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Maybe fine for Android but this will set their windows plans back another decade if it happens It has taken them that long to make arm be a thing on windows an
by dagmx 2y ago
Maybe fine for Android but this will set their windows plans back another decade if it happens
It has taken them that long to make arm be a thing on windows and that’s building on people porting stuff to arm for Mac to finally get momentum.
RISC-V with windows will be an eternity to be feasible.
- snvzz 2y ago>RISC-V with windows will be an eternity to be feasible. Will it now? Microsoft was already deeply involved in 2021 as per that years' summit RISC-V Foundation's technical talks. Ztso was pushed by them.
- dagmx 2y agoWhether Microsoft has windows running on an architecture is a very different level from whether it’s feasible to use it as a daily driver on windows. The ecosystem is what matters for most people. Windows for arm hails back to 2011. They’re only just now getting native arm ports for several major packages. That’s ~13 years for a well established architecture that’s used much more universally than RISC-V. They don’t even have arm ports for lots of software that has arm ports on macOS. RISC-V will take an aeon longer to get a respectable amount of the windows ecosystem ported over.
- snvzz 2y ago>The ecosystem is what matters for most people. Absolutely agree. The key development Microsoft has demonstrated recently is the ability to run x86 Windows software in non-x86 Windows systems. Now that this is in place -and will only get better-, there is no longer a chicken and egg situation. Instead, what we have is a clearly defined path to migrate away from x86.
- Atotalnoob 2y agoArm on windows may date to 2011, but it was mostly a side project with 1-2 maintainers. With sufficient investment, it shouldn’t take 13 years to build up RISC-V support.
- snvzz 2y agoThis. It is evident to anybody paying attention that Microsoft has RISC-V support well underway. But even if they had to start from scratch, it would be much easier, thanks to ARM having paved the way.
- dagmx 2y agoHow do you imagine ARM having helped?
- monocasa 2y agoThe x86 emulator for one.
- dagmx 2y agoFair, though I don’t think translation is a good long term strategy. You need native apps otherwise you’re always dealing with a ~20-30% disadvantage. The competition isn’t sitting still either and QC already hit this with Intel stealing their thunder with Lunar Lake. They’re efficient enough that the difference in efficiency is far overshadowed by their compatibility story. Ecosystem support will always go to the incumbent and this would place RISC-V third behind x86 and ARM. macOS did this right by saying there’s only one true way forward. It forces adoption.
- snvzz 2y ago>You need native apps For native apps, you need users. For users, you need emulation. It cannot be overstated how important successful x86 emulation is for the migration to anything else to be feasible.
- dagmx 2y agoI think you just ignored the rest of my comment though which specifically addresses why I don’t think just relying on translation is an effective strategy. Users aren’t going to switch to a platform that has lower compatibility when the incumbent has almost as good efficiency and performance.
- numpad0 2y agoJust something I as a random person been thinking, how likely is next version of Windows _not_ going to be something Linux-based with WINE+Bochs preinstalled? Windows branding is now forever tied with x86/x64 Win32 legacy compatibility, meanwhile WSL had captured back a lot of webdevs from Mac. Google continues to push Chrome, but Electron continues to grow side by side. Lots of stuff happening with AI on Linux too, with both Windows and Mac remaining to be consumer deployment targets. Phone CPUs are fast enough to run some games on WINE+Bochs. At this point, would it not make sense for MS to make its own ChromeOS and bolt-on an "LSW"?
- dagmx 2y agoI think it’s almost certain that Microsoft will not be changing their kernel to Linux. I think you’re over estimating what percentage of users use WSL. They’re an insignificant fraction of the user base. And with games, I think you’re also overestimating how good the translation layers like Proton are, and how rapidly Microsoft advance DX as well.