That's a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Mouse and a Belkin USB 2.0 hub. They're like 10 years old.
Windows 10 on ARM
171–180 of 290 posts
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strength of memory model refers to concurrency guarantees. Also gets deep into caching architectures, OOO, and inter-cpu communications. This is a deep rabbit hole because modern processors are speculatively executing THOUSANDS of instructions ahead. So what you have/haven't written to memory is slightly existential. Here is a good blog post about it http://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/ The TLDR…
Thousands ? I thought it was more like a dozen or two at most. Any link on that?
Sky lakes OoO window is 224 instructions.
With up to 96 in scheduler. 72 loads, and 56 writes.
Link: (summery you find hard intel references internally) https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/skylak...
224 per core. We're talking concurrency. So a 10core, 20HT server class can have 2240 instructions in flight.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#173Earlier 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…
> (or the upgrade wasn't pushed to users without intervention, which is effectively the same thing)
No, that's a good thing. Pushing major updates and new features instead of just patches is what makes users (and IT departments) disable automatic updates.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#174For 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?
Since there are no publicly available details, I would guess this is solved in hardware. The Qualcomm processor can be made to support stronger memory model for translated instructions similar to how the Power processors support strong-access ordering for efficient x86 emulation[1].
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#175I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned FX!32. That was the binary translation layer that Windows NT on DEC Alpha used back in 1996 or so to run x86 Windows binaries. There is an old Digital Technical Journal article about it here: http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol9num1/vol9num1art1.pd...
Everything old is new again!
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#176Props to D.M. for the pivotal work. You know who you are :-)
-- ST boot sector guy
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#177Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thousands ? I thought it was more like a dozen or two at most. Any link on that?
Sky lakes OoO window is 224 instructions. With up to 96 in scheduler. 72 loads, and 56 writes. Link: (summery you find hard intel references internally) https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/skylak... 224 per core. We're talking concurrency. So a 10core, 20HT server class can have 2240 instructions in flight.
Admittedly more than I expected, and thanks for sharing, but "20 CPUs executing a peak of 224 instructions each" is a far cry from "modern processors execute THOUSANDS of instructions AHEAD".
It's neither "thousands" of instructions in flight for a single processor, nor is it thousands "ahead" for multiple processors, let alone both. It's like taking 4000 basic single-stage CPUs and claiming they execute thousands of instructions "ahead", which makes no sense.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#179I'm out of the loop on ARM. Can somebody explain the significance of it?
It's the processor architecture that in the past was used primarily on servers. Now it's almost universally used in mobile devices, too. It's ubiquity has caused a much larger technological demand for cross-platform development, which is one of the reasons why technologies like JavaScript and Rust have become so popular. Additionally, it's lower power and lower heat compared to it's x86 cousins.
> in the past was used primarily on servers
Embedded devices, yes, but ARM on servers is more like ARM's perpetual future.
Re: Windows 10 on ARM
#180I 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
I agree, what Microsoft shows us today is a real evolution of a software-engineering empire done (mostly) right. The sad fact is that this open-source love + tons of goodies for developers comes after decades of pain and suffering, which were not really "killing" Microsoft, but they were risking a lot. Now they're flying, leaving Apple far behind (Apple completely lacks a multi-tier engineering vision), but if they g…
What is a "multi-tier" engineering vision?