Strategically interesting because, up to now, the Dalvik bytecode runtime and the subsequent pre-compiling ART runtimes were the best way to do ISA-independent application environments. Apple's fat binaries got in early enough in their (smaller) developer community for Apple to avoid being tied to an ISA. Microsoft was handcuffed to an x86 legacy boat anchor. But now they have escaped, and those other approaches are less of an advantage.
Windows 10 on ARM
41–50 of 290 posts
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#42If that runs great on phones, and has virtualization support for e.g. running ARM Linux guests, I would change both my Android phone and my Ubuntu laptop for one phone (e.g. Snapdragon 835 or better + 8-12GB RAM + 256GB flash + USB 3.0 OTG), using a dummy screen + keyboard as laptop replacement.
A desktop/mobile convergence phone is my dream. I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#43For any Microsoft insiders with knowledge about this, a few questions: 1. In the talk they claim that they get "near native" speed from the translation. Can we have some real number of what can be expected? What about warm up time? 2. Is the x86 translation layer only available in user space, or can x86 drivers be loaded for hardware that doesn't have arm drivers yet (or the manufacturer doesn't care about making the…
5. How do they solve the problem that x86 has a much stronger memory model than ARM, which makes emulation of multithreaded x86 code pretty hard without introducing a huge performance disadvantage?
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#44Microsoft is one of the few companies that really grok Systems Software right now.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#45Does this mean that Windows 10 (not Windows 10 IoT Core) will also come to Raspberry Pi 3?
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#46If that runs great on phones, and has virtualization support for e.g. running ARM Linux guests, I would change both my Android phone and my Ubuntu laptop for one phone (e.g. Snapdragon 835 or better + 8-12GB RAM + 256GB flash + USB 3.0 OTG), using a dummy screen + keyboard as laptop replacement.
Samsung has a dock like this for the S8 apparently.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#47Microsoft are seriously killing it in emulation these days. First I was amazed with them getting Xbox 360 (PPC) games running at full speed or better on the Xbox One (x86) and now we have x86 on ARM. They have some wizards working on this stuff. Edit: I wonder if Dave Cutler is involved in this x86 on ARM stuff? I think he was with the Xbox 360/Xbox One.
As far as I know, they don't emulate Xbox 360 games on Xbox One, they port and compile it for the new console, creating entirely new binaries. Not much emulation going on there. Correct me if I'm wrong. EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_games_compati... "Unlike the emulation of original Xbox games on the Xbox 360, the Xbox One does not require game modification, since it emulates an exact replica o…
http://support.xbox.com/en-US/games/game-setup/play-xbox-360...
> Xbox 360 games run within an emulator on Xbox One, which means you'll be able to use most features from both systems while playing games, such as screenshots, broadcasting, and Game DVR.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#48Does the x86/x64 cpu emulation work for JIT code or other self-modifying code? (Copy protected games, for example?) In the linked presentation they just briefly mention doing a load time(?) transpile of x86 to arm64 and caching the result on disk. What about exe packers that map memory rw then rx after unpacking, such as UPX?
They say that it's a dynamic translation layer, so presumably it doesn't make a distinction about where the code came for (except maybe you'll lose some performance optimization if they are caching translated code)
Most dynamic emulators don't do instruction by instruction emulation - they take in a whole block of instructions and translate that block, caching chunks that may be used without any inference (eg. branching). Once you hit a similar instruction block you don't have to do any translation; just execute from the cache. This is why you have a load time for reading from an x86 image.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#49HN is probably not the right target for this type of device. Either way we need Windows 10 on ARM to succeed for Intel to have more competition. I also do think it will be successful if it works at least as well as Intel's Atom-based Celeron and Pentium laptop chips, especially in emerging markets. Intel shot itself in the foot by replacing the Core architecture in mobile Celerons and Pentiums with Atom, and also by…
Given the recent unpleasantness with the Intel ME, I imagine there'd be a ready audience on HN for anything that makes alternate architectures more practical.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#50Microsoft are seriously killing it in emulation these days. First I was amazed with them getting Xbox 360 (PPC) games running at full speed or better on the Xbox One (x86) and now we have x86 on ARM. They have some wizards working on this stuff. Edit: I wonder if Dave Cutler is involved in this x86 on ARM stuff? I think he was with the Xbox 360/Xbox One.
They make a very good Android emulator as well.
Where can I download it? Latency on Bluestacks is awful.