Matisyahu's Blog

Yesterday I went down to my local computer outlet to help mum purchase a few much needed items and while I was down there I had a look at what was on offer in the way of customer built computer. I was having a look at the Dell desktop as outlined in a previous post but the problem is that the Intel CPUs are very much lagging behind what AMD is putting out. Why do I care about the gap? because my concern is about system of legivity – buy a computer and keep it for many years which is the same reason why I ensured my sister bought a AMD Zen 5 based laptop and the computer mum has (from Beelink) makes use of the latest AMD processor based on the Zen 5 platform.

What I am looking at is a customer built on with an AMD CPU and AMD graphics card in a minimalist case and what I have found is that it is a lot better value for money than what I’d buy from a big name vendor like Dell which is funny given that years ago it used to be the opposite (the reason for the big name computer assemblers being cheaper was the economies of scale advantage they had over smaller New Zealand based computer assemblers).

Just on a side note regarding Windows on ARM, one thing to keep in mind is when talking about the slow adoption is the fact that when Windows came to ARM in the form of Windows RT the requirement was that the applications had to be sold through the store and that they had to be re-written using the WinRT framework thus leaving millions of lines code having to be ported not to mention the fact that the resources required were unlikely to be offset with future sales. Then when they did make Windows 10 available for ARM which allowed win32 applications to be easily ported then the other problem being the lack of competitive hardware. Fast forward to June 2024 when the first serious ARM based laptop was shipped in the form of the Surface Laptop 7 which made use of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite which was based on Oryon architecture.

Fast forward a year we’re starting to see big names like Adobe take Windows on ARM seriously because they understand that if Apple’s market share grows because of it’s own ARM offer due to it’s efficiency advantage over x86 then it puts their own business dependent on a single platform. Expect more software companies to follow with the first group being those who are offering multiplatform applications and then eventually everyone else. It isn’t going to happen overnight but I think that eventually, especially once nVidia step into the market with their own solution, that will definitely see a spike particularly when it comes to software titles that make use of the CUDA framework. I also wonder to what extent are we going to see Sony and Microsoft adopt ARM based processors because from what I understand AMD still has an ARM licence with rumours of them working on ARM based cores in the background so we could see either AMD or nVidia ARM based SoCs become mainstream for games consoles and game handhelds.