61–70 of 290 posts
Microsoft are seriously killing it in emulation these days. First I was amazed with them getting Xbox 360 (PPC) games running at full speed or better on the Xbox One (x86) and now we have x86 on ARM. They have some wizards working on this stuff. Edit: I wonder if Dave Cutler is involved in this x86 on ARM stuff? I think he was with the Xbox 360/Xbox One.
HN is probably not the right target for this type of device. Either way we need Windows 10 on ARM to succeed for Intel to have more competition. I also do think it will be successful if it works at least as well as Intel's Atom-based Celeron and Pentium laptop chips, especially in emerging markets. Intel shot itself in the foot by replacing the Core architecture in mobile Celerons and Pentiums with Atom, and also by…
Core mobile Celeron and Pentium are still available, for example Celeron 3865U [1], it's just Intel got tired of having names with useful information in them. That processor should probably have a name like Core v7 2C-2T 1.8Ghz-15W which has most of the useful information, but 3865U is what we got, so you have to filter out the atom chips yourself.
[1] https://ark.intel.com/products/96507/Intel-Celeron-Processor...
For any Microsoft insiders with knowledge about this, a few questions: 1. In the talk they claim that they get "near native" speed from the translation. Can we have some real number of what can be expected? What about warm up time? 2. Is the x86 translation layer only available in user space, or can x86 drivers be loaded for hardware that doesn't have arm drivers yet (or the manufacturer doesn't care about making the…
5. How do they solve the problem that x86 has a much stronger memory model than ARM, which makes emulation of multithreaded x86 code pretty hard without introducing a huge performance disadvantage?
I hope the answer is not "by restricting all emulated threads to one CPU core".
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A desktop/mobile convergence phone is my dream. I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
I think I get it; but could you expand a bit on what you mean?
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5. How do they solve the problem that x86 has a much stronger memory model than ARM, which makes emulation of multithreaded x86 code pretty hard without introducing a huge performance disadvantage?
What do you mean, could you elaborate on that a bit? How is x86 "memory model stronger" and why would application code be affected?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ordering#In_symmetric_m...
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I'd be very interested in a Windows 10 phone if it has automatic updates that do not depend on the carrier, to avoid the Android situation where only certain phones get updates on a timely basis.
Windows 10 Mobile gets OS updates directly from Microsoft. Verizon does not support Windows 10 Mobile at all , but my four year old Verizon Lumia Icon got Windows 10 version 14393.1198, which released yesterday, yesterday. Microsoft has chosen to drop a lot of older models from the Creator's Update, but is still providing cumulative/security updates to the Anniversary Update right now, which is supported on all phone…
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5. How do they solve the problem that x86 has a much stronger memory model than ARM, which makes emulation of multithreaded x86 code pretty hard without introducing a huge performance disadvantage?
What do you mean, could you elaborate on that a bit? How is x86 "memory model stronger" and why would application code be affected?
This is a deep rabbit hole because modern processors are speculatively executing THOUSANDS of instructions ahead. So what you have/haven't written to memory is slightly existential.
Here is a good blog post about it http://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/
The TLDR: x64 tries REALLY HARD to ensure your pointers always have the newest data. ARMv6, very much. ARMv7 kind of. ARMv8 fairly.
Interesting - something they should have done rather than the orphan WindowsRT, in my opinion. I wonder if this ends up being the inheritor of Windows CE for embedded ARM-flavoured devices. I also wonder if this means that the Win10 ARM kernel has the full Windows API - so if you built an ARM PE executable that could run natively. I suspect 95% of the pieces are in place for that but it's not yet been productised.
Microsoft are seriously killing it in emulation these days. First I was amazed with them getting Xbox 360 (PPC) games running at full speed or better on the Xbox One (x86) and now we have x86 on ARM. They have some wizards working on this stuff. Edit: I wonder if Dave Cutler is involved in this x86 on ARM stuff? I think he was with the Xbox 360/Xbox One.
They make a very good Android emulator as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I get it; but could you expand a bit on what you mean?
A phone form factor device that can run a full desktop OS, or something close to it. Canonical was getting close with Ubuntu Touch but that's essentially dead now. I don't want a gimped version of Windows like I'd get with Continuum, I don't want a "desktop-like" version of Android like Samsung is doing, I want a full version of Linux or Windows that can run desktop applications.