First ARM-based ThinkPad about to ship - end of Qualcomm’s exclusivity and M1 Bootcamp coming?

[bobcomer]

It has a Snapdragon processor, which is made by Qualcomm, so we don't know anything that way yet.

As for Bootcamp, never. The boot environment if the M1 is totally incompatible with Windows on Arm.

Lenovo has shipped android tablets for some time...

As for non surface Windows in Arm PCs, Lenovo's isn't the first by a long shot. It's just the first in a quality line of laptops for Lenovo. (Thinkpad)

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[nickf1]

Good catch on the processor, didn’t see that.
However I wouldn’t be that categorical on bootcamp support. If MS allows other OEMs to use Windows, Apple will do the necessary work to let Windows boot on M1, the same way they did it on intel back in 2006/2007. There is so much demand for this that they will do it, it’s in their best interest to attract as many people to the Mac as they can, and if that means allowing Windows to run they will.

 

[bobcomer]

Good catch on the processor, didn’t see that.
However I wouldn’t be that categorical on bootcamp support. If MS allows other OEMs to use Windows, Apple will do the necessary work to let Windows boot on M1, the same way they did it on intel back in 2006/2007. There is so much demand for this that they will do it, it’s in their best interest to attract as many people to the Mac as they can, and if that means allowing Windows to run they will.

They could with intel chips because they used the same boot environment. When they switched to Apple silicon, they made up their own boot environment, rather than using an established standard.

 

[maflynn]

It has a Snapdragon processor, which is made by Qualcomm,

ARM is just an architecture, and so having one ARM CPU run windows won't guarantee Apple's M1 to be able to use bootcamp. I do think the ARM cpu technology may very well upset the whole wintel market and it may only be a matter of time where windows can and will work on a wide host of ARM cpus including Apple's.

[MOD NOTE]
I want to offer my apology if notifications in this thread are messed up, I was doing some forum clean up and accidently merged this thread with a completely different and unrelated thread. I cleaned up my mistakes but its possible older notifications could be messed up. Any new notifications should be fine, but I wanted to be upfront it was my mistake.

 

[Gerdi]

I do think the ARM cpu technology may very well upset the whole wintel market and it may only be a matter of time where windows can and will work on a wide host of ARM cpus including Apple's.

It is already working on a wider range of ARMv8 systems. The prerequisites are very clear, you need to have an ARMv8 compliant CPU and GIC like interrupt controller. In addition for booting you need an ACPI compliant UEFI - which would have to be provided by Apple or someone with enough in-depth knowledge of the M1 hardware.

 

[mi7chy]

Just shift-restarted Surface Pro X into UEFI so even Windows on ARM devices have to conform to UEFI requirement. Also, Apple has to supply drivers since Microsoft won't so at this stage Apple silicon devices are designed to lock users into Apple OS ecosystem so chance of bare metal boot WoA is close to none.

 

[ADGrant]

They could with intel chips because they used the same boot environment. When they switched to Apple silicon, they made up their own boot environment, rather than using an established standard.

The boot environment did change a little with the T2 Macs. To boot off the internal SSD Bootcamp has to inject an SSD driver that can communicate with the T2 chip. An ARM64 coprocessor is not an established standard for PCs though the Playstation 4 has one too.