24 T3 MARCH 2022Horizon
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Not yet. Oh, dear reader,
not yet. Guru has recently
tested a Samsung Galaxy
Book Go, which pushes Windows 11
onto the most unwilling frame of
the Snapdragon 888 processor, and
there just isn’t enough power there
for your £350. While there’s a
translation layer that will do its
darndest to get every app running,
it’s dog slow. Also, and this has
nothing to do with Windows-on-
ARM, but the screen on the Galaxy
Book Go is just about the worst
panel GaGu has ever used – and
he’s old enough to have worked
with the original colour LCD
displays on laptops.This is part of the problem
Windows, and the PC market in
general, will always face. There’s
literally no opportunity for an
all-hands-on-deck Apple pivot, the
most recent of which allowed the
company to completely revise its
platform for the fourth time and
utterly eclipse the performance of
x86 by using ARM instead. The PCgrows, it improves, but it is based
on fundamentally the same
architecture as it was in the late
’70s. Changing the formula – see
Windows RT, which somehow
managed to make Windows 8 even
worse – has not yet worked.
Okay, Windows itself runs fine on
ARM. But as long as Qualcomm has
the exclusive licence there can be
no platform competition, and while
everything surrounding the core OS
is so scuffed few manufacturers are
going to bother to take the risk on
ARM machines. Guru has no doubt
that x86/ARM hybrid processors
could be an option in the future – at
this point, though, just no.I’m tired of x86. Is Windows-on-ARM worth trying?
JOWAIN JONES, BARRYThe PC grows, it improves, but
it is based on fundamentally
the same architecture as it was
in the late ’70s
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