Microsoft Preps Windows 11 26H1 For A New Breed Of Snapdragon X2 & NVIDIA N1 Silicon
What new silicon? Microsoft doesn't actually say, but we'd put good money on it being Arm hardware, and especially the two we named in the headline: Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite series and NVIDIA's long-awaited N1. The former put up some truly world-beating performance numbers at its reveal event a couple of months ago, but then, so did the Snapdragon X1 Elite. We're keen to see if real hardware can hit the same highs as the test platforms.
As for the N1/N1X, all indications are that it would be a consumer-oriented version of the Grace Blackwell GB10 Superchip. That's the very same part that powers the DGX Spark, and similar systems from other vendors. It could make for impressive hardware, but there's some question over exactly what software it would run; the DGX Spark ships with Linux because it's oriented at high-performance computing and AI, while a potential Windows on Arm device would lose those advantages in exchange for having to run every game through Prism, Microsoft's x86-to-Arm translator.
As we saw in our review of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, Prism works very well, but there's definitely a performance hit, and it makes gaming on a Windows-on-Arm device a dubious enterprise at best. Of course, some of our issues were due to the relative immaturity of Prism at the time; it has seen major updates since then, and so have Qualcomm's graphics drivers—a bugbear that NVIDIA, presumably, wouldn't have to fight. Still, we're bearish ourselves on the proposition of a serious gaming system running Windows on Arm.
Of course, an "H1" update has never been a thing for Windows 11. The company originally planned to do two feature updates every year with Windows 10, and stuck to that cadence for a while before settling on one major update annually in 2021. That update typically comes in the second half of the year, thus "H2"; the naming replaced "Spring" and "Fall" because the seasons are reversed in the Southern hemisphere.
This one's not likely to come to anyone via Windows Update, though. Instead, 26H1 (build 28000) is likely to be what ships on the upcoming Arm laptops sporting Windows. Microsoft says that it remains on an annual feature update cadence, and that the next "real" feature update will be 26H2, when you can surely look forward to a whole pile of new AI-"enhanced" features for your operating system.
