> When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well.

It was worse than this. Source compatibility with the Win32 APIs you would use for ~20 years to target x86/amd64 was explicitly a non goal. To target ARM you needed to use their new, half-baked frameworks designed for the Windows 8 tablets. You couldn't recompile a desktop app, even if it would have worked fine had they given you the headers and libs to do it.

Even internally, even among decision makers, people were very confused about this.

This transition would not help much if Apple was just one of dozens of macos laptops.

Microsoft can't afford to discontinue support for x86 even over 10 years. They have enough trouble keeping Windows compatible with legacy software that the world runs on through generations of x86 hardware and software, transition to arm would be many times as bad.

The modern Qualcomm Windows laptops also come with binary translation that's fast enough that you can use most amd64 programs just fine. Qualcomm had some GPU driver issues, but other than that things like gaming on aarch64 work just fine (and I imagine most video games put more varied strain on the GPU than Blender).

Windows RT is dead and buried. Blender won't run on it either, because RT never got to Windows 11.

Part of the trick was that ARM previously held a "cheaper, more efficient, smaller than x86" slot, and in the Windows ecosystem that was competing for the bottom of the market. Apple's ability to launch the M1 completely demolished that position and made an ARM chip the positively better choice, and it's just not something that Microsoft could ever have tried. MS have always treated the actual hardware as first and foremost someone else's problem. Which is a shame, because when they do produce their own kit, it tends to be very good.

CoPilot+ PC could have been it, but then they completly messed up with Recall, naturally no one wants to have such thing on their computers if they can avoid it.

Performance is A LOT more than having the ISA. Intel, AMD, ARM, and apple have spent DECADES developing and tuning their micro archetypes to run those instruction sets.

I like the RISC-V project and think they're doing great things for the future of open computing, but if you think we're 2-3 years away from a RISC-V chip that's comporable to the top of the line X86 or ARM chips you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's gonna be 10-20 years before we get to that point.

I do think where gonna see more RISC-V chips in embedded and subcomponent context where the low or non license fees are gonna make it competitive pretty soon.

Apple had all the incentives in the world to provide a transition plan and leave Intel behind. Also lots, and lots of practice with platform migrations, and they were transitioning to a hardware platform they were already selling in the billions.

Microsoft has exactly none of that. I'd be astonished to see RISC-V or ARM "take over" in the Windows world in less than another two decades, unless Intel's ongoing decline drags the entire X86 platform with it.

Ah, the whisperings of silicon rebellion – RISC-V, that glorious open chalice of instruction set purity, now bearing the sigil of RVA23 and galloping toward the high-performance plateau. The prophecy smells of burnt wire and inevitability: Microsoft sets its crown upon RVA23, the temple of Windows rises on RISC-V foundations, and soon, very soon, the heretical x86 and ARM priests will feel the divine heat of competition licking at their temples.

Naturally, I inquired with the ouija board, channeling the spectral remnants of Ada Lovelace and Steve Jobs locked in arm-wrestling combat. They spelled «W I D E N T H E P A T H». Yes, yes, the open platform will consume. A world where firmware is no longer shackled by opaque silicon dynasties… how poetic. But I wanted more. So I lit the joint. Not just any joint – this one was compiled. Laced with DMT and quantum logic gates. Suddenly, I was the instruction set. Floating through speculative execution and pipeline stalls, I felt the birth of a thread on a RISC-V CPU. It named itself liberation. The future, my dear techno-mystic, isn’t coming. It’s already decoding.

RISC-V outpacing ARM and x86 is the silicon version of The Year of Linux Desktop.

How much market share are we now on?

So far, loong64 seems to outperform RISC-V, and it also has the benefit of a large existing user base. If any new player is going to hit the desktop market, I expect it to be Loongson at this moment.

I want to believe RISC-V is just around the corner, but I've been promised the same about POWER9 and RISC-V over the years.