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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

For better or worse, the last 15 years saw the industry move to a highly-abstracted platform-agnostic software ecosystem. People perform many of their tasks using applications running in a browser, in a wrapped browser engine like Electron, or in products using other portable runtimes like .NET or the JVM.

Meanwhile, much legacy software that hasn't made this transition often comes from an age of much lower performance and so can afford the penalties of emulation against modern hardware. Other legacy products are continually aging out and being retired for other reasons.

There are always exceptions, but Intel doesn't have the nearly the security it once did.

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Don’t forget that there’s all the tricks apple did with Rosetta to make emulating x86 fast (hardware consistency support, 4k pages, etc). I think the same apply for chpe.

I reckon if you send a gamer kid down to the store to buy a PC they will come back with an Intel architecture machine, even if there were ARM machines there.

They don't really care as long as the games work.

With Nvidia, AMD, and MS pushing, most new releases will probably have an ARM release, and older games can run with translation. The main problematic niche is older releases that are very CPU bound (like some sim games).

Older games are often already flaky on the current versions of the platforms they were first made for, there's no great easy business in taking legacy PC games and fixing them to be well emulated/translated.

Well if you go far back enough (like games that need DirectX8 or games that don't work on W10), the compatibility layers get really good, and overhead doesn't matter at all because they run at a billion fps.

Except for MS' Direct Draw implementation under Windows 8 and beyond, were your 1999 game runs like a dog under an i5, and you need a wrapper to translate DDraw to OpenGL.

>>> older games can run with translation

Games are the most optimised code there is.

Translation layers might cut it with vintage games but not with anything modern.

seems to be working alright for apple. I can’t remember the last game I played that was bottlenecked on the cpu anyways, seems to always be the GPU

My friends love the new Baldur's Gate game which now runs well on a little M1 laptop

Rimworld, Stellaris are big ones for me.

FEX-Emu would like a word. The asahi people recently used FEX to run Portal on arm laptops.

They JIT the x86 code to arm and their codegen is good enough to maintain most of native performance. Each new release brings them closer to closing the gap.

Portal is, like, 16 years old...

Where's your cutoff for vintage?

Yeah, and it was relatively fast even back then.

Portal 2 https://twitter.com/linaasahi/status/1638603205570613253

Portal 2 is demanding enough of a real-time FPS to demonstrate the principle and FEX is only becoming more optimized. It won't be long until it's running AAA games on low settings.

Have you got a gamer teenager? I do.

They seem to care a great deal about their hardware and gamer teenagers also seem to spend alot more time analysing hardware and milliseconds performance advantages than anyone else. They literally care about mouse latency in milliseconds.

They spend a huge amount of time on YouTube and online forums talking gaming hardware. If the word on the street is that ARM is milliseconds slower than Intel then they won't buy it. There's lots of huge YouTube channels that do nothing but measure game performance on various hardware.

Yet the Steamdeck is selling great....

Gaming is no longer dominated by affluent teenagers. At least not to the degree it once was.

And yet even dedicated gaming keyboards often have 50ms latency or more internally, and the last YT video I've seen on "system latency" actually didn't look at any latencies and just measured frame render times. I don't know of a single channel that does actual keyboard-to-screen latency measurements.

The gaming community may care about numbers but I don't know if most actually know what those numbers say.

Yeah, there is a ton of fud in the tech YT channels.

But gAmEr love Nvidia than Intel isn't it?

Really? If a gamer saw a Nvidia gaming3000 arm CPU next to the GTX 5090 he was about to buy, I'm sure he's seriously consider it instead of the obvious boring Intel.

And then he'll come back for an exchange when he realizes his games won't run on his new PC.

Depends on if they keep up with the news. NVidia has repeatedly burned a lot of goodwill with the gaming community in the last few years. They catered to crypto miners (resulting a shortage of affordable cards for gamers for years), tried to sell a 4080 that was effectively a 4070, and then released the 4060 with what is perceived to be insufficient memory to last through the current console generation.

The 4060 doesn't seem to have any performance improvement over the 3060 either, so people can just opt for the older card. Or even buy a 3070 instead. ;)

Don’t forget them cutting the 256-bit wide bus of the 3060ti to 128-bits in the 4060ti.

Oof.

> For better or worse, the last 15 years saw the industry move to a highly-abstracted platform-agnostic software ecosystem. People perform many of their tasks using applications running in a browser, in a wrapped browser engine like Electron, or in products using other portable runtimes like .NET or the JVM.

A lot of the people who only need those things have largely already moved away from the PC desktop. (Especially if we don't include "laptop" in the "Intel will be hard to displace on the desktop" statement, which I'm not sure if the OP meant to include or not. But even if we include laptops, a lot of people have already moved away to tablet or non-Wintel-land.)

The remaining things, though? Generally not highly abstracted. There's the highly-tuned-for-amd64 performance side of things, and then the legacy/slow dev cycle side. I'm skeptical on the legacy side that there's a good business to be built on trying to move those users to a different architecture. Everybody's special weird setup is gonna be different enough with lots of random one-off external hardware or other such requirements I don't see good universal solutions that could scale.

It's not a growth business anymore but it's decline is slowing, I think.

> highly-abstracted platform-agnostic software ecosystem

It also moved towards Docker and Rust.

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