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> but it becoming increasingly obvious that maintaining backward compatibility in modern high performance parts is incredibly expensive and bug ridden Moving e
by mhh__ 6y ago
> but it becoming increasingly obvious that maintaining backward compatibility in modern high performance parts is incredibly expensive and bug ridden
Moving everything to ARM will not be cheap. As for bugs that is entirely dependent on the company making the chip, which ones do you have in mind? (Also recall that M1 is vulnerable to Spectre too).
I kind of hope X86s days are numbered as well, but I'm not looking forward to an ARM monoculture.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- als0 6y ago> Moving everything to ARM will not be cheap I thought the same thing until I saw how well Apple's Rosetta 2 works. Now that we've seen what's possible, I'm hoping that the x64 emulation in Windows/ARM will rise to the challenge set by Apple.
- mhh__ 6y agoAnd to be able to use Rosetta 2 I only have to spend the combined value of all my computers again? Double that if I want the same amount of RAM and storage as I have now
- als0 6y agoYou don't have to use Rosetta 2 - that was an example of a good implementation. I did mention the announced x64 emulation on Windows, but that's only a preview release at the moment. If you're a Linux user the only thing I'm aware of is QEMU TCG but there might be faster projects out there.
- mhh__ 6y agoMy point was that it doesn't suggest cheap any time soon.
- monocasa 6y agoI imagine Apple has a patent on the cute optional TSO memory model that makes it work.
- duskwuff 6y agoI don't think they do. The memory model itself isn't patentable; the TSO memory model already existed on x86, as well as many other architectures before that. Having an option to enable/disable TSO might be patentable, but it'd be a stretch; there's plenty of precedent for allowing a CPU to select between operating modes at runtime. (For example, many PowerPC parts could be switched between little-endian and big-endian modes at runtime, and some developers even used this to assist in emulating x86!) What's more likely is simply that other ARM SoC vendors aren't implementing their own cores (e.g. they're using a standard Cortex-Ax design from ARM), so they can't add deeply integrated features like TSO themselves.
- monocasa 6y agoI mean, selectable, cheap, memory model changes are novel and I pretty much guarantee they have patents on some aspects of it. Depending on the patent there might be some cute ways to work around it, but it's going to take some work on your part. They might even have patents on other attempts to get to the same effect that they might have tried out. PowerPC's biendianness would be patentable too if it had been an absolutely ancient technique about as old as computers themselves. And there's people other than ARM and Apple making ARM cores. Samsung's Exynos M5 should be coming out before too long for instance.