Whoever can make a compatibility layer that successfully translates x86/64 to arm and vice versa and make it widely available will be a major player in the market. Valve has already somewhat done something similar with proton and Apple with Rosetta 2.
Apple developed it as a stopgap. In the Windows world x86/64 will be around for a long long time. Not sure if anyone is willing to support something like that for the next 10 years.
Proton and Rosetta 2 are two totally different beasts. One allows windows programs to run on non-windows hosts and one translates x86 to Arm.
I’m not aware of Proton doing anything like Rosetta 2 and if it did Steam would have probably used an Arm chip in their Steam Deck instead of an x86.
Maintaining 2-way compatibility doesn’t seem like an important goal. One way, x86->Arm, sure but not Arm->x86. Apple clearly sees x86 as a dead end for its own product lines and we will see if the rest of the industry follows suit over time. Of course there is a ton tied up in x86 but aside from legacy apps or games I don’t have much need of x86 in my life.
Even the servers I run are trending towards Arm due to the power savings. AWS graviton stuff is like ~25-30% cheaper than x86 last I looked
I understand proton isn’t the same thing, it was just an example of a compatibility layer…and how would a bidirectional compatibility layer not be beneficial? X86 in servers may be going away and even that’s debatable, but x86 isn’t going anywhere in the consumer space. Graviton chips are great, but they’re useless if there’s no viable way to translate those x86 legacy applications over to ARM without breaking the bank until your business is ready to transition the workload to ARM.
Amazon was working on a compatibility layer specifically for this purpose, however I suspect they’ve given up because they’ve slowly added Intel and AMD chipsets back into their general purpose ec2 class for newer generations and there hasn’t been a single word about compatibility with graviton other than just use arm based workloads.
You just can’t move to ARM because it’s cheaper, that’s just not going to work. You need to make the effort to move away from x86 and adopt applications that are arm native before making that jump. With a compatibility layer it doesn’t matter, that’s where the money is, if I can build a compatibility layer that translates an x86 binary to an arm binary, then I can move those workloads to the cheaper and more efficient server class.
FEX-Emu is basically that. They’re still in an early state but they showed Sonic Mania running perfectly a few days ago.
Windows on ARM is a thing, it will run x86 binaries.
Someone should revive transmeta and gear it towards arm.
It’s gotta be Microsoft building it into Windows. The Apple Silicon transition wouldn’t have been nearly as smooth if people had to pay for, say, CrossOver or something to use their Intel apps. And the tepid response to the ARM Surface models makes me think that it’s a must, despite the UWP dream.
The good news is that Rosetta 2 shows it can be done extremely well!
It would be an instant buy for me, especially since it wouldn’t be as locked down and work better with Linux. I’ll deal with the software issues later, gimmie now!
Question is - is Qualcomm going to do the same bullshit as their mobile ARM processors with the drivers?
Where you need to wait for their proprietary Linux driver to upgrade your kernel?
Hopefully the open source Qualcomm drivers will support this chip. The SDM845 chip is pretty well supported on mainline kernel, using SDM845 with 6.5 kernel and postmarketOS to type this comment. The Freedreno driver is probably the best ARM GPU driver in Mesa.
An ARM Galaxy Book 360 with S-pen running Photoshop and Illustrator while running relatively cold. I would buy that in an instant
