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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

#331

Post by GoblinSlayer »

sneak wrote: post #76
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…

>Most people buying computers don't want flexibility

Ancient greeks knew this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#332

Post by rsynnott »

neogodless wrote: post #253
rkangel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> M1 won't change that, or at least not rapidly. This to me is the interesting spectator sport for M1 (I have no intention of buying Apple hardware) - what are the competition going to do in response? Based on all the reviews and benchmarks, the new generation of Apple laptops are going to outperform anything AMD/Intel, while having twice the battery life. These are not 'small difference' only of interest to geeks, t…

First, I think the "rapidly" is key here. Momentum / current market share for enterprise and gaming is strongly in the x86 / Windows space. Second, the M1 successors have to cover a lot more use cases first. There are certainly use cases where M1 is winning single core performance, and some for parallelism, and nearly absolutely in efficiency and battery life. There are still plenty of cases where software either onl…

> Momentum / current market share for enterprise and gaming is strongly in the x86 / Windows space.

Sure, but they're not just going to sacrifice the consumer market entirely. The industry as a whole will need to respond.

> There are other cases where "M1 for x" doesn't exist yet - high-end workstations, for example.

For now. In a year, I wouldn't bet on it.

> AMD is at something like 20% of Windows notebook share after about one year of having dominate mobile chips.

AMD beat Intel by a little in efficiency over the last year (and for the mainstream laptop market, after a certain point, that's mostly what people care about). M1 is a _dramatic_ jump forward, there. "Here's an AMD and an Intel laptop for 1k each, the AMD one is a bit faster and has slightly better battery life" is a different proposition to "Here's the same AMD laptop from earlier, plus a $1k MacBook Air. The MacBook Air's a bit faster, and has twice the battery life".

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#333

Post by kbenson »

xmodem wrote: post #194
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be hard to argue that the PC world won't at least make some attempt at shifting to ARM. Apple has demonstrated far too large of a performance and power efficiency savings to not try. Of course, even if that becomes successful, x86 will be available for decades. Right now, ARM Macs are going to just be lost for any kind of gaming (except Catalyst versions of mobile games). This is probably ridiculous, but my…

> ARM Macs are going to just be lost for any kind of gaming Every game I've tried with a Mac port runs great on the M1 under Rosetta. I've sunk many hours into Factorio and Offworld Trading Company on my M1 mini, and if I gave you the same game running side by side on an Intel mac, I'd bet you could't tell which was which without quitting and checking the system profiler. If you meant triple-A gaming, then yeah, with…

Unreal Engine and Unity both have mobile ports, so already support ARM in some manner, and they provide much of the heavy lifting for the low-end stuff for many AAA games.

That said, I'm not sure if Unity will have an advantage here because of its reliance on C# compared to UE's C++ (but I'm not sure how common it is to use C++ compared to UnrealScript). Then again, if you can trigger the X86 consistency mode on the M1 (or if it's always on?) for ARM instructions (if that makes sense), then maybe it's as simple as a compile/release for that target from each of those platforms since the memory model will be the same for the C++ code.

Note: I'm not a game developer, and have only looked at/used minimally at those engines/suites, so there's a lot of assumptions in the above based on how I understand stuff to work, not how I know it to work from experience.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#335

Post by yellowapple »

slashdev wrote: post #298
px43 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has been steadily moving things into play services though, which is not open. This is a good thing, they've been de-googling the base OS and making it as stripped down and bare-bones as possible. This is a huge win for security, privacy, and freedom in general, and exactly what they should be doing. Android should be a small, secure Linux based operating system with an API that makes it easy to build service…

Fair enough, but android without play services is also barely usable and most apps will not run. It's also an effective way of building the walls around the garden.

I'm relatively ambivalent to a walled garden if and only if there's a (reliable) way to opt out of it. In Android's case, it's not only quite possible to opt out of Google's garden, but arguably rather commonplace (Amazon's "Fire" devices, most custom ROMs by default, etc.). In iOS' case, it's outright impossible.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#336

Post by px43 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #307
px43 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I feel like you're trying to sell the utter lack of a security model as some sort of feature.

Power users and developers have always had the ability to circumvent the Android sandbox on their own devices.

Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems.

N900s were pretty rad little toys, but anything you could do with them you could also always do on Android. The base Android OS doesn't have a built in package manager, but you can easily run a more classic Linux distro in a chroot or something.

Linux Deploy has been around for almost a decade now.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.meefik.linu...

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#337

Post by kbenson »

piokoch wrote: post #142
oblio wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agreed. I'd also want to add something for this: > Businesses above a certain size overwhelmingly use pcs unless they are in specific arty sectors. M1 won't change that, or at least not rapidly. Besides the fact, which many HN users working for FAANGS or startups don't encounter, that big enterprises are both rigid and also quite locked into the Microsoft/Windows/Office mono culture, big companies tend to hav…

Second that. Can I have Apple serviceman in 4 hours at my doors after I call that something is broken? Will that serviceman arrive with the new computer just in case the old one cannot be repaired? Dell, etc. has that and this is something IT in every company wants.

Yeah, Dell definitely has enterprise support all worked out, and can use the economies of scale on that to provide what are usually rock solid systems which they partially assemble themselves. If you're shipping a few 100k units of a desktop spec, it pays to make sure you can control costs be removing problematic components, and in their case, they often write their own firmware so they can quickly work around bugs.

Dell may actually be the PC provider closest to what Apple does, since I believe they source components for their own hardware in some cases (or use white label in others, but with their own firmware as I noted).

That said, I think the only thing that prevents Apple from competing in this space is desire and experience providing that service to enterprises at scale. It's not like they don't have the money or manufacturing pipeline, and lack of experience solves itself after a while.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#338

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #326
csharptwdec19 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the UK, the purpose of the Taxes is to pay for the programming that is broadcast over the airwaves, i.e. it funds the BBC. This is somewhat of a 'compare and contrast' to the US Model, where either stations are funded by advertisements, or the public broadcasting stations that rely primarily on grants, as well as what they can get from the government; but in the case of the US, technically 'everyone' i…

I have to be completely honest here... Entertainment is a multi billion dollar industry. Companies like Disney are making record profits. Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?

>Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?

Because why bother when you get money from free by law through taxes?

Count your blessings, as at least the BBC produces world class content viewed worldwide(former Top Gear, Dr. Who, etc) so you get your money's worth but in Germany, ARF and ZDF receive nearly as much money as the BBC but produce almost nothing worth watching by the Germans, let alone abroad, because why would they give a fuck when than sweet taxpayer money keeps rolling in no strings attached regardless.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#339

Post by neogodless »

rsynnott wrote: post #332
neogodless wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I think the "rapidly" is key here. Momentum / current market share for enterprise and gaming is strongly in the x86 / Windows space. Second, the M1 successors have to cover a lot more use cases first. There are certainly use cases where M1 is winning single core performance, and some for parallelism, and nearly absolutely in efficiency and battery life. There are still plenty of cases where software either onl…

> Momentum / current market share for enterprise and gaming is strongly in the x86 / Windows space. Sure, but they're not just going to sacrifice the consumer market entirely. The industry as a whole will need to respond. > There are other cases where "M1 for x" doesn't exist yet - high-end workstations, for example. For now. In a year, I wouldn't bet on it. > AMD is at something like 20% of Windows notebook share af…

The Ryzen 4000 laptop chips outperform Intel's as much as 45% in benchmarks, while getting 33% better battery life.

The M1 is roughly competitive with the Ryzen 4000 chips (depending on variances in TDP, cooling, etc.) but arguably gets as much as double the battery life.

No argument that it's an advancement of CPU technology, but I think you might have some magical thinking if you think momentum doesn't matter.

It's not like suddenly 100% of buyers look at only benchmarks where the M1 leads, or only at battery life, or only at software that runs on the M1 rather than all the software they use.

If users were only looking at CPU benchmarks, AMD would have a lot higher market share, and the same will be said about the M1 after a year as well. Will Apple users replace Intel laptops in record numbers? Probably! But the conversion of Windows users will be slow regardless of hardware.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#340

Post by [deleted] »

romanoderoma wrote: post #329
bfgoodrich wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Apple is done. Just doesn't matter at all. Wrap it up boys. Groan. Alright buddy. "those 3 have less than 80 million citizens combined" Those three combined have a GDP almost double India's. And the rich of India overwhelmingly carry iPhones, as an aside. The rich everywhere carry iPhones. The middle-class everywhere carry iPhones. If you're trying to sell a product or service, worldwide , there's a reason th…

> Groan. Alright buddy. I'm probably too old to be your buddy. Keep calm and read stats. > Those three combined have a GDP almost double India's Italy alone has the same GDP of India. And it's only one of 27 countries in Europe. And not even the richest. Seriously, read the stats The share of Apple in the mobile phone market, across India, in July 2020 was approximately 3.35 percent 96% of a billion people are not bu…

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