Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed today we have some very interesting benchmarks to go through I have in my hands the HP Envy x2 which is the very first Windows on arm device to hit the market that means this very tablet is not powered by an Intel or AMD x86 processor but an ARM based Qualcomm SOC you typically find in a smartphone now you might remember Microsoft's efforts to get Windows running on ARM chips way back at the launch of Windows 8 with the variant of the OS known as Windows RT this OS and the products that ran it was some of the biggest failures in Windows history to the embarrassment of Microsoft and that was all down to one simple fact you couldn't run x86 desktop apps so you were limited to using the crappy apps found in the Windows Store and it's really no wonder no one wanted to use Windows RT this time around things are different with the new windows on arm devices you can actually run desktop x86 apps through emulation which makes the whole platform actually useful apps in the Windows Store will still provide the best experience as most are you WP apps that natively support arm but if you need to run your favorite desktop apps that should be possible in this new iteration provided you don't run into the many limitations of Windows on arm for starters only 32-bit apps can be emulated at least for now programs that only have a 64-bit version will not work at all x86 drivers of any kind are not supported which is fine for plug-and-play peripherals with generic Windows drivers but anything that requires a specific driver will not work unless there's an arm 64 driver available which is pretty unlikely the list of limitations continues games that use a version of OpenGL in newer than 1.1 won't work games that use anti-cheat technology probably won't work apps that customize windows may not work hyper-v is not supported at all for running virtualized environments and even some are Maps that assume you are using phone won't work so the question on everyone's mind windows on arm is what actually does work and how well does it work I'm going to go through some benchmarks first exploring both emulated x86 and native arm performance and then discuss some more general thoughts on the platform we had and boy you're in for a ride with this one if you've seen my laptop coverage before I tend to run a wide range of benchmarks covering many different common workloads however with Windows on arm the limitations of the platform means a chunk of these benchmarks don't work some didn't work as they were 64-bit only and others didn't work for unknown reasons several benchmarks that I normally run also as a 64-bit up I needed to redownload as 32-bit to get working in some terms those still didn't work bc mark eights home tests for example works but the creative test crashes and the work test takes so long it's pointless to run pc mark 10 launches but the standard test is not supported Cinebench r15 is 64-bit only and doesn't run premier is also a 64-bit only app these days blender has a 32-bit version but requires opengl 2.1 so it doesn't work matlab stopped providing a 32-bit version recently but older x86 versions i tried didn't work and sandra doesn't work as i believe it needs to use an x86 driver so that's eight benchmarks that don't work while nine that I'd normally test with do work so roughly half there my experiences with real world apps was a little better than this you know it's K apps for me like Chrome Photoshop Excel Word Netflix Plex and Steam or work but my problems with benchmarks do give you an idea of how compatibility is an issue with windows and arm even though x86 emulation is supported let's talk performance now because it really doesn't get better when looking at how fast x86 emulation is the nvx to uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SOC which is 2017 flagship smartphone SOC packing eight cores split into two clusters there's four cryo to 80 CPU cores clocked at 2.45 gigahertz along with four cryo to 80 efficiency cores clocked at 1.9 gigahertz there's also an Audrina 540 GPU clocked at 710 and both the CPU and GPU are designed in-house at Qualcomm and of course the SOC is fabricated at 10 nanometers my Envy x2 review unit and is worth mentioning this has 8 gig of ram although many units include is 4 gig and there's also 256 gig SSD inside so starting off with pc mark eights home test and immediately it's not a good news for windows on arms emulated performance one of the cheapest and slowest intel chips you can get in a mobile form factor the gold montt based seller on n 3450 is 51 % faster here 51 % the core i5 5200 you from 3 years ago is a hundred and eighty-two percent faster while the i7 7 y 75 intel's current low-power core offering is a hundred and sixty percent faster it's pretty significant and it doesn't get better in city bench are eleven point five and yes we had to go back to our eleven point five testing as there is actually a 32-bit version of that benchmark the snapdragon 835 is more competitive against the n thirty four fifty but the N thirty four fifty still pulls ahead by six percent the 7y seventy five more than doubles its multi-core performance and just forget about comparing it to something like the i7 7500 you or i 78552 it just gets obliterated on a more concerning note single core performance is extremely weak from the snapdragon 835 while running emulated workloads the N thirty four fifty doubles it's single thread performance while the i7 7 y seven five is more than five times faster yep five times faster absolutely dire results for Windows and arm emulation so far in fact doing any sort of rendering is very slow on the Snapdragon 835 the N thirty four fifty slaughters windows on arm emulation in x264 and x265 rendering and again the N thirty four fifty is one of the slowest intel chips you can get moving on to photoshop and wow i actually thought we know zona emulated performance would be weak but this is something else the large 288 megapixel test photo we use absolutely chokes the Snapdragon 835 this is something I noticed while trying to work with several other large files and datasets the Snapdragon 835 is simply not built for these tasks especially while emulated there are some benchmarks where windows on arm performance isn't as embarrassing compression and decompression is solid provided as multi-threading with a snapdragon 835 beating the N 30 450 handily in WinRAR and in 7-zip decompression in tells other CPUs are much faster but hey at least Windows on arm gets a small win here it's similar in the Excel Monte Carlo workload where the Snapdragon 835 is a pretty significant 62 percent faster than the end of 3450 but only marginally slower than the i5 5200 you the i7 7 y 75 is still 47 percent faster in this test though any GPU related workloads including games tend to be the least reliable on windows on arm however some 3d mark tests do work and the results aren't too bad for the snapdragon 835 in the more CPU limited Cloud Gate test the 835 beats the N 3450 though it does get trapped by the i7 + 7 Y 75 and the margin between the a 35 and the N 30 450 gets largely in skydiver as the GPU becomes the bottleneck though again the 7y 75 is significantly faster so by now you will realize that windows on our performance is rather terrible if you need to emulate an x86 app in most situations the Snapdragon 835 can't match or even come close to the Celeron n 3450 while the faster core i7 7 y 75 utterly embarrasses the qualcomm SOC these Intel CPUs have the advantage of running x86 code natively and boy is that a significant advantage however there are some situations where you can and will be running native code on the ARM chip so it's fair to benchmark that performance - and see how it stacks up to roughly the same apps running on Intel's x86 CPUs again using its own native code the most interesting of the tests here are the browser tests Microsoft edge browser runs natively on arm and x86 processors while Google Chrome is x86 only it needs to be emulate here we have a selection of devices running the octane benchmark in both chrome and edge and I've included the Google pixel to excel smartphone in here as well just to see how it all stacks up to the snapdragon 835 running it's pretty decently in a phone the results here really highlight the difference between emulated and native code well not a like-for-like as edge and chrome is different rendering engines chrome performance is terrible on the MV x 2 compared to edge in contrast CRO manager roughly equivalent on the m30 450 while chrome is much faster on the core i5 5200 you and yes I'm using the old I 550 200 you hear as we know the latest cable they processes will destroy the snapdragon 85 the important thing to note here is the Envy x2 trades blows with the N 3450 when looking at the edge results while the i5 5200 you is just 37% faster it's also good to see the windows on arm edge results matching what we saw on the smartphone side which suggests everything is working as expected switch windows on arm to running on an emulated version of Chrome and it gets annihilated by the Intel devices in this test in Basemark web 3.0 it's a similar situation using edge gives the snapdragon 835 a handy advantage allowing it to beat the m30 450 and come closer to the i5 5200 you using Chrome gives the snapdragon 835 a decent disadvantage due to emulation another uwp app I benchmark was PDF viewer plus one of the most popular PDF viewers in the Microsoft Store here windows own arm was quite competitive posting a loading time between the end 3450 and i-5 5200 which is decent considering a lot of the other results at this point you've seen all the benchmarks and all the performance numbers for the first windows on arm device powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 it's an interesting platform with some benefits as I'll get to in a moment but the performance is disappointing to say the least we're looking at uwp apps that run natively on arm the Snapdragon 835 is typically faster than the Intel Celeron and 3450 and varying degrees slower than Intel's core processes from the last few years based on limited testing admittedly certainly when you put the nvx to next to an end 3450 based device just browsing through explorer and using edge is noticeably faster with windows on arm and i think that's reflected to an extent with the benchmark results however it's not surprising to see the snapdragon 835 fall behind intel's of you and why series core processes when looking at native apps as a snapdragon 835 has a very low TDP while intel's competing chips can go as high as 15 or even 25 watts put more power into the equation and you're pretty likely to win when it comes to these sort of things however the real killer is x86 emulation performance being able to run x86 desktop apps is the key feature to this new windows on arm platform and the reason why it's more promising than the failed Windows RT even ignoring the compatibility issues for a moment x86 performance on arm chips is terrible which puts the whole platform into question at least in this early iteration when the Snapdragon 835 fails to get even close to a measly Atom based Celeron processor in a number of workloads you're not going to get a good real-world experience when use the device with a desktop app like Excel or Photoshop it's really easy to get frustrated by how sluggish laggy and unimpressive the performance is using a Celeron n 3450 is tough enough when you're used to Core i5 or i7 performance and the Snapdragon 835 is significantly worse than this now I'm sure Qualcomm or Microsoft will tell you that emulating x86 apps is meant to be a niche workload for those devices and for the most part you should be using edges your browser and uwp apps from the store for everything else and that makes sense as the performance of emulation is so bad you might want to use emulator apps very often the problem there is K apps people use on a daily basis and not available through the max of store chrome for example is the most popular browser but if you want to use it with Windows on arm prepare for a painful emulated experience now edge isn't terrible but most people would agree that it's not as good as chrome adds features or web compatibility I actually shudder at the thought of a typical non enthusiast user buying one of these devices because it looks good on paper then switching from Windows 10s to pro so that you can run desktop apps I should mention earlier actually that all windows on armed devices will ship running Windows 10s by default and then of course using edge to download Chrome as per usual and then getting stuck with horrendous performance I could go on with more examples of commonly used apps and not available natively on arm but the basic point is x86 app emulation is a key pillar to Windows on arm and the performance really is not up to scratch in its first iteration so at this point you're probably wondering why have windows on arm at all well there is a key advantage and that's battery life the nvx to last noticeably longer than other devices out there from the limited testing I've been doing even when using emulated apps Qualcomm and Microsoft both said Windows and our battery life would be fantastic and I've seen nothing from my time with it to suggest otherwise windows on our devices also support integrated LTE connections you know due to the modems in Qualcomm SOC s but this is less of an advantage of these days as some Intel power devices also have integrated LTE the Envy x2 is also unbelievably quick at waking from sleep and processing Windows hello facial recognition so I guess there are some heavily optimized areas of performance too but my final thoughts on Windows on arm are unfortunately largely negative yeah you get fantastic battery life but in my opinion it's not worth it when the performance you get ranges from disappointing to outright terrible there aren't enough arm optimized apps but not just your thews yes but typical users wanting to run Chrome and office and even in arm optimized apps you're not going to match or even get close to the performance Intel offers with their lower power core processors the final nail in the coffin is pricing the HP Envy x2 we use for testing is unfortunately a u.s. $1,000 tablet Bachelor life is fantastic at this price point but the Snapdragon 835 struggles to outperform an Intel Celeron CPU typically found in sub $300 notebooks so simply way too expensive windows and um devices are expected to sell for as low as $600 which is a much more appropriate price point but even then I don't think it offers enough value over existing Intel options for example right now you can purchase the entry-level surface pro with a court m3 processor for just 599 dollars down from its regular price of $7.99 even with just a core m3 process that the surface pro is a much more capable device that's way cheaper than the Envy x2 and it's similarly priced other windows on arm devices and if you're more after a laptop a quick search on Amazon brings up mid-range laptops with is significantly more powerful Core i5 8250 you for less than $600 this puts the first iteration of Windows on arm in a precarious position the price to performance ratio simply isn't there at the moment and it's compounded by compatibility issues I could possibly see windows and arm becoming a solid niche option for basic users that want great battery life and a content browsing the web using edge and running you WP apps but devices would have to stay around $600 or ideally push even cheaper for that option to be attractive and I'm not sure the goal of Windows on arm is to cement itself as an entry level experience for this platform to really succeed I think two things need to happen firstly Qualcomm and other arm partners need to release notably faster chips at a similar level of power consumption which sounds pretty difficult but we do have chips like the Snapdragon 845 already in the wild and secondly the x86 emulation engine needs to be refined significantly with a focus on performance and 64-bit compatibility there are some promising signs here if you look closely enough and this platform has much better foundations of Windows RT ever did but right now it's hard if not impossible to recommend jumping in as a consumer and that's disappointing considering the discussion around the platform when it was first announced I will have a full review of the HP Envy x2 coming up soon and for what it's worth HP has actually delivered a really nice piece of hardware here it's a shame they've been let down by Qualcomm and Windows and arm in general but I guess that's the risk you take in launching an early adopter product anyway more on that later give us like if you enjoy this windows on arm analysis subscribe for more and I'll catch you in the next one