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I have a feeling that this will work like broadband to small towns. The major carriers are only marginally interested in making it work well right up until some

by nathanb 15y ago

I have a feeling that this will work like broadband to small towns. The major carriers are only marginally interested in making it work well right up until someone makes a move toward municipal broadband, and then suddenly everyone takes a great interest in providing service. Until there's a viable competitor in the Linux space, Flash on x64 will continue to be a choice between several bad solutions. The only thing that could change this would be if Arm CPUs started supporting the x64 instruction set. Then Android's position in the market would likely make a compelling business argument for a 64-bit Flash. I'm not holding my breath.

makmanalp 15y ago
Sort of, but not really. The problem is that we don't pick whether we're going to use Flash or an alternative. The website does. And you bet that a lot of websites also aren't going to care about the tiny 64 bit linux segment. "Competition" in this case would have to provide an exact drop-in replacement of Flash, which I don't think will happen soon. (The open flash replacements mostly sucked the last time I tried them.)
- nathanb 15y ago
  Sorry; by alternative I didn't mean HTML5 or Silverlight or whatever but whether to use gnash + Lightspark or an old, buggy 64-bit flash or 32-bit flash.
reemrevnivek 15y ago
x64 uses a complex instruction set, which has a huge number of instructions that can do non-primitive operations in one step. ARM uses a reduced instruction set, which limits the available operations to basic load, store, arithmetic (on register data only), and a couple jump/branch instructions. These design philosophies are incompatible. An x64 chip would be spinning its wheels, wasting power, if it tried to run ARM assembly. An ARM chip would have to virtualize a huge percentage of the operations that an x64 chip would do in a single instruction, and would be painfully slow, mitigating any power savings it might have. ARM will never run x64 binaries. Good thing you're not holding your breath. This is why we write portable code in higher-level languages that can be compiled for both architectures. Not sure that Android is a motivating factor for Adobe to produce code for desktop Linux, though. Virtualized x64 compatibility would be slower than ARM, and Flash is already a dog on Android.

by nathanb 15y ago

makmanalp 15y ago

Sort of, but not really. The problem is that we don't pick whether we're going to use Flash or an alternative. The website does. And you bet that a lot of websites also aren't going to care about the tiny 64 bit linux segment. "Competition" in this case would have to provide an exact drop-in replacement of Flash, which I don't think will happen soon. (The open flash replacements mostly sucked the last time I tried them.)

nathanb 15y ago
Sorry; by alternative I didn't mean HTML5 or Silverlight or whatever but whether to use gnash + Lightspark or an old, buggy 64-bit flash or 32-bit flash.

reemrevnivek 15y ago

x64 uses a complex instruction set, which has a huge number of instructions that can do non-primitive operations in one step. ARM uses a reduced instruction set, which limits the available operations to basic load, store, arithmetic (on register data only), and a couple jump/branch instructions. These design philosophies are incompatible. An x64 chip would be spinning its wheels, wasting power, if it tried to run ARM assembly. An ARM chip would have to virtualize a huge percentage of the operations that an x64 chip would do in a single instruction, and would be painfully slow, mitigating any power savings it might have. ARM will never run x64 binaries. Good thing you're not holding your breath. This is why we write portable code in higher-level languages that can be compiled for both architectures. Not sure that Android is a motivating factor for Adobe to produce code for desktop Linux, though. Virtualized x64 compatibility would be slower than ARM, and Flash is already a dog on Android.