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A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

blogs.windows.com

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Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#251

Post by asveikau »

rusticpenn wrote: post #59
lars-b2018 wrote: post #41

I think the bigger story here is that computing based on ARM64 has been, and continues to, surround the traditional x86-64 territory. ARM dominates phones, and is popping up in server environments as well, where it is cheaper to run for many workloads than X86-64. We have migrated to ARM based Gravitron processors to deliver our services at my company, and we have been able to reduce our AWS EC2 costs by 40% or so, w…

I do not understand why ARM is considered lesser technology. RISC was always considered to be better then CISC in many academic circles.

The complaint about ARM as I understood it was that they couldn't match Intel performance. The commentary around Apple seems to be that over the decade-plus where they iterated for iPhone and iPad, it's caught up

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#252

Post by SXX »

slashdev wrote: post #234
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #230

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.

Can I boot Linux on an iPhone? Install android instead? I don't think we ended up in a place much better off from a freedom perspective. Android is a little better because parts of it are open. Google has been steadily moving things into play services though, which is not open. There is now an open source replacement for play services - I don't think it's very compatible yet though.

MicroG is fairly compatible, but obviously it's can't do anything about DRM like SafetyNet.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#253

Post by neogodless »

rkangel wrote: post #85
codeulike wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I think Microsoft have 5 or 6 different lines of business that bring in billions or more of revenue: windows, cloud, gaming, office/productivity and surface. They are the most diversified of the big players.

> 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 only works on Windows, or it's where many users are currently using it, and accustomed to using it. There are other cases where "M1 for x" doesn't exist yet - high-end workstations, for example. We have rumors and expectations for this to come out in over the next two years, and assuming the competition stands still, you might start to see cases where the time savings on heavy computation favors the Apple Silicon options heavily enough to overcome inertia.

But I would suggest people look at Intel and AMD in the Windows space for a precedent. AMD multi-core performance has been dominating Intel for about 3 years now... guess who owns the market share? It's still Intel. The momentum definitely takes years to overcome. AMD is at something like 20% of Windows notebook share after about one year of having dominate mobile chips. See this - https://www.pcworld.com/article/3588154/amds-notebook-pc-sha...

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#254

Post by cesarb »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #240
offtop5 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything I see computers being more open now. You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer. Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ? Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good…

>You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer. Except that decent RaspberyPI configs that could replace PCs cost around $60-70(In EU) and once you add a display, peripherals and a decent microSD card(which is still smaller, slower and less reliable than even a budget SSD) and you're looking at over $100 and for that kind of cash…

> and once you add a display, and peripherals you're looking at over $100

I believe the basic idea of the Raspberry Pi is that everyone already has the display (a television), so the only peripherals you need are the power supply, keyboard, mouse, and HDMI cable, which together should be around USD 15 or even less (from a quick search for local prices here then converting to USD).

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#255

Post by 0xffff2 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #50
orra wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> patents generally cannot be used to prevent interoperability I think you're thinking of copyright? Where reverse engineering is allowed for interoperability.

No, it's patent-law, not copyright law. Interestingly while the US has Fair Use (which is an open-ended legal defence), I don't think any countries in the EU (or "Western Europe" if Brexit happens) have anything beyond the closed and enumerated "Fair Dealing" defence).

>or "Western Europe" if Brexit happens

Wait a second, one of us is behind the times. I thought Brexit happened earlier this year?

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#256

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

cesarb wrote: post #254
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer. Except that decent RaspberyPI configs that could replace PCs cost around $60-70(In EU) and once you add a display, peripherals and a decent microSD card(which is still smaller, slower and less reliable than even a budget SSD) and you're looking at over $100 and for that kind of cash…

> and once you add a display, and peripherals you're looking at over $100 I believe the basic idea of the Raspberry Pi is that everyone already has the display (a television), so the only peripherals you need are the power supply, keyboard, mouse, and HDMI cable, which together should be around USD 15 or even less (from a quick search for local prices here then converting to USD).

>I believe the basic idea of the Raspberry Pi is that everyone already has the display (a television)

Sounds like a pretty poor assumption to me. In EU at least, over half the people I know own no television(TV tax is huge here and excluding boomers, nobody watches it anyway because Netflix) and if we assume all families in developing nations own a TV in the household then it would be difficult to do any productive type of work on it as the TV would probably be used a lot for, you know, watching TV and other entertainment rather than having it reserved just as a tool. Good luck writing your homework on your TV while your dad wants to watch his game and your mom her show.

Even in developing nations, second hand PCs are such affordable commodities that they're a no brainer.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#257

Post by 0xffff2 »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #250
cromwellian wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macs in general are terrible for triple-A gaming. I doubt any Mac in existence can run a Bootcamp's version of Cyberpunk 2077, except maybe a Mac Pro with a top-end GPU, or maybe an eGPU would work, assuming you could get a top-end AMD or Nvidia eGPU. On top of that, there's a lack of raw mouse which Apple hasn't fixed despite over a decade of people begging. This really fubar's FPS games where absolute control over…

While not native on M1, you can play Cyberpuck 2077 streaming over stadia on a Mac: https://stadia.google.com/game/cyberpunk2077?hl=en

I keep seeing comments like this pop up, and I don't get it. Of course if you run the game on some other computer and only stream the video output to the client you can play any game on nearly any device. That's not what anyone's talking about when they say you probably can't run Cyberpunk 2077 on an M1 Mac.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#258

Post by andrewprock »

morganvachon wrote: post #122
sime2009 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> M1 can accelerate the shift of home users to Macs. I can't see the M1 making a lick of difference here. Home users aren't going to double their budgets to afford an Apple machine, especially one which can't even play most games.

> Home users aren't going to double their budgets to afford an Apple machine... If I were to switch to a Mac mini I would pay about $350 less than it cost me to build my main workstation/gaming machine. According to the benchmarks and real-world tests, I'd gain quite a bit in performance over my Ryzen build, with a fraction of the power consumption which is currently 120W idle, 310W maxed out as measured by my UPS. P…

I do think that's the disconnect. Apple has eschewed gaming whereas Microsoft has embraced it. It turns out that gaming is a huge moat, and until Apple decides to invade they will be relegated to second place in the PC market.

On the flip side, the PC market is less and less relevant as phones have become the primary computing platform in the last 10 years.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#259

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #230
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #175

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.

The market rejected it because it had crappy UX. Those smartphones were marketed for balding dads in white shirts, working in cubicles. Steve Ballmer types.

The iPhone had 60 fps smooth animations, a built-in iPod, a huge capacitive touchscreen, and most importantly none of the baggage of being associated with balding managers in their 40s. It was sexy. It was a fashion statement.

There wasn’t even an AppStore on iOS initially.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#260

Post by neogodless »

dolmen wrote: post #16
mtgx wrote: post #4

Are they doing any kind of translation, too, or just pure emulation? Because if they aren't, then Windows will continue to run significantly slower on the already significantly lower-performance third-party Arm chips compared to how macOS runs on the M1. My prediction is 50%-60% of the performance of M1 on the latest/highest-end Qualcomm laptop chip.

The post says "x64 emulation for ARM64 devices" for applications. Windows itself is already native on ARM64. And some apps too: Edge, Photoshop. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2020/12/10/introdu...

I think the parent comment was worded poorly but this is how I'd look at it.

MacOS with M1 runs software compiled for ARM at 100%.

MacOS with M1 runs translated software via Rosetta 2 at like 95%.

Windows on ARM runs software compiled for ARM at 100%.

Windows on ARM runs x86/x64 emulation at 60%.

If Windows for ARM would replace x86/x64 emulation with binary translation, they might remove a significant barrier to ARM adoption (on Windows) by removing the harsh penalty of having to emulate legacy software until enough native/compiled for ARM software exists.

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