What Apple did for Macs when switching architectures, though, was to port their own software to the new architecture. Microsoft doesn’t even port fucking Minesweeper to ARM.
Isn’t that the point? This new layer is supposed to make it easier to port everything, and they’re saying that’s what Rosetta did for Apple/Mac.
Translation layers aren’t porting
Fair enough, but to the end user it doesn’t matter if it works.
to the end user it doesn’t matter if it works.
Emulation is always slower and eats more battery. Microsoft’s laziness is proof they don’t care about that hardware, so may just as well buy an iPad Pro instead.
To add to what the other person said, there are some Windows-only games even today that run better on Linux than on Windows (I don’t have examples off the top of my head.)
Emulation is almost always slower and eats more battery.
FTFY. There have been some cases where emulation actually outperforms native execution, though these might be, “the exceptions that prove the rule.” For example, in the early days of World of Warcraft, it actually ran better on WINE on Linux than natively on Windows.
For example, in the early days of World of Warcraft, it actually ran better on WINE on Linux than natively on Windows.
WINE literally stands for “WINE Is Not an Emulator”.
To be fair this is also a translation layer and not an emulator.
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Isn’t that the point?
No, the point of Rosetta was to be a stop-gap for 3rd party software because Apple did all porting in-house software long ago.
Prism is Microsoft’s tool for staying lazy. Microsoft ships ARM-based Surface tablets since 12 years!!!
In all architecture transitions (PPC->Intel then Intel->ARM), Apple Chess has always been a native port from day one.
The 68k to PPC transition was rough though. It wasn’t until system 8 that Mac OS on a PPC mac was fully PPC code. But that was also a much different Apple that’s nothing like the Apple of today.
I firmly maintain that if Microsoft gave a shit about ARM, they would be defaulting every one of their compilers to produce fat x86/aarch64 binaries. The reality is, however, that they don’t care about the hardware so long as it is good enough.
if Microsoft gave a shit about ARM, they would be defaulting every one of their compilers to produce fat x86/aarch64 binaries
Wasn’t the point of .NET once that native binary code isn’t needed? I’d say if Microsoft gave a shit about ARM, everything would have been ported to .NET.
this is for the transition. no point in porting your software if nobody has the hardware. This will get people to get the hardware, as they can just keep using the existing software, and wait until it’s properly ported
Nobody will buy the hardware if they can’t commit to supporting the software. In a previous role, I was responsible for advising purchasing decisions for my company’s laptop fleet. The Surface X (Arm edition) looked cool, but we weren’t willing to take the risk, because at the time Microsoft had far worse transitional support than they do now. It’s gotten better, but no one in their right mind is going to make the kind of volume purchases that actually drive adoption until they demonstrate they are in it for the long haul. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and Microsoft doesn’t care what hardware you are using, so long as it is running Windows or using (expensive) Windows services.
What better way to sell devices than by halfassing them to oblivion?
Apple released a native x86 version of Tiger with their first Intel Macs.
Sure, but the vast majority of Mac software at the time, including loads of first applications from Apple, couldn’t run on Tiger. You had to run it in the “Classic” environment - and they never ported that to Intel.
Tiger shipped just 4 years after the MacOS 9.2 and plenty of people hadn’t switched to MacOS X yet.
The reality is Apple only brings things forward when they can do it easily.
Apple has done eight major CPU transitions in the last 40 years (mix of architecture and bit length changes) and a single team worked on every single transition. Also, Apple co-founded the ARM processor before they did the first transition. It’s safe to assume the team that did all those transitions was also well aware of and involved in ARM for as long as the architecture has existed.
Microsoft really never do that port if they have a translation layer
Prism is definitely a bad name , Edward Snowden knows
Is it ? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Why the fuck would they name it PRISM?
Maybe their goal is to bury that prism and hope people forget?
Just being honest about how much data Windows collects these days…
I don’t really know if ARM adds benefits I’d really notice as an end user, but it’ll be interesting to see if this really goes through and upends the dominant architecture we’ve seen for really 40+ years.
As an ARM Mac user, I wouldn’t trade all this new battery life for an x86 processor
Second this. Not to mention INSTANT resume from hibernation! It’s fucking crazy. I can use this thing ALL DAY doing webGL CAD work and Orca Slicer and barely scratch 50%.
With a modern system, I honestly don’t think there’s a noticeable difference between suspend to ram and suspend to disk. They’ve gotten the boot times down so much that it’s lightning-fast. My work laptop’s default is suspend to disk, and I don’t notice a difference except when it prompts for the bitlocker password.
S0 standby is borderline unusable on many PCs. On Apple silicon macs it’s damn near flawless.
My current laptop is probably the last machine to support S3 standby and I do not look forward to replacing it and being forced back into a laptop that overheats and crashes in my backpack in less than 15 minutes. On my basic T14 it works ok for the most part, but my full fat Thinkpad P1 with an i9 is in S0 standby for longer than a few minutes, and sometimes uses more power than when it was fully on. Maybe Meteor lake with it’s LP E cores will fix this but I doubt it.
There’s nothing stopping x86-64 processors from being power efficient. This article is pretty technical but does a really good explanation of why that’s the case: https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/03/27/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die/
It’s just that traditionally Intel and AMD earn most of their money from the server and enterprise sectors where high performance is more important than super low power usage. And even with that, AMD’s Z1 Extreme also gets within striking distance of the M3 at a similar power draw. It also helps that Apple is generally one node ahead.
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Idk, the battery of my 12.9“ iPad Pro is great.
If nothing else it breaks the stranglehold the 2.1 x86 licensees (Intel and AMD) have on the Windows market. Its just that that market is much MUCH smaller than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
So we replace two players with one (ARM)?
Right? I’m much more excited to see RISC-V start to become more powerful and have more commercial offers of hardware to compete against the global tech brokers. We need the FOSS version of hardware or else our future privacy and ownership rights will forever be in jeopardy with info tech.
I’m not expert, but I can tell you that Apple Silicon gave the new Macbooks insane battery life, and they run a lot cooler with less overheating. Intel really fucked up the processors in the 2015-2019 Macbooks, especially the higher-spec i7 and i9 variants. Those things overheat constantly. All Intel did was take existing architectures and raise the clock speeds. Apple really exposed Intel’s laziness by releasing processors that were just as performant in quick tasks, they REALLY kicked Intel’s ass in sustained workloads, not because they were faster on paper, but simply because they didn’t have to thermal throttle after 2 minutes of work. Hell, the Macbook Air doesn’t even have any active cooling!
I’m not saying these Snapdragon chips will do exactly the same thing for Windows PC’s, obviously we can’t say that for sure yet. But if they do, it will be fucking awesome for end users.
You will definitely notice better battery life as an end user.
The benefits, basically, are that it can provide an architecture that is designed for modern computing needs that can scale well into the future. That means high performance with low power consumption and heat.
The x86/64 model has been up against a wall for a while now, pumping out red-hot power hogs that don’t suit modern needs and don’t have much of a path forward wrt development compared to ARM.
Huh?
32-bit ARM and x86 were both from 1985…
It did take ARM a lot longer to make 64-bit work
I don’t see this working. The reason that Apple and ARM work is because Apple controls the whole ecosystem on Macs.
One of the biggest problems I had with windows on ARM was drivers. Most of my devices that needed drivers didn’t have an arm compatible version available. This needs to change more urgently than simply being able to run software, for me, at least.
What drivers?
…It took them only 4 years to follow the leader this time.
It has more to do with manufacturers than Microsoft. Nobody was making high performance ARM chips, so there was never a market for windows on ARM until now
Windows on arm was a thing, I had a surface 2 rt about a decade ago, too bad it never felt like microsoft ever really fully committed to the idea imo, and yeah x86 apps wouldn’t run on it (though there was an emulation tool apparently, was community developed). Market was definitely there (though I’m not sure how big it was, probably a cross over with netbook users), they just fumbled it like they did windows phone in my view.
…but Apple started making performance ARM chips 4 years ago
And Apple was not selling those chips to Windows laptop manufacturers.
LOL if MS says it then you know it’s the exact opposite.
While they are at it, can we get Prism for Linux?
We have Box64
And fex
And my Axe
I can hear the game launchers laughing. If EA doesn’t have a native version of their app out, that should be every reviewers first test.
