Win 10 can run on ARM CPU's. How will it run Blender?

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#1

Microsoft is enabling Windows 10 to support ARM chips directly by building an emulator into the operating system. Devices will be able to run x86 win32 applications like Chrome or Photoshop, but Microsoft won’t be emulating x64 variants of these apps. That’s not a huge problem as not many apps have been compiled for x64 instructions, and most that have also have an x86 counterpart. What this means is you’ll be able to buy a lightweight laptop with good battery life and support for Windows desktop apps next year.

I wonder if custom boards with 10-20 ARM cpus can render with minimal wattage and heat. What do you blenderheads think?

#2

32 bit x86 Apps only…

#3

Blender can already run on ARM processors without any code changes (as seen in the Raspberry Pi thread in the Tests forum).

Now whether or not it’d be trivial to run Windows builds on ARM remains to be seen.

#4

apologies… but to me it seems more of a marketing strategy, continuation & evolution of idiocracy

  1. to keep the prices of an old tech high
  2. prolong the profit of investments made in the 90s
  3. propagate dependency on closed source

or maybe i’m just to long on this planet

Have Win10 on a second machine, after half a year i almost stop using it for it hurts my soul, it breaks my peace, it invades my heaven
:slight_smile:
exaggerating a bit, but yeah… no, thank you very much, i’ll continue evolving my skills

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#5

Exaggeration or not, if your spirituality is being impacted by something as trivial as the OS on your computer, then you really need to examine where you are in life.

I get that a lot of Linux fans love to hate Microsoft, but this is going beyond that.

2 Likes
#6

lets make windows great again!

#7

To me I see a vast improvement to the lower end Windows laptops/tablets.

The high end ARM CPU’s already perform better than Intel’s atom processors, and in a device that can dissipate some heat, probably better than the Core M CPU’s.

This should allow cheaper, faster and longer battery life vs the low end Intel processors. Good for Microsoft/Windows. Good for those who like to use Windows (which is a significant amount of people)

#8

@Ace, don’t take my statements so personal.
My machine is just a tool… and i don’t want to have all the bloat for the sake of conforming to their marketing and suggestive propaganda strategies. Is it not my choice to have a protection, browser, speaker, custom tools, running or not…? They mainly sell tools, yet don’t offer any warranty so why do they insist of correcting my way of administration?
Let it go… was just expressing my experience.

@zeealpal, this i certainly endorse, i just don’t like taking the freedom and suggestions that come along…

Like it or not it’s here, it will be welcomed well.
So have joy :slight_smile:

#9

I was thinking more of the price of an arm cpu vs an intel cpu. A cluster of arm cpu’s can maybe outperform intel i7 with the price point.

#10

I would also like to look more into the die area in mm^2 vs performance of Intel CPU’s vs the Snapdragons in this case, as that reflects the ‘silicon’ cost of each processor, and how efficient/well designed they are.

Looking here you can see that (i7 6700k) could easily be an 8 core for the same manufacturing cost, if they replaced the iGPU with more CPU cores.

Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Block-Diagram.jpg1056×725 191 KB

In the long run, how efficient an architecture is vs the silicon it requires all relates to power draw, performance etc… Unfortunately x86 has quite a lot of legacy instructions it must support, as well as the extra decoding required due to the CISC complexity.

#11

Keep in mind that it is emulation, and although that’s quite an achievement, running on baremetal is always faster.
So i wouldn’t recommend to run something as demanding as blender is, on such systems.

though if blender could run straight run on such systems (no x86) exmulation, then maybe it could be faster.
but i think those systems will be more targeted to laptop’s PDA’s running a browser and some light office version.

#12

might be in pointless for blender but i like the idea of playing widows games…

#13

Would you want it to run blender?

#14

This thread is a few years old now but looking at ARM today this is feasible with good result. A snapdragon 835 got 1.6 in cinebench. The Snapdragon 855 has 3 times faster CPU score than the Snapdragon 835.

In theory it should be as fast as an Intel i5. Apple’s ARM is even faster.

#15

I think that blender can be easily compiled to run in the arm architecture. I think the problem is that most of these devices don’t support the full opengl api.

#16

Is that necessary for a cycles render node? At least the the snapdragon 855 has OpenGL ES 3.2. I don’t know if that is enough to run blender.

#17

i dont know about cycles but for eevee is more than enough
both snapdragon 835/845/855 support opengl es3.2, vulcan,opencl 2.0 ,directx12
so from api standpoint there is nothing holding back
i want like crazy blender 2.8 on android