their efforts is it something that Apple needs to watch out for speaking of watching out today's sponsor the 70 my dashcam Omni will watch out for dangers on the road and be your reliable security guard in the parking lot founded in 2016 70 my is an industry-leading auto intelligence company specializing in dash cams and the Omni is the industry's first 360 degree full view dash camera but what does that actually mean well beyond doing what you would expect a dash cam to do face forward it's 140 degree field of view and 340 degree rotating swivel allows it to intelligently look out for your vehicle when parked robberies vandalism or the innocent fender bender will be captured precisely 70 my's AI motion detection triggers recording by analyzing Behavior not just present which helps produce false 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there's also Adas which adds Advanced functionality to your average car like pedestrian and cyclist notifications Lane departure and more best yet it is very affordable relative to Market leaders so visit the link below to purchase yours today this is Project Volterra an arm-powered Windows device made by Microsoft but it's not intended for me or for any other consumer because like the Apple developer transition kit remember that weirdo Mac Mini that used an iPad chip inside of it before the M1 was announced yeah well this too is strictly intended for developers to develop compile and test apps forearm on arm the difference however between the windows dev kit and the apple dtk is that well anyone can buy this and I did for 599 dollars I don't have to give it back either and I didn't have to sign an NDA at least I don't think so so that obvious easily means that I'm going to have to open it and luckily so doing is quite easy four visible hex screws hold the bottom of the case in place and then removing them allows us to just easily pop off the cover the only thing on the back cover itself is a pad to transfer thermal energy from our tiny 20 to 30 sized SSD as for the other half this thing is uh well it's weird the first [Music] what that you notice is that many of the connectors on this board have not been landed and I suspect it is because this is the exact same motherboard found inside the Surface Pro 9 tablet this suspicion is further cemented in fact given that the dev kit has two USBC poking out the side of the device which is kind of weird and with the same spacing as the Surface Pro tablet so yeah this is the same board but where this kit deviates from the surface is expanded rear i o this is handled through a daughter board and a weird one at that the i o selection in general is strange you've got three USB a gigabit Ethernet over USB and for your monitor should you not elect to use DisplayPort over USBC a single old Mini DisplayPort which actually needs to even be used for bios configuration and a couple other things like that it's it's weird another Oddity is well the fact that there's room sufficient for a much much more common 2280 sized SSD but there's no standoff to accommodate one they've used the same smaller more expensive 20 to 30 sized SSD found inside the surface laptops now another big area where this machine has deviated from Microsoft's portable consumer devices is memory this kit ships with 32 gigs of RAM as standard that's quite a lot but it's designed to again accommodate workloads like running simulators and VMS compiling in the background Etc so given the hardware one would have to assume that Microsoft has at least gotten Windows to a point of usability where development could be possible correct well yeah mostly look windows for arm isn't new versions have existed in one iteration or another since RT an arm specific version of Windows 8 designed for the original Microsoft Surface yes I forgot too but the first surface device ran an arm-based Nvidia Tegra 3 not an x86 chip from Intel or AMD now despite this Microsoft itself neglected arm development and even upon the launch of the Service Pro X in 2019 there was a shocking number of crucial system apps that just straight up lacked arm binaries well that is no longer the case with Windows 11 virtually every Stock app is arm capable to boot this is fantastic unfortunately support Beyond first party is quite Grim now there are a handful of third-party apps that support arm that have been updated recently a beta version of Spotify adobe's Photoshop zoom and select few others additionally Progressive web apps are also supported within the edge browser which is native to Windows so Instagram Netflix and Twitter they all run natively even if it's just a fancy web wrapper then there's a bunch of apps from the RT days having gone years and years without updates but that's still typically function and most of these are frankly games so this is unfortunate but it's not unprecedented even two years later a few popular Mac apps have still not made the transition to arm and in those instances well the Mac just falls back on Rosetta it's x64 to arm translation layer and as of last year Microsoft also offers x64 emulation in Windows and despite the rumors it's actually not that dissimilar from Rosetta 2. it is quite capable of both ahead of time and just in time compilation and in our testing well we experienced that running in an emulated mode we were getting 50 to 80 percent of the performance of the Native versions should they exist which is actually it's it's honestly not that much worse than Rosetta Rosetta averages about 70 to 90 percent of native efficiency on the Mac so that sounds pretty good but where we did notice a large discrepancy and I mean a big one is compatibility I've run into just one app that didn't translate well using rosetta in the last two and a half years after just a few hours with Microsoft's emulation layer we experienced a number of crashes and failures Dolphin Emulator the x86 version refused to run for more than a few minutes before crashing and the arm version wasn't much better Discord and slack were both hilariously laggy despite the fact that these are frankly just electron absent could be made native arm Chrome's rendering was much slower than native performance and would often fail to load elements altogether ignoring that and that's a really big thing to ignore but ignoring that all things being equal translation was of similar efficiency good job Microsoft except for don't mistake efficiency for performance because these two computers are not comparable in terms of performance in our testing the M1 continually destroyed the Qualcomm hcx gen 3 found in the Microsoft dev kit on average we found that the nerd box was anywhere from 20 to 50 percent slower than Apple's chip in multi-core performance and in single core performance it was often even worse to put into perspective how much faster the M1 is than the chip used in the Microsoft dev kit let's put two scenarios front and center okay the first scenario is this at WWDC this year Apple announced that you can now run Intel x86 binaries using Rosetta from within a Linux VM in Mac OS on Apple silicon I know that's loaded but hang with me here Mac OS is booted you're running a Linux VM and you can run an x86 binary using Rosetta inside of Linux virtualized in Mac OS it's bananas so I did just that I installed an Ubuntu VM on my M1 Mac Mini I executed a few commands to allow the interception of x8664 binaries and I installed a geekbench even running an x86 Rosetta translation inside of a Linux VM from within Mac OS the M1 handily outperformed the native windows for arm performance of the Snapdragon hcx gen 3. so that's not so good but it gets even worse with our second scenario I elected to run Windows for arm itself as a virtual machine using Parallels for mac and yet again the M1 virtualizing Windows handily outperformed Microsoft's native performance using their own dev kit but maybe I'm just being a little bit hard on the poor Microsoft sq3 SOC after all this is a chip designed for the Microsoft Surface Pro a laptop and arm chips are known for their efficiency so maybe Microsoft is just at our performance per watt then apple is using less energy overall so we hooked each system up to a watt meter and nope both systems squeeze out about 28 Watts under load and at idle the dev kit actually uses more energy than the M1 more energy to do half the work that's not so good but before you accuse me of losing the plot let's Circle back to the point that yes I'm aware this is not intended for consumers like you and me this is not a benchmark machine this box is designed to run Visual Studio 2022 which gives developers the ability to write build and run a number of workloads for arm on arm but how sad is it that buying a Mac Mini to develop for Windows is only marginally more expensive but a vastly better experience than buying the official Dev box produced by Microsoft and here's the craziest part I feel for Microsoft they've got a ways to go but Windows 11 for arm is actually generally pretty decent it has come a long way from where it was in 2019 but the hardware it's abysmal it's not even scratching the surface of what Apple's worst chip accomplished nearly three years ago and I don't know if Microsoft can convince developers to bring their apps to arm if there's only one company Qualcomm making a remotely competent chip and competent is generous again it's it's based on a three-year-old Android chip that's several years behind Apple's best I don't see developers jumping at the bit to bring stuff to arm and if there's lackluster third-party software support what will other chip makers be keen on developing arm socs to compete with Qualcomm I don't know Microsoft really cares about the future of arm you can tell and I think it's because they have to care but they also need everyone else to if anything is going to happen and it doesn't look like that's the case this dev kit it ain't it and the worst part is that apple is showing no signs of slowing down either well if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't well tell me in the comments what didn't you like and you can leave a thumbs down I don't care whatever thanks so much for watching but most importantly and as always stay snazzy

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 871,484

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, microsoft, dev kit, microsoft dev kit, microsoft arm, windows on arm, windows arm, windows 11 for arm, windows for arm, arm, apple silicon, macos vs windows, mac arm vs windows, apple silicon vs microsoft windows, qualcomm, x86, rosetta, jit compiler, aot compiler, emulation, virtual machine, linux, windows, mac os

Id: cIOZuY-fi5E

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 16 2022