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> I'm waiting for a ARM Steam Deck that has something like Rosetta built in. This would solve nothing, besides maybe a better chip design, but you're bringing

> I'm waiting for a ARM Steam Deck that has something like Rosetta built in. This would solve nothing, besides maybe a better chip design, but you're bringing back the same ISA, and you'd have to bend over backwards with your new fancy architecture to painstakingly truly support old software. > Windows has a compatibility layer for x64 applications on ARM It's the WoW layer, there's also Arm64X and I think a x86 mode (see Arm64EC documentation?).

999900000999 3y ago
I'm thinking battery life and heat. The SteamDeck is also a giant device compared to a Switch. A ton of progress has been made with Box64, I imagine a corporate effort would yield even better results.
- cristeigabriel 3y ago
  > I'm thinking battery life and heat. The problem is, I'm not sure how it'd help, when you have to do emulation. It often requires explicit hardware support (or some system level support) to break ABI to not manually do mappings and stuff, to make emulation as little overhead as possible. Make sure you caught that, "as little overhead as possible", I am not good at hardware whatsoever but to me there's no reason that an alternative chip would be any better than the original chip being emulated, when you have the same ISA being ran....... UNLESS there is some recompilation. This is why I'm a fan of JITs and their little VMs, you can do your own JIT compiler for VMs and implement your own optimizations, the same way you'd, say, implement fast-paths in a JS JIT compiler.
  - 999900000999 3y ago
    I might be out of my ballpark, but what about Rosetta ? As far as I can tell you still get a battery life increase even when running x86 apps.
    - cristeigabriel 3y ago
      I heard that apparently the M-series chips have some dedicated hardware for emulation, I may be wrong however. Not sure though how it's powered, and how it does the emulation itself afterwards. It very well could improve battery life if it does more than blind emulation. For the opposite end, look at QEMU (kind of an unfair comparison since Rosetta seems to be more like an userspace emulator, whereas QEMU handles a ton of devices and more)

999900000999 3y ago

I'm thinking battery life and heat. The SteamDeck is also a giant device compared to a Switch. A ton of progress has been made with Box64, I imagine a corporate effort would yield even better results.

cristeigabriel 3y ago
> I'm thinking battery life and heat. The problem is, I'm not sure how it'd help, when you have to do emulation. It often requires explicit hardware support (or some system level support) to break ABI to not manually do mappings and stuff, to make emulation as little overhead as possible. Make sure you caught that, "as little overhead as possible", I am not good at hardware whatsoever but to me there's no reason that an alternative chip would be any better than the original chip being emulated, when you have the same ISA being ran....... UNLESS there is some recompilation. This is why I'm a fan of JITs and their little VMs, you can do your own JIT compiler for VMs and implement your own optimizations, the same way you'd, say, implement fast-paths in a JS JIT compiler.
- 999900000999 3y ago
  I might be out of my ballpark, but what about Rosetta ? As far as I can tell you still get a battery life increase even when running x86 apps.
  - cristeigabriel 3y ago
    I heard that apparently the M-series chips have some dedicated hardware for emulation, I may be wrong however. Not sure though how it's powered, and how it does the emulation itself afterwards. It very well could improve battery life if it does more than blind emulation. For the opposite end, look at QEMU (kind of an unfair comparison since Rosetta seems to be more like an userspace emulator, whereas QEMU handles a ton of devices and more)