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A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

blogs.windows.com

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Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#71

Post by AmericanChopper »

oblio wrote: post #58
AmericanChopper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve contracted in lots of large enterprise, and software engineers who prefer (and are provisioned) Macs are everywhere. I’ve even seen a number of .NET teams who bootcamp with them. I’m contracting in a reasonably large bank right now, and most of the people in my office use MacBooks. It’s true that large enterprise is slow and cumbersome. But they really don’t care too much if they’re buying you a MacBook, or a su…

Yeah, but check out large enterprises where software engineers are not the norm, common, or some times, not even present at all :-)

There is no such large enterprise. You need software engineers at the very least to operate an ERP, and any organisation that doesn’t rely heavily on an ERP to operate is not a large enterprise. Any large enterprise will also have an infrastructure team, comprised of people just as likely to have strong preferences about their operating systems.

Technical and design staff may make up a relatively small portion of the headcount for some of them, but the Windows-only enterprise is becoming increasingly less common. The primary reason being that the tools they need to support other operating systems are simply more capable and accessible than they have been in the past.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#72

Post by the-enterprise »

WhoCaresLies wrote: post #64

why this late? at this point the ecosystem should have been full of ARM apps and ported programs already Apple uses emulation only just as a transition mechanism, not to depend on it This is a concerning move from Microsoft to be honest

There is very low demand for ARM from Microsoft customers, ARM support exists for when and if such demand materialises.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#73

Post by Joe_Cool »

rasz wrote: post #53
Dylan16807 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many programs depend on SSE3 or later? Any earlier extensions are free now.

Games, pretty much all of the AAA ones. ~10 years ago you would read cries of AMD x64 users not able to play SSE3 games. 2-5 years ago situation was repeating with AMD Phenom I/II owners and SSSE3/SSE4.

Using a compiler with proper switches is hard it seems. Some also blame 3rd party libraries or DRM.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#74

Post by adrian_b »

est31 wrote: post #22
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #17

Microsoft are between a rock and a hard place. They've done a very good job maintaining compatibility with windows/DOS x86 programs as hardware and the OS grows, but eventually for windows to survive and be competitive they need to ditch it and do a successful port to the next generation (presumably ARM). This will be challenging and painful for many of their existing users.

The ARM platform is currently massively held back IMO by its lack for standardization. I think there is tremendous value hidden behind a company that achieves a push for consistency. Microsoft has invested tens if not hundreds of thousands of man years in this, so who would be better qualified for this than them. RISC-V is kinda in a similar situation as ARM. If I were Microsoft, I'd be investing hard into the RISC-V…

It would be very nice if an open CPU ISA, which can be implemented by everyone, like RISC-V, would be more widespread.

Sadly, RISC-V is not a good candidate for that. It is an excellent ISA for student implementation projects, but not for real work.

RISC-V is praised only by people who have very little or no experience with different CPU ISAs and with the history of their evolution.

RISC-V sucks more than even the ugliest ISA, x86. At least from the huge x86 ISA it is possible to extract a subset composed mostly of more recently introduced instructions, which can be considered as a decent ISA, except for the weird encoding, with many prefix bytes, which is needed for backward compatibility.

The 64-bit ARMv8 ISA is an example of a good ISA, but its future is clouded by the NVIDIA acquisition.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#75

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

oblio wrote: post #21
londons_explore wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was Microsoft, I would be very reluctant to support Windows on M1 Macs. The obvious disadvantage is the consumer will get Mac OSX for free with the hardware, and won't be too keen to pay much more to Microsoft. Apple will end up earning most of the revenue. The strategic disadvantage is that as windows users move to M1 based macs, sales of PC hardware will drop, since the PC ecosystem is hobbled by a lack of dee…

> The strategic disadvantage is that as windows users move to M1 based macs, sales of PC hardware will drop, since the PC ecosystem is hobbled by a lack of deep integration, lower performance CPU's, lower profit margins, less R&D, etc. If volumes of sales drop too, it could trigger a cascade effect (fewer sales causes less R&D causes less desirable products causes fewer sales). That could kill consumer PC's entirely,…

With M1 they have a single platform though. Phone, tablet, laptop, desktop. All on Apple silicon. The iPad already supports BT keyboards. M1 already supports iPad apps. I imagine an iPad is already powerful enough to run MacOS. I imagine the next step is to unify the OS.

That’s your cheap computer right there.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#76

Post by sneak »

qalmakka wrote: post #70

I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC. Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) is what makes the PC truly special. Moving to a world where you can't install Linux or where every single machine has incompatible firmware would be disastrous, IMHO. Curren…

The xbox and the iPhone are the security models I expect on almost all mainstream computing devices soon. I estimate that it will be impossible or near impossible to execute any code that was not approved by the hardware vendor, and obtained by the hardware owner IDing themselves to the code distribution/signing service ("stores").

Anonymous software publishing or use/consumption will be relegated solely to what will, by then, be ancient and slow hardware, and relatively dangerous (for non-experts) OSes.

Modifying the signed apps or OS to remove their phone home and spying will be impossible, like iOS is today.

There is presently very little stopping large vendors from implementing this across the board, and, indeed, consumer demand for malware-free (but not vendor spyware-free) platforms is driving this in a big way.

Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage:

https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware...

I imagine this will happen regardless of ISA; see what happened with the intel ME and related DRM, and Pixelbooks/T2 macs.

Most people buying computers don't want flexibility, they want reliability. OS alternatives, software alternatives, and privacy aren't really part of the buying decision outside of a small and mostly commercially irrelevant market segment.

The e-waste will be colossal when the vendors just decide to EoL them. You won't be able to reinstall the OS on any current Apple product (phone, tablet, or computer) once Apple's activation servers for those devices go offline in 10-20 years.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#77

Post by dan-robertson »

oblio wrote: post #67
rusticpenn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not understand why ARM is considered lesser technology. RISC was always considered to be better then CISC in many academic circles.

Well, two main reasons: 1. Innovator's dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma ARM in this case is the underdog, attacking the incumbent x86. It is the lesser tech because it started from "below" (lower value niches not taken by the incumbent which prefers higher profit margins). 2. RISC vs CISC has never been settled. Until Apple (and Amazon super recently) produced their super recent archit…

The reinvention that gave x86 the advantage over (workstation) RISC was OoO execution in the Pentium.

It’s a bit silly to think of x86 and ARM as being so different these days. Most x86 code looks a lot like it was produced for a RISC chip and ARM has been gaining some more complex instructions and addressing modes. Academics may have felt that RISC was better than CISC for a long time but I don’t think they were predicting the world of today so much as they were incorrectly predicting the near past. If RISC were so much better then we’d have lots of workstations running on modern Alpha or PA-RISC systems. But we don’t see that.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#79

Post by iSnow »

simfoo wrote: post #5

What happened to the patent issues surrounding x86 emulation? For example I remember reading this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel... First Apple and now Microsoft. Do they license the patents from Intel or did they expire? Or are they working around that somehow?

Cross patent volume license deals are pretty much standard among the tech giants.
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