Intel Rumored to Have Offered $2 Billion for RISC-V Chipmaker SiFive

[Stoly]

Mentioned it in the quote you posted from me? Problem with emulation is it takes work, is not always consistent and can have its own issues or bugs with the tens of thousands of game titles and cause another developer work load for in like Tesla's case, a very tiny market to have to support, plus many games would never get any updates since published. Why emulate when you can have the real McCoy? New devices, using arm and what ever GPU with new games supporting it makes more sense vice using emulation on software not likely to get updated. Of course applications, unless a wide spread adoption of a standard ARM platform for developers would most likely be needed for making it worth while. PC ECO system which goes along with the Consoles as well, x86 centric makes that a pretty big barrier for gaming unless Cell phone gaming is good enough, plenty of stuff there but not so much AAA big titles.

Just a unique use case (which may not sell) where x86 is the better solution over ARM for the time period. I am sure other types of use cases could also be better with x86 over ARM.

Seeing that Apple has been pretty successful emulating x86 applications on M1 (and back then when they moved from PPC to x86), I don't really see any reason it can't be done on an ARM pc. as well.

BTW while emulation does have its issues, it can also make games look a lot better so there's that.

 

[Brian_B]

Well, OS X has x86 emulation already for non-native 64-bit programs (Apple has been phasing out and completely discontinued 32-bit programs as of 10.14 -- the 2018 release -- so lack of 32-bit support is not out of the blue).

Honestly, apart from the very first time you run on a fresh install -- it downloads the emulation libraries, they aren't installed standard for some reason -- you'd not even realize anything is being emulated. Apart from some very intensive tasks (Photoshop, etc), the emulated version on the M1 runs about the same as the native version on the 10th gen Intel hardware.

As many other people have said -- that isn't because the M1 is a screaming fast processor, or that the 10th gen Intels are slouches. It's because Apple has been in tight control of the software stack, and it's so closely integrated to the metal - they know what needs to be accelerated with specialty hardware, what needs to go to the fast cores, and what can go to the slow cores. They weren't afraid to tell users and developers "No" when it came to legacy support, and you could call it "courage" or you could call it "Ignorance", but they drug the entire Apple community out of 68k, out of PPC, out 32 bit x86, and now out of x64 and into 64-bit ARM. And every single transition has went relatively smoothly - some minor growing pains as devs had to push new versions and grumbling when long-loved abandonware went incompatible due to lack of updates, but nothing that proved to be a fatal flaw or show stopper.

It's almost like they plan this stuff years in advance.... (that's sarcasm, for some of you that need the tag. There is no doubt they do)

Unlike Microsoft. Part of that is because the user base is just so large. Even if they leave 1-2% behind on a forced transition, that's still a ~lot~ of install base. And part of it is just because they like being the general purpose Swiss Army Knife - the OS that does it all, for better or worse. How long did Windows take to finally abandon 16-bit programs? Oh wait - it's still there, if your running 32-bit OS. I guess you can call that a good thing - I mean, you can still run all that old software. But I'd argue your much better suited downloading an actual old 16-bit OS, running it virtualized, and running your old software that way (and OS X allows that, including downloading archived versions of OS X, as long as you are on Apple hardware).

So yeah. Emulation is absolutely possible -- going both ways. And it can be pretty painless. It just takes someone who has a good vertically integrated hold on their system, and right now that's.... Apple, and the gaming consoles, and maybe the RPi folks.

Tesla is just doing this play games in the car thing as a gimmick. I doubt they are actually paying for a Windows license (that $25 or whatever it costs an OEM to throw one in there would eat into their margin, I'm sure). Probably Steam on Linux if I had to guess: and while I know a lot of car entertainment systems do run linux kernals, they typically are running them like fully embedded systems -- if your car kernal panics while your going down the freeway, bad things tend to happen... and while it doesn't happen often, there's still a world of difference between a consumer AMD system and an embedded system with a lot of special purpose watchdogs, redundancy, and failsafes.

 

[LazyGamer]

Seeing that Apple has been pretty successful emulating x86 applications on M1

I think a big part of this 'success' is that they'd already homogenized their APIs and developers had already tuned for the ecosystem. As much as it seems like the M1 came out of nowhere, it's important to remember that there's over a decade of effort behind the thing that makes the M1 successful, that being the ecosystem.

Which is why this is hard:

I don't really see any reason it can't be done on an ARM pc. as well.

Because this hasn't happened on the PC side of things. Not because it can't, but because it's been unnecessary. Where x86 CPUs have lacked in clockspeed headroom, and they're already quite a bit faster there given what they're capable of doing, they've managed to keep adding cores. Full-fat, out-of-order cores with extra higher-precision SIMD units available as well.

They essentially have just banked on performance increasing over time and not bothered with the level of homogenization that Apple has spent a decade asserting over the Mac ecosystem. Note that the Linux community is just as culpable here when it comes to DEs.

So, can it be done? Sure. Will it? Remains to be seen.

With respect to RISC-V, the main implications of 'ARM challenging x86' are that the ISA doesn't really matter so much. It needs to support modern features and not be architected stupidly yes, but in general if CPUs are used for what CPUs are good at - that is, chewing through branching code and getting payloads to heavy-hitting, specialized processors like GPUs - and not used as much for what they're bad at, which is basically everything, then it's not hard to make a decent, efficient computer.

BTW while emulation does have its issues, it can also make games look a lot better so there's that.

This is true!

 

[Brian_B]

Going a step further... I'd not really praise Apple for moving to Arm - after all, Microsoft tried to do it years ago with Windows RT. I'd argue it was the right move even back then - it's just Microsoft got in their own way, as per usual.

Where they failed was in failing to provide that compatibility layer - it wasn't really the hardware performance or anything. They didn't do the emulation or prep work needed to run x86 programs: you had to have separate versions, and Microsoft and developers were stuck trying to support two entirely different platforms, with entirely different use cases and capabilities, but somehow make them unified user experiences. You can't really do that - that's a fatal flaw right there. (and that's why Apple hasn't entirely merged iOS and OS X, and probably never will, despite the two gaining a lot of commonality)

Apart from that, I'd almost argue they ~couldn't~ support that emulation level (at least with some reasonable level of investment)- just because Windows has grown into this 800lb gorilla, and there are so many different libraries and compatibility levels - that to provide support they needed to pare it all down and get to some common denominators.

So that's where UWP comes from. Problem is, Microsoft's implementation of UWP sucks, even on x86. So if you can't make it work on your big platform right, how you are going to use that to help people migrate to other hardware platforms?