This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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
Edit: you people really think windows is the only software that needs a translation? Do you only ever use your OS on your computer, and not a single software more?
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.
No, this won't get people to get hardware that looks horribly slow because everything needs to run through a translation layer. They do have the sources. They could just recompile them for the new hardware. If their sources are not total crap.
I'd expect there's quite a lot of assembly and endianness-dependent stuff here and there. It's Microsoft. Their culture is about pride of things being arcane-complex inside, cause if you can untangle that, you are a good programmer. They think that. I think they think that. Maybe they are just vile.
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.
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.
To be fair this is also a translation layer and not an emulator.
Prism is an x86 emulator for ARM. If you think that Prism is "a translation layer and not an emulator", I refer you to the very first word of the second to last paragraph of the submitted article.
That's assuming the writer knows what they're talking about. Last line from the second paragraph:
Windows 11 has similar translation capabilities, and with the Windows 11 24H2 update, that app translation technology is getting a name: Prism.
And first line from the third paragraph.
Microsoft says that Prism isn’t just a new name for the same old translation technology.
That’s assuming the writer knows what they’re talking about.
Certainly more than you because Prism emulates an x86 CPU and WINE doesn't, therefore the WINE comparison is still wrong.
Edit: Please prove the writer wrong.
This article seems to conflate "emulation" and "translation layer". I don't think there is anything that confirms "Prism emulates an x86 CPU", only that it allows for running x86 code on ARM. This does not inherently require emulation as demonstrated by Rosetta 2, which is a translation layer.
only that it allows for running x86 code on ARM. This does not inherently require emulation as demonstrated by Rosetta 2, which is a translation layer.
WINE doesn't "translate" one CPU architecture to another CPU architecture either, so the WINE comparison is still wrong, no mater if CPU translation is called emulation by you or not. WINE is a wrapper for API calls within the same CPU architecture. That's it.
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.)
Wine is not CPU emulation.
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.
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.
Why the fuck would they name it PRISM?
Just being honest about how much data Windows collects these days...
Maybe their goal is to bury that prism and hope people forget?
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.
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.
If there's 'nothing stopping' it then why has nobody done it? Apple moved from x86 to ARM. Mobile is all ARM. All the big cloud providers are doing their own ARM chips. Intel killed off much of the architectural competition with Itanic in the early 2000's. Why stop?
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.
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)?
ARM is the licensor, not the licensee. At the very least, they are willing to license the ARM architecture to more companies (the licensees) than Intel is with x86. More RISC-V support would be ideal though for sure...
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.
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.
Apple controls the whole ecosystem on Macs.
In what sense? The vast majority of macOS software is downloaded/installed from the internet, just like Windows.
I don’t see it working because the Windows APIs are a dozen self-oxidizing dumpster fires scattered into the wind, but that’s a different story.
They control the ecosystem in the way that they provide what hardware is new on MacOS and what capabilities it has. So if any developer wants to support modern devices they have to port to that new hardware. They don't have any choice, if they want to stay relevant.
LOL if MS says it then you know it's the exact opposite.
…It took them only 4 years to follow the leader this time.
