Jason Perlow
for Tech Broiler
| June 28, 2021 — 10:50 GMT (11:50 BST)
| Topic: Enterprise Software
Thanks to Windows 11, Microsoft is going to help Apple sell a lot of Silicon Macs.
Last week, I pondered the potential scenarios for PCs that would be unlucky enough to make the upgrade cutoff for Windows 11. I thought, for sure, that the cutoff would be 32-bit hardware, and most, if not all, 64-bit systems currently running Windows 10 would be able to run the updated OS.
My parents also have Windows boxes dating probably back to around 2016. They’ve been reluctant to make replacements, but they’ve also invested in various Apple gear, such as their iPhones and iPads. Considering that I have to be the one to support them, I will most likely recommend (excuse me, insist) they also move to Macs when it is time for their boxes to take the rainbow bridge.
Planning for a move to Apple Silicon
For myself, a new, powerful Mac Mini box would undoubtedly allow me to reduce my energy consumption for running a bunch of different workloads, and it would take up a lot less space than both of those big desktop systems. In addition, I could use it to replace my Dell 8900 and my HP Proliant ML10 if I had one with enough memory in it, like 32GB or 64GB. Unfortunately, Cupertino does not sell a Silicon-based system with that much memory today. Still, I think it’s not unreasonable to assume one is likely to materialize within a few months or within the next year when we see an M1X or M2 refresh.
And even though it is Arm-based, if I wanted to run Windows 10 on one of these systems today, I can run a 64-bit system virtualized using software like Parallels for Mac, with little or no performance degradation. The M1 running it virtualized allows it to run up to 30 percent faster than on a comparable Intel Mac.
Now, the Windows that runs on Parallels for M1 is the native Arm version of Windows 10 (albeit an Insider Preview), but it can run 32-bit x86 apps and 64-bit ones are forthcoming. We will know more about Windows 11 on Arm likely sometime in October when we hear about the actual release pipeline from the Surface team. So depending on one’s use case, it might make sense to hold off on buying a new Windows laptop now.
There is currently no evidence that the Arm version of Windows 11 will run flawlessly on Parallels, as the software now only supports DirectX 11, and Windows 11 is DirectX 12. But I doubt DirectX 12 will be a dealbreaker; I expect Parallels will support it when the Arm version of Windows 11 is ready.
Am I going to move my Windows workloads over to an Apple Silicon box like this tomorrow? Probably not. There isn’t even a way to license Windows 10 on an Arm-based Mac yet. But I suspect by the time I need to be able to do this, two or three years from now, it will be not only sorted out from a technical standpoint, but Microsoft and Apple will have figured out how to do this from a licensing standpoint.
Who knows? Maybe Parallels becomes a Windows 11 Arm retail distributor in this situation, as they do with the x86 version today On the other hand, maybe Windows 11 will run on Mac’s built-in hypervisor without the need for 3rd-party solutions like Parallels, and Microsoft resells it on the App Store or by some other mechanism.
Or maybe Microsoft decides it isn’t in their best interest to let consumers run Windows on Apple Silicon and never makes the ISOs or a binary distribution available — at least, that is what Ed Bott believes.
Who needs PCs that get orphaned when you have the cloud?
Or, we end up running Windows 11 workloads on Azure, which is already a valid way to run Windows today. Currently, Microsoft does this with VMs as provisioned resources on enterprise Azure accounts with the right set of Windows, Office 365, and Client Access License (CAL) entitlements. But, unfortunately, your average small business is not set up to do this today, and indeed, it is not a viable option for a one-person shop or a consumer who wants a Windows desktop in the cloud.
But two years from now, I think that is likely to be a very different story. Microsoft isn’t the only hyperscale provider with cloud Windows desktops today. This will become a very competitive space in a few years as cloud density increases due to containerization instead of VMs to run the instances. Additionally, the use of Arm server processors themselves in the cloud — courtesy of Nvidia and Qualcomm, will make them much less power-consuming. They will also be much denser computationally in terms of how you can populate racks of systems — resulting in much less expensive desktop cloud instances than what exists today.
And how to access these cloud desktop instances? You guessed it: With existing PCs, iPads, and Macs, and — when those need replacement — with thin-client, low-power, inexpensive smart terminals using Arm and open source RISC-V processors. With systems that have the complexity of a Raspberry Pi. This includes monitors with embedded systems and other solid-state, fanless devices with integrated 5G, WiFi and ethernet networking, graphics acceleration, HD sound, and 6-plus year service lives.
Something that costs around $200 as an endpoint that requires no management beyond occasional firmware updates and configuration pushes.
I’m done with x86
As the Wall Street Journal noted recently, Arm-based architecture will be a much more compelling story for PC end-users in about two years. At least in terms of looking at it from the perspective of the M1 chip today, with the latest Mac systems, they are much more powerful, computationally, per watt, and are just greener and more efficient, period — not to mention packed with Machine Learning goodness.
So I am not upgrading my PCs because who knows, based on this observed behavior, what Microsoft and Intel are going to orphan next — in the next few years, they could just as quickly dump 8th- or 9th-generation Intel chips for some arbitrary cutoff as they’ve decided for the 7th-generation. I am done with the churn.
Could Microsoft backtrack on this over the next few months based on the blowback they are receiving? Maybe, but I don’t want to play this game anymore. To quote Danny Glover’s character Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, I’m getting too old for this shit.
As I have been saying for at least a decade, 45 years with Intel architecture is enough. It’s time for me to move on. If Microsoft and their OEM partners come out with compelling Arm-based systems from Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Intel that’s competitive with Apple’s offerings in a few years, great, I’ll be happy to look at one. But for now, my plan going forward is to invest in Apple Silicon Macs and cloud services, where eventually, I think most of my Microsoft workloads will live.
Has the revelation that your 7th-Generation Intel system will not move on to Windows 11 got you steamed? Talk Back and Let Me Know.
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Jason Perlow
for Tech Broiler
| June 28, 2021 — 10:50 GMT (11:50 BST)
| Topic: Enterprise Software