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Comment by ibiza | Hacker News Reader

I suppose dropping x86 support makes for one less architecture for Rosetta II to support.

Rosetta II being the x64 -> ARM translation layer for when they start putting the AX chips in Macbooks?

HP already has it's Snapdragon convertable out that has Windows 10 x86 emulation. But surprisingly this is only _32-bit_ not 64. Looks like performance is understandably poor as well.

I'd expect Apple to take their usual strategy and wait a bit until chips are a little faster/they have a more mature emulator before they make the switch.

Interesting times though!

Re: HP Envy

It's an ARM64 chip running ARM64 OS and ARM32/x86/ARM64 Win32 and UWP apps. Just doesn't handle amd64 > arm32/64 conversion.

I actually expect Apple to implement some "emulator-acceleration instructions" into their own chips and get excellent (almost as good, as good or better) performance once they switch, as always, because otherwise people just won't switch en masse.

If Apple make the move, I kinda expect them to do nothing, and make their customers deal with incompatible software. They've been super hostile to their customers of late.

I dont think Intel will allow that to happen without some patents issues.

x86 is now 30-40 years old depending on how you measure it. Even "modern" x86 (post Pentium Pro) is over 20 years old. An awful lot of the patents have expired.

X86-64, that is the most important one.

It's not even by Intel; it's by AMD and they did nothing to prevent Intel from using it.

Intel did license it from AMD IIRC.

Microsoft has announced 64 bit emulation coming in a few months.

Snapdragon Single Thread Performance isn't even great, hence with added emulation performance penalties it is going to be even slower.

Yeah Apple's "big cores" do have better single threaded performance over Snapdragon, but we're not talking an order of magnitude.

I think chips need to be a bit faster AND emulation overhead reduced before it gives a "can't really tell the difference between an Intel or ARM MacBook" type experience. At least for developers/creators.

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