A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM • Hacker News Board

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#211

Post by bluedays » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #175

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…

>I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC I think that ship has long sailed as we failed to treat smartphones as handheld computers and subject the smartphone/OS manufacturers to the same scrutiny as computer/OS manufacturers. This is a missed opportunity especially to those countries where smartphones are the first computer to majority of…

I see this sorta argument frequently but there was a time when only IBM was capable of making PCs. It seems whoever is first to market ends up not having an open platform, which later is superseded by a more open platform.*

See the variety of open operating systems for devices. Ie sailfish, postmarketOS, librephone, etc.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#212

Post by maccard » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #100

fartcannon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of comment dictators love. Crushed spirits. It's a cold, emotionless, frank extrapolation to a future without hope. You've already given up. Maybe you can drag a few more down with you.

My comment didn't suggest if this future is good or bad, or if I am pleased or dismayed by the state of affairs. I stuck to the facts and my own predictions about future facts and left my emotional opinions out of it. Perhaps these sort of closed systems are crushing to you, as you have correctly assumed that they are to me. They aren't to most people: the iPhone is wildly popular. Many people will be very happy to g…

> Most people prefer the conveniences of central management

To be fair, it's a pretty broad stretch to compare buying an xbox to "terrifying and violent failure modes of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship".

The console experience is easy to understand for non-technical folk, is vertically integrated (you buy a headset with the correct label and you can voice chat with your friends, you know you have the prerequisite account to play X game on your platform), is fully usable with a controller and designed from the ground up for a tv.

The gaming PC experience is... far worse. If you buy a $1000 gaming PC, you're going to need to install steam/epic/gog/xbox/origin/ea to play the top 5 games of the year, deal with awful audio issues, masses of account systems with varying levels of "party" support, hardware/driver incompatibilities, background software issues (antivirus, etc), varied levels of online play/party support, mixed support for controller/kbm, the list goes on. Networking issues? Hope you don't accidentally have a double NAT, or you might run into [0]. That's before touching on the actual open way of running proton on linux (You have an Nvidia card? tough. Have an AMD card? that's great, just compile your own mesa).

It's tempting to distill this down to "convenience", but it's much more than that. For many people (including myself, a professional programmer) that convenience is the difference between gaming being a way I want to spend my time or not. I'm not choosing between an open and closed device, I'm choosing between a closed device or no device.

[0] https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/connect... (disclaimer: I work for Epic, we have skin in this, but this is my own personal experience, and I don't work on the store)

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#213

Post by wffurr » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

emilsedgh wrote: post #7

I'm wondering what's happening at Microsoft's camp regarding M1. They are in a weird situation. They depend on AMD/Intel to deliver. This is a massive dependency for Microsoft. Are there other large corporations have this big of a dependency? I understand that Microsoft's revenue is shifting towards cloud, services, etc. But I think Windows is still "the" key to a lot of those offerings. Take a massive chunk of marke…

AMD is delivering. Not at the same power and performance levels as the M1, but at least competitive unlike Intel's latest.

I expect to see a whole raft of design wins for AMD from the major OEMs this year.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#214

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #197

pjmlp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please list tier 2 and tier 3 countries where there is a significant market share of Apple hardware.

Go to a mall in Bangkok and you will lose count of the number of people walking around with iphones. I don't know what you consider a "tier 2 and tier 3" country, since I think you just made that up, but maybe you should travel more.

I do travel a lot, hence why I know how little iPhones are seen around the planet.

I guess Bangkok holds 28% of Thailand population then.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/thailand

Also the issue being discussed here are Apple computers with M1, even less than those 28%, in case you also want numbers.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#215

Post by WhoCaresLies » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

the-enterprise wrote: post #72

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.

That doesn't mean Microsoft shouldn't be pro active

That reminds me of an interview with steve jobs, the mass doesn't necessarily know any better, the role of microsoft, apple and other big companies is to show people the impossible is possible

Speed, efficiency, fanless design without perf penalty, are a possibility, M1 is showing that to people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSg3fU9XWow

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#216

Post by oblio » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #150

oblio wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It's also a mix of CISC and RISC, it's not pure CISC now. It's not. It's microcoded. Like VAX. Which RISC is a response to.

Micro ops?

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#217

Post by bfgoodrich » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #205

bfgoodrich wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were any such thing as "tier 2 and tier 3 countries" in any broad sense, I'd say that's quite a lazy and disingenuous transition from "only on HN" and only something the US cares about, to "outside of the vast bulk of the world's economy". Further I don't think you understand what "significant" marketshare is. Even 10% marketshare is significant , where the actions of that market player is impactful. But App…

I bet if we do a demographic IP check that is what most HN logins come from. I surely do, whatever Porsche and Ferrari do have very little repercussions on the automotive market, if you want a comparison.

This circular logic is more disingenuous noise (the userbase of HN is utterly irrelevant given that you're trying to prove your own absurd claim that only HN cares, when clearly the entire developed world cares). How are you not moderated down to transparent by now? [I will tell you why - because the title draws in a certain crowd that is comforted by your nonsense, however fictional it is]

Whatever you hope the position of Apple is doesn't correlate with reality.

Aside: Ferrari has between 0.01% - 0.1% marketshare in a given year in the richest countries, and that is your example why Apple -- at 20% or so in most of the world's economies -- is irrelevant. That is some perilously embarrassing nonsense. Hyundai, in contrast, has 7% marketshare in the US and is considered a pretty big player.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#218

Post by sharpneli » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #137

sharpneli wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage There is a massive practical upside of this. It makes thefts worthless, or almost worthless as the only value is spare parts. It worked like a charm for phones. Thefts of smarphones were rising very rapidly but then diminished as they become worthless to steal. However it would be nice to be a…

> Thefts of smarphones were rising very rapidly but then diminished Did it really? In absence of official statistics, I think it just got normalized. When everyone has a monthly contract with insurance, it's not a tragedy if the phone gets stolen: you make a call, they send you a new phone, life goes on. In the UK at least, phones do get stolen all over the place, it's just not reported anymore because it's simply a…

Yeah they did. Substantially https://www.google.fi/amp/s/cbslocal.com/2018/01/31/despite-...

” Cell phone robberies and thefts from persons went down 50 percent in the first two years after the kill switch became mandatory on phones. In the past two years they fell again by another 8 percent, to a total of 1,754 last year.” 2018

Not only that. Perhaps most importantly it curbed the growth rate.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#219

Post by simias » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #193

simias wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) That was true ~15years ago but less so today. Modern PC EUFI bootloaders are bigger and more bloated than any uboot build in existence, and things like device tree support in linux means that you can support various boards with the same kernel (including boards that don't exist yet). Sure you…

> Modern PC EUFI bootloaders are bigger and more bloated than any uboot build in existence, and things like device tree support in linux means that you can support various boards with the same kernel (including boards that don't exist yet). Sure you'll probably still need custom bootloaders for most boards, but it's not like you can swap your motherboard BIOS/UEFI chips and expect them to work either. This feels like…

I feel like we're kind of mixing up a bunch of things here, or maybe I am.

The reason you don't need to mess with GRUB or you BIOS when you change your hardware is that modern hardware interfaces have built-in discovery and resource allocation features. Before that you had to deal with pesky low level details like IRQ allocations and the like (which was a thing on PC not that long ago).

That's not really a feature of "PC" per se, it's a feature of USB, PCI etc... That stuff works exactly the same on ARM or anywhere else.

The things that need to be described in the device tree are generally internal components of the SoC and motherboard, things like IO expanders, SPI interfaces, serial interfaces, and of course the USB/PCI/... controllers themselves.

I think there maybe some confusion because of the term "bootloader". It's true that both u-boot and GRUB are bootloaders, but bootloaders in the ARM world have a lot more to do than PC bootloaders, they're effectively the equivalent of UEFI + GRUB, not just GRUB. You can write a simplistic boot sector loader for PC in a few hundred ASM opcodes, that would be a lot more difficult for the average ARM bootloader because there's a lot more to do before you can just call into Linux. In general you won't even have RAM or caches available when u-boot begins executing.

And I think it's actually a better design, because it means that proprietary built-in firmware crap is usually kept to a minimum on ARM: the BOOTROM usually just initializes the bare minimum to be able to load u-boot (or some other loader) into on-chip SRAM and then it's over. Of course that means that the loader is significantly more complex, but that complexity has to be some place or an other.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#220

Post by Razengan » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

So it was Apple's moves into ARM that finally prompted Microsoft to improve Windows' support for ARM, whereas Microsoft's own forays into ARM were largely ignored and forgotten, even by themselves.