Microsoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs
Microsoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs
Why the fuck would they name it PRISM?
Just being honest about how much data Windows collects these days...
Maybe their goal is to bury that prism and hope people forget?
Lol they knew exactly what they were doing....
They probably want to bury it by making their Prism more SEO friendly
Prism is definitely a bad name , Edward Snowden knows
Is it ? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I don't see this working. The reason that Apple and ARM work is because Apple controls the whole ecosystem on Macs.
Apple controls the whole ecosystem on Macs.
In what sense? The vast majority of macOS software is downloaded/installed from the internet, just like Windows.
I don’t see it working because the Windows APIs are a dozen self-oxidizing dumpster fires scattered into the wind, but that’s a different story.
I don’t really know if ARM adds benefits I’d really notice as an end user, but it’ll be interesting to see if this really goes through and upends the dominant architecture we’ve seen for really 40+ years.
As an ARM Mac user, I wouldn’t trade all this new battery life for an x86 processor
Second this. Not to mention INSTANT resume from hibernation! It's fucking crazy. I can use this thing ALL DAY doing webGL CAD work and Orca Slicer and barely scratch 50%.
There's nothing stopping x86-64 processors from being power efficient. This article is pretty technical but does a really good explanation of why that's the case: https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/03/27/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die/
It's just that traditionally Intel and AMD earn most of their money from the server and enterprise sectors where high performance is more important than super low power usage. And even with that, AMD's Z1 Extreme also gets within striking distance of the M3 at a similar power draw. It also helps that Apple is generally one node ahead.
I'm not expert, but I can tell you that Apple Silicon gave the new Macbooks insane battery life, and they run a lot cooler with less overheating. Intel really fucked up the processors in the 2015-2019 Macbooks, especially the higher-spec i7 and i9 variants. Those things overheat constantly. All Intel did was take existing architectures and raise the clock speeds. Apple really exposed Intel's laziness by releasing processors that were just as performant in quick tasks, they REALLY kicked Intel's ass in sustained workloads, not because they were faster on paper, but simply because they didn't have to thermal throttle after 2 minutes of work. Hell, the Macbook Air doesn't even have any active cooling!
I'm not saying these Snapdragon chips will do exactly the same thing for Windows PC's, obviously we can't say that for sure yet. But if they do, it will be fucking awesome for end users.
The idea is ARM can be more efficient, which translates as longer battery life and/or faster computers for the end user.
Let’s spend all that new-found battery life by translating x86 code to ARM code.
You will definitely notice better battery life as an end user.
Battery life and thermals. really neat for laptops
The benefits, basically, are that it can provide an architecture that is designed for modern computing needs that can scale well into the future. That means high performance with low power consumption and heat.
The x86/64 model has been up against a wall for a while now, pumping out red-hot power hogs that don’t suit modern needs and don’t have much of a path forward wrt development compared to ARM.
Huh?
32-bit ARM and x86 were both from 1985…
It did take ARM a lot longer to make 64-bit work
I give ARM a decade before RISC-V eats it from the bottom up
One of the biggest problems I had with windows on ARM was drivers. Most of my devices that needed drivers didn’t have an arm compatible version available. This needs to change more urgently than simply being able to run software, for me, at least.
…It took them only 4 years to follow the leader this time.
It has more to do with manufacturers than Microsoft. Nobody was making high performance ARM chips, so there was never a market for windows on ARM until now
Windows on arm was a thing, I had a surface 2 rt about a decade ago, too bad it never felt like microsoft ever really fully committed to the idea imo, and yeah x86 apps wouldn't run on it (though there was an emulation tool apparently, was community developed). Market was definitely there (though I'm not sure how big it was, probably a cross over with netbook users), they just fumbled it like they did windows phone in my view.
Same argument can be valid for Apple as well.
Although it may look like Windows is a platform for any-hardware, reality is MS can and does push manufacturers to shape hardware as it’s desire, like forcing all mainboards to have TPM.
......but Apple started making performance ARM chips 4 years ago
I can hear the game launchers laughing. If EA doesn't have a native version of their app out, that should be every reviewers first test.
LOL if MS says it then you know it's the exact opposite.
now we need some sort of hw-accelerated x86_64 layer but for linux
Isn't there already Box64/Box32? Not to mention most Linux software is already compiled for ARM thanks to being open source.
yes, but you'll be missing out on ALL games, none of which are compiled for arm64.
also no, box64 is not hardware accelerated.
both snapdragon and apple m series cpus have hardware magic that makes translation viable at all (as demonstrated by box64's (and even fex) piss poor performance)
What Apple did for Macs when switching architectures, though, was to port their own software to the new architecture. Microsoft doesn't even port fucking Minesweeper to ARM.
Another thing they did is add hardware support for the x86 strong memory model to their ARM chips, allowing for efficient emulation. Without this, translated code takes a big performance hit.
Did Qualcomm add something similar to their ARM CPUs ?
They've still got things that haven't changed since about Windows 3.1, like that ODBC dialog window.
Isn't that the point? This new layer is supposed to make it easier to port everything, and they're saying that's what Rosetta did for Apple/Mac.
Translation layers aren't porting
No, the point of Rosetta was to be a stop-gap for 3rd party software because Apple did all porting in-house software long ago.
Prism is Microsoft's tool for staying lazy. Microsoft ships ARM-based Surface tablets since 12 years!!!!!
In all architecture transitions (PPC->Intel then Intel->ARM), Apple Chess has always been a native port from day one.
this is for the transition. no point in porting your software if nobody has the hardware. This will get people to get the hardware, as they can just keep using the existing software, and wait until it's properly ported
Edit: you people really think windows is the only software that needs a translation? Do you only ever use your OS on your computer, and not a single software more?
Nobody will buy the hardware if they can't commit to supporting the software. In a previous role, I was responsible for advising purchasing decisions for my company's laptop fleet. The Surface X (Arm edition) looked cool, but we weren't willing to take the risk, because at the time Microsoft had far worse transitional support than they do now. It's gotten better, but no one in their right mind is going to make the kind of volume purchases that actually drive adoption until they demonstrate they are in it for the long haul. It's a chicken and egg problem, and Microsoft doesn't care what hardware you are using, so long as it is running Windows or using (expensive) Windows services.
Apple released a native x86 version of Tiger with their first Intel Macs.
No, this won't get people to get hardware that looks horribly slow because everything needs to run through a translation layer. They do have the sources. They could just recompile them for the new hardware. If their sources are not total crap.
Microsoft really never do that port if they have a translation layer