Following testing in Canary earlier this year, Google today announced that the Arm/Snapdragon version of Chrome for Windows is now rolling out to stable.
Google says this version of Chrome is “fully optimized for your PC’s hardware and operating system to make browsing the web faster and smoother.” People that have been testing it report significant performance improvements over the emulated version.
↫ Abner Li at 9To5Google
A big Windows on Snapdragon Elite X is about to tumble through the tech media landscape, and this Chrome release fits right into the puzzle.
What concerns me with mass market ARM based systems is its locked down nature and closed source drivers. I would be less concerned if we also hear about upcoming Linux distros on these systems.
Linux on enthusiast ARM systems have had poor driver support so far and are mainly custom manufacturer distros. I’m not ready to jump on the whole ARM PC band wagon, until I see official Linux support. Maybe if AMD gets onboard making ARM CPUs, we might see some changes.
There are many of us who feel the same way. Going only by the capabilities, ARM CPUs have gotten very good. ARM hardware has come a long way except for one: ARM devices remain tightly coupled to vendor controlled operating systems. ARM manufacture support isn’t particularly worse than x86 manufacturer support, but ARM hardware becomes useless when the software is no longer supported. By contrast, most x86 systems can easily be re-provisioned by end users with new generic operating systems even after the manufacturer looses interest.
If I ran ARM, solving this would be a top priority. They do have the “system ready” initiative, but the problem is it isn’t used in consumer products. I think the culprits here are the manufactures who’s incentives don’t align with strong vendor interoperability standard. 🙁
FWIW Qualcomm has contributed a lot of support for Snapdragon Elite to the Linux kernel and LLVM. I don’t know if Linux is going to be a first class citizen since these are geared initially towards Windows on ARM devices. But Google Chromebooks are also a target market, so we’ll see.
Considering that people got Linux working on Apple Silicon without too much trouble I’m optimistic about it in ARM PC case as well.
Totally get not wanting to jump on the bandwagon until it’s actually open of course.
Microsoft is a Wintel company and this won’t change, like ever.
Microsoft themselves supported multiple architectures many times in the 90s, it’s just that they never took off. Ultimately Microsoft will do whatever they think will make them money. Just look at their current open source and Linux efforts.
Microsoft has no real intentions to undermine their Wintel position hence their efforts with ARM shouldn’t be taken seriously in a sense that they are targeting beyond negligible market share.
Alas, these compute Snapdragon SKUs are 1 year late. So Windows on ARM devices are going to still have little to no clear value proposition to Windows on x86 devices, since intel and AMD are going to release their laptop SoCs on a similar process, on a similar timeline.
Traditionally windows on non-x86 platforms have never gone anywhere significant in terms of market share within the windows ecosystem. Even back in the day, when non-x86 windows platforms like AXP had a clear performance advantage.