ARM64 Boot Camp

[ARM64 Boot Camp: Table Of Contents]  [Return to Emulators.com]

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Windows on ARM device benchmarks (and how they compare against their Intel counterparts)

As I mentioned in the intro, since the launch of Windows 10 on ARM in 2018 most of the major PC manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Microsoft, Samsung and Apple have launched ARM64-based computers.  As someone who has been buying and collecting personal computers since 1981 of course I have purchased as many of these as possible, duh!  Shopping in person at Best Buy and Staples, online on Amazon and manufacturer websites (such as apple.com, surface.com, and hp.com) I've acquired about a dozen such ARM64 devices through retail channels at my own expense.  These are not prototypes or pre-release hardware that I used to use at Microsoft; these are real boxed devices purchased at my expense.

I would like to give you folks a sampling of these various devices and give you my honest opinion about which ones I really like and which ones I'm not a huge fan of, what the specs of each device are, what the performance of each device is, and how much each device cost me.  For reference I will also compare against two better known Intel-based Microsoft Surface tablets to give you an idea of how ARM64 devices stack up against the more traditional Intel devices.

To give you a better idea of what the devices look like, I've recorded this 24-minute video where I show the devices in my lab.  Click on the link below to watch the video in 720p or watch the embedded 480p video:

Tour of Devices (video)

I am also summarizing the specs and performance of each devices.  To keep the summary tables below more readable, I have categorized the devices into two bins - Premium (about 1000 US dollars and up) and Economy (well under 1000 dollars).

Economy devices

I am choosing as my Intel baseline device the first Surface Go tablet which launched in 2018.  This was released during the same Windows 10 release cycle as the initial batch of Windows on ARM devices in 2018.  And importantly, Intel Pentium Gold processors that the Go uses - although based on an 8th generation Intel Core micro-architecture and thus fully Windows 11 compliant - does _not_ support the Intel AVX or AVX2 instruction set.  The Surface Go only supports running code up to SSE4.2 and AES, which conveniently is the exact same level of Intel instruction set support which both Apple's Rosetta 2 emulator and Microsoft's XTA emulators support.

As a developer, I use the Surface Go as my reference device for Windows 11 application compatibility testing, since what it implements in hardware is the x86 that Windows on ARM devices are emulating.  In a recent sampling of laptops on sale at Staples I found the Pentium Gold processor is still found today in entry-level PCs, and even the Pentium Silver as per my recent $250 Laptop Bake Off video, therefore I feel it is a good baseline to represent the "economy Intel" device.

The rest of the economy devices are all Qualcomm Snapdragon based and were launched between 2018 and 2022.

 

Manufacturer		Microsoft	Samsung	Microsoft	ASUS	Lenovo	Lenovo	HP
Device name		Surface Go	Galaxybook Go	"Volterra" Devkit 2023	Novago	Yoga C630	Miix	Envy X2
CPU vendor		Intel	Qualcomm	Qualcomm	Qualcomm	Qualcomm	Qualcomm	Qualcomm
CPU model		Pentium Gold	7cx (7180)	8cx g3 (8280)	835	850	835	835
"big" cores		2	4	4	4	4	4	4
"little" cores		0	4	4	4	4	4	4
peak clock (GHz)		1.6	2.5	3.0	2.6	3.0	2.6	2.6
year purchased			2021	2022	2018	2018	2018	2018
purchase price		250 (discount)	350	600	600	700	800	800
RAM (GB)		8	8	32	4	8	4	4
SSD (GB)			256	512	256	256	256	256
HDMI ports					1	0	0	0
USB3 ports					1	0	0	0
USB-C ports		1	1		1	2	1	1
SD card slot?					yes	yes	yes	yes
SIM slot?		no			yes	yes	yes	yes
separate power?		yes	no	yes	no	no	no	no
screen size (inches)		10		n/a
touch screen?		yes	no	n/a	yes	yes	yes	yes
higher is faster scores:
Cinebench 11 x86 ST
Cinebench 11 x64 ST
Cinebench 20 x64 ST
Darwinia frame rate
Geekbench 5.5.1 x64 ST
Geekbench 6.2.2 x64 ST
Xformer turbo (1 VM)

 

 

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