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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those smartphones were marketed for balding dads in white shirts, working in cubicles Ouch, burn. Though oldschool cubicles sound better than the current open office chicken farms I've seen.

Hehe, true! Cubicles are much better from a privacy perspective, but the startup kids tore them down on the dubious pretext of hindering collaboration. It was only a matter of time before BigCos followed suit, if only for the obvious cost saving reasons.

I don't mind open offices for the 5 man starups made of the guys who met in college and are trying their luck with blood sweat and tears, however I really do mind them in the nouveau wannabe pseudo startups where it's an open chicken coop for the developer plebs and private offices for the sales/marketing/management.

But it's ok, they give you a ping pong and foosball table. /s

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#272
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in Spain.

Lucky you. Still, it's not a UK only tax, as you originally claimed.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices. Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations? Given that the general public is largely unaware of DRM and the like, it was likely for lack of other features. There's no inherent reason why a more open phone OS couldn't succeed in the market. After all, Android devices…

>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?

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the perf gains on the M1 are due to hardware support for TSO (total store ordering), which doesn't exist on the latest/highest-end Qualcomm chip, hence the Windows support needs to insert many more barriers to emulate TSO. This likely has a significant impact on emulated performance. At least the x86 (32-bit) emulation relied entirely on JIT compiling its emulated code, instead of doing anything AOT. _However…

I believe windows elides TSO guarantees when it thinks they aren't necessary. This should usually work out all right–only a small amount of code usually cares very much about memory ordering.

That seems like a very difficult task to determine when it matters.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#275

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.

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…

> "Those smartphones were marketed for balding dads in white shirts, working in cubicles. "

While true, I wouldn't say that's a burn because it was exactly those people who could afford smartphones and justify paying the painfully high bandwidth charges of that era. Remember, those phones cost as much as a iPhone today but in 2005 dollars (ouch). The ubiquitous Blackberry, a.k.a. the "Crackberry", and Palm devices were also aimed at the same business and professional market.

These early devices paved the way to the current smartphone market.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices. Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations? Given that the general public is largely unaware of DRM and the like, it was likely for lack of other features. There's no inherent reason why a more open phone OS couldn't succeed in the market. After all, Android devices…

> " Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations? " My point was that openness didn't outweigh other considerations in the eyes of people purchasing them. Windows Mobile smartphones were actually dominant in the market until the iPhone was introduced. IIRC from the industry data I had access to, there were over 100 different models in a variety of form fac…

They weren't as open as you remember for most people using pre-iPhone smart phones. Carriers did all sorts of things to cripple reduce functionality so they could sell it back to you.

A major factor of the iPhone's early US success was forcing a major US carrier (AT&T) to stop doing consumer hostile things and just let the device connect to the network as intended.

So, in part, it was improved openness that drove iPhone/Android's success. It just was network openness instead of device openness.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#277

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…

We can only hope. The first Arm version, Windows 10 S was Apple style concentration camp.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#278

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.

> 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 services on top of it. The Google ecosystem should be completely decoupled from the OS.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#279

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…

We can only hope. The first Arm version, Windows 10 S was Apple style concentration camp.

This phrasing is really misplaced and hurts many many people. Please fix. And no, I am not talking about the Apple fanboys.

Re: A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM

#280

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've considered it, but I've tried Steam Link inside my local LAN, and Playstation NOW over my gigabit cable connection, and I find both to be too laggy for my taste.
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