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Windows 10 on ARM

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Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#51

Post by doomlaser »

poizan42 wrote: post #19

For 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…

I remember when Apple supported PPC emulation of applications when they made the switch to Intel x86 for a major OS release cycle. I was impressed that the speed there was, in fact, near native enough that the transition was essentially completely seamless.

Although this is somewhat of the reverse in architectures, going from CISCy to RISCy.

The only thing that concerns em about recent Microsoft developments is that they seem very keen to move their OSes into more of a walled garden like iOS and the Mac App Store, and extract 30% from every third party application transaction. They could use one of these sorts of transitions as an opportunity to advance that business strategy further.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#52

Post by satysin »

Kenji wrote: post #38
satysin wrote: post #9

Microsoft 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…

It uses emulation. While it is true the user needs to download a 'game image' rather than play the game directly from disc this is because that image is a virtual hard disk that contains the game and a customised Xbox 360 virtual machine that has tweaks for the game. It is similar to PC console emulators that have specific configs for certain games.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#53

Post by deskamess »

nailer wrote: post #50
deskamess wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make a very good Android emulator as well.

Where can I download it? Latency on Bluestacks is awful.

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/

If not using Visual Studio, search for 'Acquire on its own' on the page. There is a link in that section.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#54

Post by satysin »

nailer wrote: post #50
deskamess wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make a very good Android emulator as well.

Where can I download it? Latency on Bluestacks is awful.

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/

It uses Hyper-V so you will need a Pro version of Windows.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#55

Post by artmageddon »

wand3r wrote: post #35

I am seriously impressed with Microsoft. I haven't used windows in years but they are releasing tons of useful things. VSCode is great on Ubuntu and every version of OS X I have run it on. Plus tons of other cool things like bash on win; etc. Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

> Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

How so?

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#56

Post by Analemma_ »

doomlaser wrote: post #51
poizan42 wrote: post #19

For 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…

I remember when Apple supported PPC emulation of applications when they made the switch to Intel x86 for a major OS release cycle. I was impressed that the speed there was, in fact, near native enough that the transition was essentially completely seamless. Although this is somewhat of the reverse in architectures, going from CISCy to RISCy. The only thing that concerns em about recent Microsoft developments is that…

> I was impressed that the speed there was, in fact, near native enough that the transition was essentially completely seamless.

Not to diminish Apple's accomplishment, which was indeed impressive, but a lot of this was because by that point, PowerPC was so, so far behind Intel's chips that, even after the emulation performance penalty, the Core 2 chips were fast enough to make it no big deal.

There's not a similar Intel/ARM gap this time around so Microsoft will have to rely on their chops alone.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#57

Post by jdc0589 »

wand3r wrote: post #35

I am seriously impressed with Microsoft. I haven't used windows in years but they are releasing tons of useful things. VSCode is great on Ubuntu and every version of OS X I have run it on. Plus tons of other cool things like bash on win; etc. Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

> Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

I actually disagree with this pretty strongly. The Azure UI seems flashy for the sake of being flashy. The AWS UI is much easier to navigate and use for me.

Azure's UI is more unified though. There are some random AWS services (e.g. sqs) that have a totally different UI theme going on.

Edit: the Azure UI is only more unified if you ignore the fact that there are two totally separate versions (classic + the new portal), and you end up having to hop between the two in some instances if you have some older infrastructure because feature parity is not perfect.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#58

Post by toast0 »

kyriakos wrote: post #30
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 Mobile gets OS updates directly from Microsoft. Verizon does not support Windows 10 Mobile at all , but my four year old Verizon Lumia Icon got Windows 10 version 14393.1198, which released yesterday, yesterday. Microsoft has chosen to drop a lot of older models from the Creator's Update, but is still providing cumulative/security updates to the Anniversary Update right now, which is supported on all phone…

One thing Microsoft does well is Long term support and backwards compatibility. I guess this applies to their mobile OS as well.

Unless your mobile OS is Windows Phone 8.1, or Windows Phone 7, or Windows Mobile 6, etc which got very little in the way of updates once a new major release was made; and many phones are not upgradable from one major release to the next (or the upgrade wasn't pushed to users without intervention, which is effectively the same thing).

I would say, Microsoft has a reputation for long term support and backwards compatibility, but it seems like it's something they're trying to get away from.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#59

Post by kyberias »

wolfgke wrote: post #43
poizan42 wrote: post #19

For 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?

What do you mean, could you elaborate on that a bit? How is x86 "memory model stronger" and why would application code be affected?

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#60

Post by ocdtrekkie »

toast0 wrote: post #58
kyriakos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing Microsoft does well is Long term support and backwards compatibility. I guess this applies to their mobile OS as well.

Unless your mobile OS is Windows Phone 8.1, or Windows Phone 7, or Windows Mobile 6, etc which got very little in the way of updates once a new major release was made; and many phones are not upgradable from one major release to the next (or the upgrade wasn't pushed to users without intervention, which is effectively the same thing). I would say, Microsoft has a reputation for long term support and backwards compati…

I would more characterize it as failures in their mobile space. Microsoft has rebooted it's mobile product line a bunch of times. But, as noted, my Lumia Icon was a Windows Phone 8.x device, and it runs yesterday's release of Windows 10 Mobile. A pretty large number of 8.x devices are capable of 10.

The manual intervention to upgrade to 10 is because, as noted, the big change is that Windows 10 Mobile upgrades are handled by Microsoft, so the update servers had to be changed. Prior versions to 10 had the same carrier-based update issues Android had.

I'd argue that change alone points to the fact that Microsoft is getting better at long term support, not worse.

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