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A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

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Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#301
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be thinking of the most recent AVX-512 extensions which had significant power management complications delaying adoption. Many common programs have optimized SIMD paths because GPU computing is significantly more complicated and the setup overhead makes it slower for uses which don’t process tons of data - one of the interesting points about the M1 is that the unified memory design avoids the overhead of co…

Yes sorry so am thinking of AVX-512 you are correct.

No problem - Intel’s marketing hasn’t helped at all. I notice this mostly for cryptography- we do a lot of data validation so spending up SHA is a nice win.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#302
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had that in the form of Windows CE based smartphones. As open as a PC, no walled garden, no app stores, just load your app and launch it. The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices.

Are you really arguing the that Windows CE platform was more open than Android? Back in 2005, an open source Linux based phone was a hippie pipe dream, and carriers were FIRMLY against allowing anything open source on their networks. Android blew all of that wide open, and now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS. This is what we were all dreaming about back then. I feel like this i…

> now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS

That's an interesting comment, because it really calls attention to how us nerds often perceive things differently from how the rest of the world does. I am guessing that most consumers would not recognize something that just used vanilla AOSP as an Android phone. Google's closed-source add-ons are a huge part of what people think of when they think, "Android."

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations? Obviously other considerations. Where there is only a small handful of options within a class of product, any statement about "what the market wants" should be limited to very broad strokes. The consumer doesn't select from the entire possibility space, they buy from the available options. Any "correlation is…

> " a lying huckster " Rather rude, don't you think?

I did make the context quite narrow and add the caveat for people who are simply deluding themselves, but yeah, it's rude. I've spent enough of my professional life listening to people try to tell me what sales numbers "mean" to have any higher of an opinion.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#304
How does this compare to Rosetta II? What's the difference between emulation and translation. Presumably, translation will be much faster? In that case, why did MSFT decide to go about emulation. My understanding, is that this will be slower, but more compatible.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#305
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV tax it's just for the UK.

How are you so certain it's only in the UK? It's definitely a thing here in Germany and Austria, and a relatively expensive one at that for just possessing a TV, and I'll bet my hat it's a thing in most EU countries.

TV Taxes and Licenses?

What is that? Is there something in the EU that doesn't have a special tax or required paperwork?

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#306
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

India would be tier 2 or 3. Apple share is less than 5%. Its very rare to see a iphone in the wild.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#307
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had that in the form of Windows CE based smartphones. As open as a PC, no walled garden, no app stores, just load your app and launch it. The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices.

Are you really arguing the that Windows CE platform was more open than Android? Back in 2005, an open source Linux based phone was a hippie pipe dream, and carriers were FIRMLY against allowing anything open source on their networks. Android blew all of that wide open, and now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS. This is what we were all dreaming about back then. I feel like this i…

> "Are you really arguing the that Windows CE platform was more open than Android?"

The topic is the control that the user has over a phone they purchased, not source code availability for the OS, so yes, I am. Windows CE smartphones provided access about the same as Windows 98/NT in terms of the freedom to run apps and providing apps unfettered access to OS level APIs. The same can't be said for Android and Apple's sandbox + walled garden model.

The only Linux smartphone I can think of from that era that offered similar access and control was the (I think?) Nokia N900 and interest in those was IIRC negligible.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

We had that in the form of Windows CE based smartphones. As open as a PC, no walled garden, no app stores, just load your app and launch it. The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices.

They rejected it because the experience was garbage not because it was open. My least favorite part is constantly manually pruning open apps to fit in tiny memory.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#309
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The practical upshot is: On PC, I can take a single disk with a single GRUB version and boot it on an arbitrary machine. If ARM machines can do that with their own UEFI/ACPI/ServerReady setup, then great. But if I need to alter that disk for each machine I want to use it on (inject board.dtb, add a custom u-boot, whatever), then that's not okay. I would happily accept u-boot and whatever else being on an onboard flas…

We completely agree here. If ARM desktop becomes mainstream there will probably be some kind of abstraction layer needed at this level that doesn't really exist at this moment. I'm fairly optimistic that it will happen when it's really needed though.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#310

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…

Wait so a standardized system is more flexible? Experimenting with new ideas would be too rigid? That seems entirely contradictory.

It’s more flexible because more components can fit together.

It’s flexibility at the system level rather than the component level.

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