4 ms·

Any x86 emulation layer to support natively x86 executables on ARM without shedding any performance?

diroussel 8y ago
Do we even need emulation? All supported software can be recompiled. All the rest is unsupported. It's not nice for those with unsupported software bit I don't see this holding back Apple.
- tracker1 8y ago
  I could see this being a time for Adobe to partner with say Canonical to do make a linux commercial release supported.
  - dev_tty01 8y ago
    Not sure I see the relevance. Mac OS US installed base is about 46 million, Linux is about 5.8 million. (Based on browsing data for share of total installed base of about 350 million in the US.) The actual numbers can be sliced and diced different ways of course, but by any accounting the Mac is small compared to Windows and Linux is much smaller than that. I just don't see the economic motivation for companies like Adobe, particularly when you add in the diversity of Linux versions that would have to be supported. Whether or not Adobe can generate working code on a platform is only a small part of the cost of releasing on that platform. Don't hold your breath... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... https://www.statista.com/statistics/670172/united-states-installed-base-desktops-laptops-tablets/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/670172/united-states-ins...
    - tracker1 8y ago
      I don't know for certain, but I'd venture to guess half of Adobe's users are on Macs, and that an ARM based architecture won't work well for creative works (heavy image manipulation, video editing and encoding). And that could lead to a lot of Mac creative types looking for somewhere to go. It could be an opportunity for Adobe, if they played their cards right.
mikhailt 8y ago
They'll do a Rosetta + fat binaries and use ARM's hardware virtualization features to run a lightweight Hypervisor to run these apps on top of ARM CPU almost faster than any emulation technologies. There's a reason Apple added Hypervisor to Lion, it wasn't just for supporting VMs via Mac App Store but I suspect to virtualize legacy apps on top of fast ARM chips.

Do we even need emulation? All supported software can be recompiled. All the rest is unsupported. It's not nice for those with unsupported software bit I don't see this holding back Apple.

tracker1 8y ago
I could see this being a time for Adobe to partner with say Canonical to do make a linux commercial release supported.
- dev_tty01 8y ago
  Not sure I see the relevance. Mac OS US installed base is about 46 million, Linux is about 5.8 million. (Based on browsing data for share of total installed base of about 350 million in the US.) The actual numbers can be sliced and diced different ways of course, but by any accounting the Mac is small compared to Windows and Linux is much smaller than that. I just don't see the economic motivation for companies like Adobe, particularly when you add in the diversity of Linux versions that would have to be supported. Whether or not Adobe can generate working code on a platform is only a small part of the cost of releasing on that platform. Don't hold your breath... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... https://www.statista.com/statistics/670172/united-states-installed-base-desktops-laptops-tablets/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/670172/united-states-ins...
  - tracker1 8y ago
    I don't know for certain, but I'd venture to guess half of Adobe's users are on Macs, and that an ARM based architecture won't work well for creative works (heavy image manipulation, video editing and encoding). And that could lead to a lot of Mac creative types looking for somewhere to go. It could be an opportunity for Adobe, if they played their cards right.

mikhailt 8y ago

They'll do a Rosetta + fat binaries and use ARM's hardware virtualization features to run a lightweight Hypervisor to run these apps on top of ARM CPU almost faster than any emulation technologies. There's a reason Apple added Hypervisor to Lion, it wasn't just for supporting VMs via Mac App Store but I suspect to virtualize legacy apps on top of fast ARM chips.