201–210 of 234 posts
best outcome I can think of: AMD licenses x86 patents to Qualcomm/MS to make x86 emulator better patent troll proof. In return, Qualcomm and AMD team up for better ARM server based processors. MS can sell more Windows/Windows Sever (sad).
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Fine. If you are really into getting the shortest instruction, try "xorl %eax,%eax" then "incl %eax" which is four bytes (31 c0 ff c0).
push $1/pop %eax (6a 01 58) is shorter, but perhaps not the best idea.
This marks a distinct shift for Intel. Historically, Intel's IP approach has focused on trade secrets, because they had a huge advantage in manufacturing and implementation techniques that are not easily reverse-engineered. Patent-protecting x86 didn't make much sense during the long period where nobody could make a general-purpose CPU as fast as Intel running native code, much less while emulating x86. As Moore's la…
Do you have a source for this claim? Not saying it's wrong, I'd just appreciate seeing a real benchmark/power usage test.
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I thought the primary reason Windows RT sucked was it's reliance on the horrendously terrible Windows Store? You couldn't even recompile popular apps if you wanted to, you had to port them to the store system. Unless you were MS, then you could grant yourself an exception and let stuff run direct (Office).
You make it sound so evil while the fact is that the store is for a lot more secure and sandboxed apps so you can't just put any kind in the store. The reason why they let their own apps in like office is because they are ok for guaranteeing for their own products while they do not want to discriminate other app developers among themselves on who can and who can't put an unsecure app into the store
Search for "Game of Thrones" right now on the Windows Store. Or WinRAR. Microsoft doesn't even verify their "publishers" are actual companies, have valid URLs for the store listing (most of these junk apps just go to "http://"). It's been and remains a joke.
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Next decade?! That long???
Yes. x86 is dominant for desktops/laptops. ARM is starting to make inroads with Chromebooks and covers the low end. RISC V is starting from scratch, both in terms of available hardware and software support. If RISC V can quickly prove popular in the embedded space then perhaps we'd see a desktop/laptop earlier than in a decade, but it's a competitive market. To give a comparison, MIPS is popular in the embedded space…
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push $1/pop %eax (6a 01 58) is shorter, but perhaps not the best idea.
Actually, there is no 32-bit pop instruction in x86-64 mode. Your code won't work.
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> their warning could backfire if it gives Microsoft one more reason to finally walk away from x86 compatibility Emulation is an important part of walking away, no? Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility above anything else.
Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility above anything else. Yes and no. If you're buying a managed service - like Azure HDinsight say - why do you care or even need to know what's under it? The volume buyers of CPUs now are the big cloud operators. If you're buying a tablet and consuming "apps", then why do you care about compatibility with old Windows desktop applications?
Because you operate some piece of enterprise software that was built in the 90s and is working just fine up until now.
Average end-users (and to a certain degree cloud customers) aren't that picky about backwards compatibility, but enterprise customers certainly are.
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There seems to be a lot of mingling here of the way things ought to be and the way they are.
Reminds me of a list of "copyright myths" I saw in school. The first nine were, "you think you can do this simple thing, this reasonable thing, or have any freedom whatsoever? SCREW YOU." The tenth claimed it was a myth that copyright levied oppressive burdens on the consumer. Lesson: With any type of intellectual property protection, you can usually just presume it works in the most totally disgusting way imaginable…
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Hmmm. So for example, a strength of X86 is that all reads and writes are synchronized by design, guaranteed by hardware. So if two threads call a write instruction, those instructions are guaranteed to happen in the order they were written in. You have no such guarantee on ARM. What's more, Intel has a patent for this. So now, if the same algorithm is implemented in software to emulate X86 platform on ARM, how is tha…
how can it possibly infringe on any kind of patent to "promise that commands are executed in order". maybe thats a difficult problem for hardware to solve. for software, thats just how software works. maple is solving differential equations and that may have at some point been difficult to write software for. if they have a patent for that, then so be it. I start a company that hires professors who are really good at…