131–140 of 223 posts
Linux support is still basically non-existent for the first gen, and they made all this deal about supporting Linux and the open source community. This is to say, don't trust them
They expected linux devs to build it for free
Seems to be the first Arm CPU to hit 5 GHz. I couldn’t find the ISA details, and curious if they will support SME, like the M-series Apple chips?
18 cores = 12 Prime and 6 Performance Cores Not sure what a prime core is. For comparison the M4 Pro can go as high as 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.
Mind you, Geekerwan managed to push the A19 Pro to 4019 in Geekbench 6 by using active cooling. https://youtu.be/Y9SwluJ9qPI
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I got a ChromeOS device a few years ago and it was great. I think they get an underserved bad reputation from being the locked-down devices you're forced to use in schools, but a personal ChromeOS device is a capable computer that can run any Android app or desktop Linux app. Though having said that, in the past year I've replaced ChromeOS with desktop Linux (postmarketOS) and I love it even more now. 4GB of RAM was…
Not really any, Crostini has plenty of restrictions. Cool if one wants to CLI stuff alongside Web and Android apps, but that is as far as it goes for GNU/Linux, with many yes but. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/1792b43f...
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Does anyone have benchmarks for Rosetta with TSO vs the Linux version with no-TSO? I guess it might be a bit challenging to achieve apples to apples, although you could run a test benchmark on OSX and then Asahi on the same hardware, I think? I've always been curious about just how much Rosetta magic is the implementation and how much is TSO; Prism in Windows 24H2 is also no slouch. If the recompiler is decent at tra…
People who have worked on the Windows x64 emulator claim that TSO isn't as much of a deal as claimed, other factors like enhanced hardware flag conversion support and function call optimizations play a significant role too: http://www.emulators.com/docs/abc_exit_xta.htm
This is a misinterpretation of what the author wrote! There is a real and significant performance impact in emulating x86 TSO semantics on non-TSO hardware. What the author argues is that enabling TSO process-wide (like macOS does with Rosetta) resolves this impact but it carries counteracting overhead in non-emulated code (such as the emulator itself or in ARM64EC).
The claimed conclusion is that it's better to optimize TSO emulation itself rather than bruteforce it on the hardware level. The way Microsoft achieved this is by having their compiler generate metadata about code that requires TSO and by using ARM64EC, which forwards any API calls to x86 system libraries to native ARM64 builds of the same libraries. Note how the latter in particular will shift the balance in favor of software-based TSO emulation since a hardware-based feature would slow down the native system libraries.
Without ecosystem control, this isn't feasible to implement in other x86 emulators. We have a library forwarding feature in FEX, but adding libraries is much more involved (and hence currently limited to OpenGL and Vulkan). We're also working on detecting code that needs TSO using heuristics, but even that will only ever get us so far. FEX is mainly used for gaming though, where we have a ton of x86 code that may require TSO (e.g. mono/Unity) but wouldn't be handled by ARM64EC, so the balance may be in favor of hardware TSO either way here.
For reference, this is the paragraph (I think) you were referring to:
> Another common misconception about Rosetta is that it is fast because the hardware enforces Intel memory ordering, something called Total Store Ordering. I will make the argument that TSO is the last thing you want, since I know from experience the emulator has to access its own private memory and none of those memory accesses needs to be ordered. In my opinion, TSO is ar red herring that isn't really improving performance, but it sounds nice on paper.
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Because Apple controls verything vs Windows/Linux world where hundres (thouthands?) of OEM create things?
I agree with you on the Windows side. Linux is different. Decades of being tied to x86 made the OS way more coupled with the processor family than one might think. Decades of bugfixes, optimizations and workarounds were made assuming a standard BIOS and ACPI standards. Specially on the desktop side. That, and the fact that SoC vendors are decades behind on driver quality. They remind me of the NDiswrapper era. Also,…
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Not really any, Crostini has plenty of restrictions. Cool if one wants to CLI stuff alongside Web and Android apps, but that is as far as it goes for GNU/Linux, with many yes but. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/1792b43f...
Sorry, but "CLI stuff" is not "as far as it goes" with desktop Linux apps on ChromeOS. ChromeOS provides Wayland and PulseAudio servers to the apps as well so GUI and audio works too. It even synchronises file associations and installs a ChromeOS-like GTK theme into the container. The Linux GUI apps I had installed back when I used it felt completely native.
As someone who has used the Snapdragon X Elite (12 core Oryon) Dev Kit as a daily driver for the past year, I find this exciting. The X Elite performance still blows my mind today - so the new X2 Elite with 18 cores is likely going to be even more impressive from a performance perspective! I can't speak to the battery life, however, since it is dismal on my Dev Kit ;-)
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That’s brutal.. I wonder why the Apple Silicon transition seemed so much smoother in comparison.
Every Mac transitions to ARM, only a very small amount of Windows PCs are running ARM. SO right now there's not an large user base to incentivise software to be written for it.
So if you support macOS/x86, macos/ARM, and Windows/x86, then the additional work to add Windows/ARM is rather small, unless you do low-level stuff (I remember Fortnite WoA port taking almost a year from announcement to release due to anticheat).
We’ve been using X Elite Snapdragon laptops (Thinkpad T14s and Yoga Slim running Ubuntu’s concept images) to build large amounts of ARM software without the need for cross-compiling. The hardware peripheral support isn’t 100% yet (good enough) but I’ve been impressed with the performance. ARM seems to be popular in the server space and it’s nice to see it trickling down to the PC market.