Live data from Hacker News

A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

blogs.windows.com

361–370 of 418 posts

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...Apple caught everyone with the pants down in the PC industry... Pffft. There's no competition between PCs and Apple, they're not even in the same class. PCs are general purpose computers and Apple products are closed platform devices that you don't really own or have any control over. That's why Macs only have 10% the market size of PCs.

Pretty sure this is the discussion that happened in Blackberry and Nokia HQs when the iphone was announced

Meh. Phones I can take or leave. Personally, I will never, ever use an appliance as my workstation though and I'm a user, so my opinion matters much more than any manufacturers because I'm faaaaar from alone ;)

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think MS is in trouble. Nearly everyone's home computer just runs Chrome now. Work PCs are going the same direction. Even developers can probably rely on a SSH and RDP to a server running anything. Android tablets are selling for about the same price as Windows license.

PC/Laptop and Microsoft are thriving. You can't even buy a modern GPU from AMD or Nvidia and Ryzen cpus are sold out everywhere - and there is a massive new console launch with X86 on new Xbox and PS5. Windows has supported ARM for a while and they have a nice arm device right now. New mobile Ryzen chips are extremely fast and efficient. X86 isn't going anywhere. If Apple is successful putting algorithms into silicon…

Good point on the consoles. I'm just thinking about my office and seeing thousands of new PCs bought every year. We're now getting more terminals and virtualized PCs running on servers. There isn't much reason to stay x86.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#364
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the point. When a 16 year old non-male teenager is accepting it, than you won. See iPhone, facebook, whatsapp, tiktok or whatever they are doing nowadays. I owned two of these devices as a personal information manager (contacts calendar ...). They were not comfortable and the data plans then were so prohibitive expensive that modern usage was far away.

There's no need to stereotype.

From the wording: you are right, I apologize.

Regards the argument: if you do not win this audience (predominantly female) you are doomed.

For the records: I do not want to attribute any positive or negative characteristics to any of the audiences.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#365
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…

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 pre…

It was the PPro and OOO processors were being developed by lots of companies and teams at that time. Wikipedia indicates it was featured in the PowerPC 601 (93), SPARC64 (95), PPro (95), MIPS R10000 (96), etc. Hard to see where was the advantage over workstations on that point...

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#366

Anyone else thinking maybe nVidia shouldn't have been allowed to buy ARM?

It's a shame the UK government allowed it to be sold to Softbank.

Yeah they were trying to show how 'open for business' we were after Brexit. Open to getting screwed more like.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly don't travel, or you're a liar, because your varied claims are uproariously disconnected reality. Further, your snarky misunderstanding of their statement is more disingenuous nonsense. If 28% of Bangkok citizens had iPhones, you will lose count because it's a large city. That would make them very common by any metric. A country where the GDP per capita is $7000 USD / capita and still the iPhone is at 28%…

> and still the iPhone is at 28%, It's not. It's more like 25% and dropping In Italy iPhones used to be 50% of the market, because they were a status symbol and it was literally the only smartphone available, ten years after they have dropped below 24% globally, but new sells are much less, because The number of people buying their first iPhone is declining. Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference this week wi…

It's the lying guy who uses multiple alts. Neat. I assume you also mod up your trollish posts with your alts, surely earning a ban.

Begone, troll.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pre…

But ARM64 instructions are all fixed width still right? And how specifically are these instructions complex? Do they produce an unusually high number of micro-ops when decided?

Yeah CISC vs RISC thing barely makes sens anymore. It could only matter in the context of hand-programmed and low frequency processors. What remains of "it" (at least in some people's mind) that is still relevant today on major ISA is clearly instruction encoding, but you could totally make a CISC with fixed length instruction. You could also make a RISC with (highly) variable length but... just why? And actually why make a highly variable length ISA at all regardless of if the ISA is RISC or CISC? The real reason that x86 has an highly variable length is only historical. When you only decoded one at a time it did not matter that much. So maybe you wanted some big ones for convenience but it would be a shame to make them all big. So the 8086 had instructions of 1 to 6 bytes (up to 10 with prefix?). And then you had 32-bits with 16-bits compat, it seems it went up to 15 bytes, and then stayed at 15 max for AMD64...

Today the most used x86 instructions are not that much different from ARM ones, and in a good number of cases actually even simpler. The simplest way to compare is to simply look at the assembly an optimizing native compiler emits, and lookup for what the emitted instructions are doing.

The micro-ops of processor are actually quite dependent on the ISA. You could do neutral micro-ops, but I doubt this would be very efficient. So you can't really compare the complexity of ISA by the number of micro-ops issued, because among different arch and microarch the micro-ops are themselves more complex on some point and less on others, with tons of similarities with (core instruction set of) the ISAs they implement.

Complex instruction for backward compat, special, or intrinsically difficult operations, are transformed to a potentially very high number of micro-ops, often looked-up in a ROM.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You created a burner account for this. Yeah, that's a good sign. Are they burner accounts all the way down? How many other personas are you in here? "You also brought up India." Specifically to point out that number of people is largely irrelevant. But, as with the Ferrari nonsense, way to completely miss the point. "Of course you deleted it as soon as you realised it." LOL, I deleted it because I realized there were…

said the Apple fan boy who created the account 20 days ago to argue violently and offensively :) > This all started with an insanely stupid comment that Apple only matters in the US, It's true Apple is losing market share everywhere on mobile market and it's not gaining in computing devices You might be surprised how much irrelevant the US bubble is outside of the US > LOL, I deleted it because I realized there were…

Neat. How many accounts are you trolling under?

You're boring, and probably super poor. Cool.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#370
post #150
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.

CISC and RISC are mostly an ISA concept.

Most chips are "microcoded", at least here and there. The term does not define a whole micro-architecture, esp in modern complex ones, but I'm not really sure how you would implement old school CISC chips without microcode concepts. The 8086 was microcoded: https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8086-microcode-disassembled/. It basically means that "you" program some low level internal details of a chip, e.g. the muxes connecting various buses to execution units. Most of the time the "you" is only the chip designers, and it is stored mostly in a ROM. Sometimes microcoding is accessible by actual software programmers, but it is quite rare.

And modern u-ops are not necessarily like what was done at the time of old-school microcode.

Post reply on HN