208
Microsoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
208 points (94.4% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3794 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Emulation is always slower and eats more battery. Microsoft's laziness is proof they don't care about that hardware, so may just as well buy an iPad Pro instead.
This is a pretty interesting counter example: https://www.eteknix.com/running-yuzu-on-switch-gives-you-better-performance-than-native-gaming/
But, as others have said, exceptions confirm the rule.
Yuzu can exhibit superior performance because the Switch is rocking the Tegra X1 from 2015. Yuzu absolutely cannot beat the Switch with contemporary hardware and/or comparable power consumption.
But yuzu was running on the switch in that example. So it was beating the switch on contemporary hardware.
Oh yeah, clearly I did not read the article well. Still, it doesn’t mean what you think it does.
First, Yuzu is more of an alternative API implementation than an emulator in this setup. The stock Switch OS and API implementation have been entirely replaced with Linux and the Yuzu implementation of the API. Given recent performance uplifts in the Linux kernel, I’m not surprised that Linux+Yuzu beats the first-party implementation.
Second, the use of the word “emulation” in the above thread is really a misnomer: Rosetta 2, Prism and the like all perform what is called dynamic ISA translation. Yuzu need not perform ISA translation when running on ARM hardware.
I'm also not surprised and I still find it amusing. The ISA translation is something I never actually thought about in emulation
It is always quite amusing to see a billion dollar corporation beaten in its own game :)
More information/context, if you’re curious:
Rosetta 2 in particular isn’t full emulation because the API is the same for both architectures - it is only dynamic ISA translation. I expect that Prism will be slightly closer to full emulation; there is simply no way Microsoft will reimplement all of the legacy Windows APIs on ARM.
WINE is a great example of something that is also not a full emulator, but for the opposite reason: it does not perform any ISA translation or hardware emulation, but rather only syscall (API) translation.