I havn’t really closely followed neither the whole windows on ARM story, nor its Rhino on ARM counterpart, so bear with me if I am asking stupid questions.
The announcement of nvidia’s Spark laptops today seems very interesting from a hardeware point of view. Basically Mac ARM like system integration coupled with Nvidia RTX graphics cores with unified RAM of up to 128 GB. All this with Mac like (all day) battery life.
Let’s just pretend all this is true: this sounds like dream hardware (coupled with nightmare AI-windows-privacy-loss? - whp knows?)
What would one have to expect from running windows on an arm based machine?
How well does Rhino run?
What about plug-in compatibility?
Is there a compatibility layer that can run older windows software?
If yes, would this work with older plug-ins, that is Rhino Arm running older plug-ins in compatibility layer?
Probably some questions that have been answered somewhere on this forum, but I though this hardware announcement deserved a seperate thread.
Thanks for putting this in the right space, @wim !
From what I understand, like on the Mac with Rosetta, windows on arm has the possibility to run intel binaries on Arm hardware. Rhino will run in that way on Arm-based hardware.
One of the main reasons to switch to Direct3D for the next major version of Rhino is better driver support for Arm-based systems.
I remember that people tested windows virtualization on some new Macbook, I guess it was when the M4 came out and it benchmarked better than most native windows machines.
If Nvidia can pull of something similar that would be awesome.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Anyway, these machines will probably be heartbleedingly expensive, but than again so are all capable windows laptops nowadays.