This week has seen the Qualcomm Snapdragon 2024 Summit taking place in Hawaii and a slew of exciting news is starting to appear in its wake. Windows for ARM has been around for a number of years now, ever since its first appearance under the “Windows RT” banner back in 2011 and continuing through to its latest Windows 10 & Windows 11 on ARM builds. So far, uptake seems limited in its scope until you note that Microsoft has had an agreement with Qualcomm directly to build ARM chips for Windows computers, which in turn has kept the platform as a relatively niche offering up until now.
This is looking to change this year as the agreement first penned in 2016 reaches its conclusion and the market place is to be opened up to other competing hardware venders. Announcements have been appearing over the last 12 months regarding the road ahead with new processors coming from heavyweights like Nvidia and AMD but its Qualcomm’s latest partnerships that have been picking up the headlines with new laptop ranges from the likes of Acer, Asus, DELL, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and once more Microsoft themselves, all looking to feature either the Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus chips.
The move to ARM promises many changes and initially a lot of the focus is on the new “NPU” (Neural Processing Unit) component found in Microsoft Co-Pilot ready silicon that has been snatching the headlines. The addition of this new co-processor may open up new avenues for off-loading various processing tasks, with an early example of this appearing in the Djay Pro software from Algoriddim, where the NPU is capable of handling the on the fly processing of the software’s STEM’s functionality. Indeed, over time we would expect further functionality to be developed to take advantage of this extra processing ability from many more audio applications as adoption of this new tech continues to spread
In the short term however, it’s the underlying design of the RISC silicon used in the ARM design that may prove to offer sizable benefits to average recording musician. Just like the existing “M” series Apple based processors that are also based around a RISC silicon design, Qualcomm and other chip developers have been touting improved efficiency over regular X86 based CPU designs, resulting in hardware that features low power usage and in turn requires less active cooling than the chips you may find in your PC today. The potential for more powerful mobile solutions, with longer battery lives and near silent operation is no doubt attractive to many users anyone whether recording on the move or just in their own studio.
Further to the general announcements made at the Snapdragon Conference itself, a number of a musician focused features have been raised and reported by Microsoft’s own principal engineer within the Windows Developer Platform team Pete Brown, including the fact that various software developers have already announced ARM ready software builds of their key studio applications.
- Cockos Reaper already available in preview today
- Previews of both Steinberg Cubase and Nuendo launching in preview later this week
- Reason Studios to launch the Reason preview in early 2025
Reaper once more leading the charge if only by a few days, but it’s exciting to see all three firms devote themselves to bringing ARM ready ports of their software at such an early stage in the cycle. The Steinberg announcement arrives not only heralding native versions of their software, but along with the fact that Yamaha who develop their hardware are also at the forefront here, as both Steinberg (Yamaha) and Focusrite have announced their own dedicated ASIO drivers optimized for ARM will be coming over the course of 2025.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SALIz428JM[/youtube]
Steinberg showing off Cubase and IXO22 interface running natively on a Snapdragon based laptop, using the inbuilt drivers.
However, it doesn’t end there as through a collaboration between Microsoft, Qualcomm and Yamaha we can expect to see a brand new native USB Audio Class 2 driver within windows, which promises to add support for both WaveRT (Windows ARM native audio) along with ASIO itself into the OS. What this means is that we may expect to see low latency audio support within Windows out of the box when working with an USB interface on a Snapdragon based system. This is more in line with the Apple environment, where class compliant audio interfaces can run without the need of third party drivers, at least when it comes to USB. This initially will be limited to USB devices as PCIe or other connection methods will still require further work to achieve this degree of plug and play readiness, although firms can of course continue to develop and optimize their own drivers for further functionality or performance reasons.
Further to this is the note that whilst previews of these drivers will become available for developers and users alike throughout 2025, with further development then being discussed to back-port these new improvements over to the regular X86 version of Windows as well. The result of this in the mid-term looks like it will finally give us a degree of audio standardization across the Windows platform much like Core audio has for Apple, which in turn should help to make the setting up of new hardware in the studio a breeze for users going forward.
Ultimately for the end user the key here is keeping things simple and letting you get on with just writing music. None of this would be attractive if you came across limitations and with that in mind, what about your existing plugins?
Compatibility with existing Intel architecture apps has been an important concern throughout the development of Windows on ARM and many of your existing Windows developed plugins look to just slot into these new DAW versions and run as normal. However, developers may choose to do further work or simply recompile the code directly for native ARM setups to get best results in terms of performance and battery life when running on the new hardware.
For users already on the PC platform and perhaps looking for an ultra mobile laptop solution, to run alongside their existing PC desktop, this should allow you to easily move between devices and maintain a similar setup on both machines, whilst still being able to leverage the best parts of each platform.
Of course, studio machines rarely work in isolation and being able to effectively communicate with the outside world is also important. Included in amongst the announcements is for native support to be included for the latest 2.0 iteration of the MIDI standard, complete with it’s increased resolution, expanded control options and improved timing accuracy, all helping to ensure that the platform handles itself as effortlessly when dealing with other devices outside of the system as it does within the box.
These are exciting developments as Apple’s move to the M series platform successfully re-invigorated their offerings and helped them to carve them a fresh niche in what was an fairly stagnant market. Intel and AMD have both continued to advance their offerings in the years since and whilst they can often maintain the lead in raw performance, it does tend to come at the expense of higher levels of power usage overall. Here we see the potential for not only more efficient PC chips that may give the Apple hardware a serious run for its money, but it also leads the way for other new players to enter the CPU market and shake it up.
Potentially with half a dozen new firms working towards their own CPU ranges, we could be looking at a fresh period of innovation, along with keener pricing as they proceed to battle it out for new market share. The revolution is almost upon us and it just might be time for PC users to take up ARMs and join the fight.
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