This week’s Snapdragon Summit has already given us the
Snapdragon 8 Elite and
Qualcomm’s retort to Intel. But there’s a lot more going on. Fans of Windows 11 on Arm, like myself, will want to really pay attention throughout the week, and not just for the expected second generation Snapdragon X chips for PCs, which
should offer significant performance improvements while using much less power.
But Microsoft and Qualcomm–and a growing legion of third parties–are working to close the few Windows 11 on Arm compatibility gaps that critics still gripe about.
I don’t get it. Windows 11 on Arm scores incredibly well across all the software I use, as it will for most people. Of course, the further you are from the mainstream, the better the chance that some esoteric app you rely on won’t run efficiently or at all under emulation. My only major issue is Google Drive, though Google has said it will make the port, and it does seem like this week is the obvious time to launch the product, if only in beta. Fingers crossed.
On the hardware end, Microsoft is fixing some compatibility issues itself and in partnership with Qualcomm. It has rewritten its MIDI stack from the ground up for Snapdragon and the MIDI 2.0 standard, with multi-client and virtual device support, and a new USB class driver. And a new USB Audio Interface with native ASIO driver will solve
the only hardware issue I experienced of note, with my Focurite Scarlett; Focusrite will issue the new drivers soon. Looks like I’m about to be completely free of software
and hardware issues. Nice.
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