@Desertlap thank you so much for that level of detail it really helps a ton. I have spent so much money on tablet devices I am still hesitant to pull the trigger on this one, so one additional clarification question asked from a point of ignorance please. I do understand x86 emulation and it appears to still be making a really big difference in battery life, which in all honesty is my single main concern at this point.
So my question is in the following scenarios am I using emulation or not?
a website that is being run as an app in an edge browser
an app running within the android subsystem
OneDrive
core Microsoft Office desktop apps
And more specifically how are you determining the emulation? In the past I ran the app and then looked at the process running in task manager but not sure if that is the correct way or not. Thanks.
Web apps- native, unless they make use of a non native plug in- Those are actually fairly rare at this point with the most notable hold out being some of the more obscure videos codecs, not the mainstream such as VP9 or HEVC.
As of earlier this year the Android subsystem is completely native as it is running arm64 executables. Prior to that it did have code to run intel based android code, but they removed it several revisions back.
One drive is native now
Core MS_ apps almost all of the core Office executables except Project, and Visio. Some of the plug in such as the VBA based ones are still x86. Most common with Excel, but a few remain in in Word and Power Point as well.
We built an app with help from MS to detect and determine when apps are running fully or partially in emulation. Emulation in some core ways (pun intended) runs like a virtual machine for all intents and purposes including protected memory and reserved instruction and function calls. Our app detects those calls as well as a system flag that WOA uses whenever emulation is active.
Hope that helps.
EDIT: Also, one dead giveaway that you can see with any CPU monitoring tool, is that emulation only uses (and often pounds) the performance cores.
“I’m also loving Windows 11’s Android support. Thanks to being able to run proper tablet apps like Amazon Kindle, this has been my only tablet for the last couple of weeks, allowing me to cast both my laptop and my iPad aside.”
I still want to know if WOA is really more battery efficient, or just the fact of more battery in the larger Intel-size cage?
Seriously though and dependent on how much you use emulation, we peg it at about 25% or so even after factoring in the bigger battery in the Pro 9 versus Pro x
PS: since you use office and acrobat primarily you’d see in in the low 30s %
You also get the AI oriented cores which to start with improve video calls both in image quality and audio such as echo reduction. And as developers adopt it. even more stuff and there is now a toolkit specifically for them in Visual Studio.
PS: Cortana, if you use it is noticeably faster as are any of the Android apps you may run. In fact the Pro 9 5g is among the very fastest Android tablets if you use it that way
My apologies - should read (think) before I write - the xda author emphasized no additional battery in the WOA model - just empty space (OK MS - make that an upgrade SPECIAL and fill that puppy).
“With the Intel and Qualcomm models being called the Surface Pro 9, they need to both fit in the same cases. That means that both variants have to be designed for the least common denominator. And of course, the least common denominator is Intel. That extra space doesn’t seem to be used for anything, since both models have the same size battery.”
BTW: just so I don’t seem as all sunshine about the Pro 9 5G, one area where the Intel Pro 9 is superior is Bluetooth.
It’s not a huge difference, but both range and throughput are a bit better.(10-20%) That as much as anything is a qualcomm legacy generally, whereas Intel has really embraced it with modern core I chipsets
I think you shouldn’t be asking questions about WOA at this stage, @dstrauss. Knowing you, the next step is springing for the SP9 5g, and setting yourself up for a huge disappointment. Leave it to “coolheaded” for now😀.
