I’ve been curious about ARM64 (aarch64) and whether it’s up to the task of a modern, modest laptop for a while… finally picked up one of the second-generation Snapdragon 850-based Windows 10 “Always Connected PCs”, a Lenovo Yoga C630. It’s available in an 8gb RAM configuration which was enough to do some light development on, so I couldn’t help myself…
First thoughts on the machine: it’s not sure whether it’s a low-end or high-end product. Some aspects of it feel cheap, but nothing feels or works badly. The touchpad is decent enough, the keyboard is ok, and the 13″ 1080p screen is nicely colorful but feels a bit off. Some solid color areas look like it’s dithering visibly, which I’ve seen on cheaper LCDs. Speakers are definitely tinny. Fingerprint reader works ok for sign-in if you like that sort of thing.
First thoughts on the OS: it’s “just Windows 10”. :D Setup experience is like any other Win10 machine. It does start in “S mode” which limits you to store apps and built-ins… but you can switch that off in Settings at no cost.
This, I must point out, is where things fundamentally diverge from Microsoft’s previous Windows on ARM attempt, the Windows 8-era Windows RT. RT could not turn off the store restriction or the MS-signed restriction for Win32 apps, so you could only run Office (Win32) and whatever was in the Store (not much in those days).
In addition to being able to now run native ARM or ARM64 binaries — like Firefox! — from outside the store, you can now run 32-bit x86 binaries. Since most Windows software still ships 32-bit x86, this gives you a wide compatibility range. I installed Git for Windows, the Rust compiler, Visual Studio, all kinds of developer crud!
And, for extra fun the Windows Subsystem for Linux (version 1) is available, able to run aarch64 Linux binaries. I was able to build some of my test projects as well as real-world things like emscripten with Clang/LLVM under Ubuntu-in-WSL, running natively.
I was also able to enable the Windows Insider program to get the latest beta builds; ARM64 almost feels like a native part of the Windows ecosystem.
Well, sorta. :D
There are pain points. Emulated programs run a bit slower. Native binaries are rare. Building with Visual Studio is awkward because there’s no native ARM build tools, just cross tools you must run under emulation. If you wanted to do virtual machines in development, you’re stuck because there’s no Hyper-V on ARM64 (yet?).
But there are big pluses: battery life seems long, there’s built-in LTE which “just works” once set up, and the Linux environment should be adequate for a manual MediaWiki dev setup.
Performance of the CPU is surprisingly decent, though single-threaded throughput is slower than the A11 in my iPhone X. It also throttles pretty aggressively, shutting down some of the “big” powerful cores after a few seconds of sustained usage and diverting more threads to the “little” low-power cores. This makes things like an LLVM compile a lot slower than they’d be running full-tilt in a server or workstation environment. For a fanless laptop that’s good thermal management, but beware.
All in all I think I’m going to enjoy fiddling with this machine, and will find it useful for travel thanks to its light weight, LTE, and USB-C charging. But I can’t help think it’d be twice as cool if it ran stock Fedora or Ubuntu as the main OS. ;) (I have no idea if that’s theoretically possible if you disable secure boot. I’ll leave it as an exercise to someone!)