Well consider me skeptical. Even if they "work", I doubt performance will be as good as on a comparable x86 machine. Not even Apple could accomplish that with Rosetta 2, and their ARM chips are...
Well consider me skeptical. Even if they "work", I doubt performance will be as good as on a comparable x86 machine. Not even Apple could accomplish that with Rosetta 2, and their ARM chips are generally better than Qualcomm's.
I'm not convinced ARM is going to replace x86 wholesale anytime soon. Intel is already starting to close the gap on performance per watt at the laptop scale. I haven't seen any compelling arguments that one ISA is inherently more efficient than another, as neither ISA is truly representative of how their respective chips work under the hood anymore.
I think growing competition in the laptop, desktop, and server CPU space the last 5-6 years has done more to produce faster, cooler chips than any one architecture.
I just see this as a stopgap. Hope emulation is "good enough", and if it takes off it'll encourage devs to properly port to ARM. Heck, Given Epic's recent news for phone stores I can see Unreal...
I'm not convinced ARM is going to replace x86 wholesale anytime soon.
I just see this as a stopgap. Hope emulation is "good enough", and if it takes off it'll encourage devs to properly port to ARM. Heck, Given Epic's recent news for phone stores I can see Unreal Engine working Qualcomm and studios alike to make it easy to port such games to ARM.
The only consolation here over Apple is that Qualcomm aren't stuck in Metal world, so I can see better emulation performance.
I'm not sure how much it will matter to be honest. There will almost certainly be games that don't work or perform poorly, but I'd probably wager a good chunk of games will be just fine with a bit...
I'm not sure how much it will matter to be honest. There will almost certainly be games that don't work or perform poorly, but I'd probably wager a good chunk of games will be just fine with a bit of CPU emulation bottleneck, especially if the ARM chips keep getting more performant over time. I imagine it could be a bit like Proton on Linux where most games (particularly if they're not bleeding edge / really CPU bound) will just work fine, with a few notable exceptions.
Still, I do find it disappointing that we have all of these proprietary x86 binaries out in the wild. It'd be really nice if we just had the source code so we could make proper ARM builds out of existing software, haha.
ALSO... I dunno, maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't really trust Qualcomm? Like I hope these chips are great, but doesn't Qualcomm kind of suck at supporting their old chips? Isn't that a huge part of the reason why Android phones had terrible long term software support? I really don't want to buy a laptop that will only be supported for 9 months T_T. I'm sure it will be better than the Android situation was, but god am I ever bitter about that lol.
Weirdly enough I actually have more faith in this application because Microsoft is going to be the one supporting them. But it’s admittedly not well founded because I never checked to see what the...
Weirdly enough I actually have more faith in this application because Microsoft is going to be the one supporting them. But it’s admittedly not well founded because I never checked to see what the support was like with other Windows ARM devices.
Yeah, this is something that's a bit unclear to me too. There's definitely stuff that's nice about ARM vs x86, but I don't think anybody fully knows how this will shape up, and sometimes I...
I haven't seen any compelling arguments that one ISA is inherently more efficient than another, as neither ISA is truly representative of how their respective chips work under the hood anymore.
Yeah, this is something that's a bit unclear to me too. There's definitely stuff that's nice about ARM vs x86, but I don't think anybody fully knows how this will shape up, and sometimes I convince myself that the x86 slander is kind of overblown and the differences don't really matter much in the grand scheme of things. Like... I wouldn't be terribly surprised if ARM ends up coming out on top, but overall I haven't seen great arguments for why it would dominate in all spaces vs x86. Like having a simpler instruction set with fixed-width instructions and more registers available feels like a win... But it's at least not obvious to my amateur eyes that stuff like the number of named registers matters when you start having register renaming and stuff in hardware anyway. All of the computer architecture people I talk to seem to be a little unsure too?
Either way, I'd love for a more power efficient laptop, and the Apple Silicon chips seem really great for that use case... Hoping we can get some of those benefits in Thinkpad land.
I hope they're right, but "most" is one of those words that can mean everything you need or nothing useful. I know they say they're testing on the top steam games, but if there's a common...
I hope they're right, but "most" is one of those words that can mean everything you need or nothing useful. I know they say they're testing on the top steam games, but if there's a common denominator that doesn't work that's in a frequent development pipeline (or future pipeline) that's going to be a major issue.
It sounda on the surface that the compatibility is similar to Steams Proton for Windows to Linux compatibility. If that ia true, the laptops have a lot of potential. I hope it could also put more...
It sounda on the surface that the compatibility is similar to Steams Proton for Windows to Linux compatibility. If that ia true, the laptops have a lot of potential. I hope it could also put more pressure on game devs to stop using Kernel level anti-cheat, because it is nonsense anyway
Wine/Proton don't do cross-architecture transpilation, as far as I'm aware. It's an .exe file loader and an implementation of a bunch of Windows functions in terms of not-Windows functions....
Wine/Proton don't do cross-architecture transpilation, as far as I'm aware. It's an .exe file loader and an implementation of a bunch of Windows functions in terms of not-Windows functions. They're still running native x86/amd64 code.
If I was going to try to assemble something like this, I'd start with trying to glue that to qemu, which can do this sort of binary translation.
There's also box64, which can already run the Steam Client and some games on ARM. If you install an x86 Flatpak on ARM Linux it is used automatically afaik. But it doesn't perform nearly as great...
There's also box64, which can already run the Steam Client and some games on ARM. If you install an x86 Flatpak on ARM Linux it is used automatically afaik.
But it doesn't perform nearly as great as Rosetta 2. I think it's around 80% performance versus around 50% .
binfmt_misc is a really cool Linux kernel feature that will let you transparently run executables from different architectures under QEMU and stuff. I imagine it can be put to great use for this...
binfmt_misc is a really cool Linux kernel feature that will let you transparently run executables from different architectures under QEMU and stuff. I imagine it can be put to great use for this kind of stuff.
There's a little bit of translation because of differences in calling conventions between Windows and Linux, I think, but yeah with WINE you're essentially just running "native code" (insomuch as...
There's a little bit of translation because of differences in calling conventions between Windows and Linux, I think, but yeah with WINE you're essentially just running "native code" (insomuch as native code is a real thing, anyway, haha, the boundaries are a little fuzzy imo).
Yeah the issue is with anti-cheat software. Multiplayer gaming is a big part of what I do with friends that I can't visit in person, so online multiplayer needs to work before I can say that games...
Yeah the issue is with anti-cheat software. Multiplayer gaming is a big part of what I do with friends that I can't visit in person, so online multiplayer needs to work before I can say that games "just work".
I kind of understand the desire for anti-cheat software, because cheating sucks... I've kind of ducked out of online gaming for the past decade, but I feel like part of this problem is that games...
I kind of understand the desire for anti-cheat software, because cheating sucks... I've kind of ducked out of online gaming for the past decade, but I feel like part of this problem is that games have moved towards servers which are controlled by the companies instead of community servers so you have to rely on official moderation and stuff. Anti-cheat seems a lot more important when moderation is in the hands of the company and costs them money and there are no community servers which can enforce their own rules (which has its own problems too, of course, but I think it can be a win).
I don't, whatsoever, however see why anti cheat software should be at the kernel level. Because it literally doesn't. It also still circumventable, making it only a vulnerability and breach of...
I don't, whatsoever, however see why anti cheat software should be at the kernel level. Because it literally doesn't.
It also still circumventable, making it only a vulnerability and breach of security for the end user that serves as an obscure hurdle to overcome.
Just because people cheat shouldn't mean a game has to be capable to read all sensitive data on a device. The overreach is ridiculous.
I'm not quite technical enough to know what the capabilities of anti-cheat would be at the kernel level or above that, why doesn't it need to be at the kernel level? My perspective is that the...
I don't, whatsoever, however see why anti cheat software should be at the kernel level. Because it literally doesn't.
I'm not quite technical enough to know what the capabilities of anti-cheat would be at the kernel level or above that, why doesn't it need to be at the kernel level?
My perspective is that the premise of having greater control or awareness of the system the game is running on can mitigate things loaded onto that system that would undermine the integrity of the online play seems valid, but we're also seeing other tech developed that operates outside of just the computing system running the game so I recognize it's not controlling for all factors.
I know someone can have a device that emulates a keyboard/mouse or controller and capture the video output from said system and perform external analysis off the system running the game and then use that to automate the game controls, at which point if the emulation is good enough to go undetected then there will appear to be nothing unusual running on the system that the game is running on. I don't know what the development stage those types of methods are at, but I would assume there is a bit more barrier to entry whether it be cost or something else than just loading up some scripts or cheat software directly on the device playing the game. The reality is you're never going to stop all cheating, just like you're never going to stop all burglaries or thefts, but you take what steps you can to minimize it to an extent.
Oh, I totally agree that the overreach is ridiculous. I don't know if I agree that user-space anti-cheat software could be effective, though. It seems like something you would need some kernel...
Oh, I totally agree that the overreach is ridiculous. I don't know if I agree that user-space anti-cheat software could be effective, though. It seems like something you would need some kernel level / hardware support for, to be honest. Not that that means we should accept these things, of course :). I'm honestly a little surprised we haven't seen more usage of TPMs and security extensions for DRM, and frankly I hope we never do because that gets dystopian very fast.
What would really be neat is if this hardware can go into a mobile form factor, and we can see how ARM translation works in PC gaming once it's outside the hobby space.
What would really be neat is if this hardware can go into a mobile form factor, and we can see how ARM translation works in PC gaming once it's outside the hobby space.
To be very frank I have very little hope that any major game company will be supporting ARM for Windows. They may have made it so that porting software has become “easy”, actually supporting that...
To be very frank I have very little hope that any major game company will be supporting ARM for Windows. They may have made it so that porting software has become “easy”, actually supporting that version and fixing all the bugs for it is still going to be a big financial commitment for a market that there really isn’t much reason to be confident will exist. Big game companies have issues dealing with three GPU vendors on the PC platform as it is, so even if emulation worked perfectly it doesn’t mean that the graphics will display correctly.
This situation has an extremely high number of variables that are completely impossible to know how they will pan out, so it seems to me that speculation on this front is entirely useless. But if I had to guess, we do have historical precedent from the players involved that demonstrated an extremely underwhelming public response; the attempt was not terribly successful.
Well consider me skeptical. Even if they "work", I doubt performance will be as good as on a comparable x86 machine. Not even Apple could accomplish that with Rosetta 2, and their ARM chips are generally better than Qualcomm's.
I'm not convinced ARM is going to replace x86 wholesale anytime soon. Intel is already starting to close the gap on performance per watt at the laptop scale. I haven't seen any compelling arguments that one ISA is inherently more efficient than another, as neither ISA is truly representative of how their respective chips work under the hood anymore.
I think growing competition in the laptop, desktop, and server CPU space the last 5-6 years has done more to produce faster, cooler chips than any one architecture.
I just see this as a stopgap. Hope emulation is "good enough", and if it takes off it'll encourage devs to properly port to ARM. Heck, Given Epic's recent news for phone stores I can see Unreal Engine working Qualcomm and studios alike to make it easy to port such games to ARM.
The only consolation here over Apple is that Qualcomm aren't stuck in Metal world, so I can see better emulation performance.
I'm not sure how much it will matter to be honest. There will almost certainly be games that don't work or perform poorly, but I'd probably wager a good chunk of games will be just fine with a bit of CPU emulation bottleneck, especially if the ARM chips keep getting more performant over time. I imagine it could be a bit like Proton on Linux where most games (particularly if they're not bleeding edge / really CPU bound) will just work fine, with a few notable exceptions.
Still, I do find it disappointing that we have all of these proprietary x86 binaries out in the wild. It'd be really nice if we just had the source code so we could make proper ARM builds out of existing software, haha.
ALSO... I dunno, maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't really trust Qualcomm? Like I hope these chips are great, but doesn't Qualcomm kind of suck at supporting their old chips? Isn't that a huge part of the reason why Android phones had terrible long term software support? I really don't want to buy a laptop that will only be supported for 9 months T_T. I'm sure it will be better than the Android situation was, but god am I ever bitter about that lol.
Weirdly enough I actually have more faith in this application because Microsoft is going to be the one supporting them. But it’s admittedly not well founded because I never checked to see what the support was like with other Windows ARM devices.
Yeah, this is something that's a bit unclear to me too. There's definitely stuff that's nice about ARM vs x86, but I don't think anybody fully knows how this will shape up, and sometimes I convince myself that the x86 slander is kind of overblown and the differences don't really matter much in the grand scheme of things. Like... I wouldn't be terribly surprised if ARM ends up coming out on top, but overall I haven't seen great arguments for why it would dominate in all spaces vs x86. Like having a simpler instruction set with fixed-width instructions and more registers available feels like a win... But it's at least not obvious to my amateur eyes that stuff like the number of named registers matters when you start having register renaming and stuff in hardware anyway. All of the computer architecture people I talk to seem to be a little unsure too?
Either way, I'd love for a more power efficient laptop, and the Apple Silicon chips seem really great for that use case... Hoping we can get some of those benefits in Thinkpad land.
I hope they're right, but "most" is one of those words that can mean everything you need or nothing useful. I know they say they're testing on the top steam games, but if there's a common denominator that doesn't work that's in a frequent development pipeline (or future pipeline) that's going to be a major issue.
It sounda on the surface that the compatibility is similar to Steams Proton for Windows to Linux compatibility. If that ia true, the laptops have a lot of potential. I hope it could also put more pressure on game devs to stop using Kernel level anti-cheat, because it is nonsense anyway
Wine/Proton don't do cross-architecture transpilation, as far as I'm aware. It's an .exe file loader and an implementation of a bunch of Windows functions in terms of not-Windows functions. They're still running native x86/amd64 code.
If I was going to try to assemble something like this, I'd start with trying to glue that to qemu, which can do this sort of binary translation.
There's also box64, which can already run the Steam Client and some games on ARM. If you install an x86 Flatpak on ARM Linux it is used automatically afaik.
But it doesn't perform nearly as great as Rosetta 2. I think it's around 80% performance versus around 50% .
Yes, that's right. I was talking more about the performance and caviats. Didn't know QEMU could do that sort of thing.
binfmt_misc is a really cool Linux kernel feature that will let you transparently run executables from different architectures under QEMU and stuff. I imagine it can be put to great use for this kind of stuff.
There's a little bit of translation because of differences in calling conventions between Windows and Linux, I think, but yeah with WINE you're essentially just running "native code" (insomuch as native code is a real thing, anyway, haha, the boundaries are a little fuzzy imo).
Yeah the issue is with anti-cheat software. Multiplayer gaming is a big part of what I do with friends that I can't visit in person, so online multiplayer needs to work before I can say that games "just work".
Kernel level anti-cheat should've never been so prevalent in the first place...
I kind of understand the desire for anti-cheat software, because cheating sucks... I've kind of ducked out of online gaming for the past decade, but I feel like part of this problem is that games have moved towards servers which are controlled by the companies instead of community servers so you have to rely on official moderation and stuff. Anti-cheat seems a lot more important when moderation is in the hands of the company and costs them money and there are no community servers which can enforce their own rules (which has its own problems too, of course, but I think it can be a win).
I don't, whatsoever, however see why anti cheat software should be at the kernel level. Because it literally doesn't.
It also still circumventable, making it only a vulnerability and breach of security for the end user that serves as an obscure hurdle to overcome.
Just because people cheat shouldn't mean a game has to be capable to read all sensitive data on a device. The overreach is ridiculous.
I'm not quite technical enough to know what the capabilities of anti-cheat would be at the kernel level or above that, why doesn't it need to be at the kernel level?
My perspective is that the premise of having greater control or awareness of the system the game is running on can mitigate things loaded onto that system that would undermine the integrity of the online play seems valid, but we're also seeing other tech developed that operates outside of just the computing system running the game so I recognize it's not controlling for all factors.
I know someone can have a device that emulates a keyboard/mouse or controller and capture the video output from said system and perform external analysis off the system running the game and then use that to automate the game controls, at which point if the emulation is good enough to go undetected then there will appear to be nothing unusual running on the system that the game is running on. I don't know what the development stage those types of methods are at, but I would assume there is a bit more barrier to entry whether it be cost or something else than just loading up some scripts or cheat software directly on the device playing the game. The reality is you're never going to stop all cheating, just like you're never going to stop all burglaries or thefts, but you take what steps you can to minimize it to an extent.
Oh, I totally agree that the overreach is ridiculous. I don't know if I agree that user-space anti-cheat software could be effective, though. It seems like something you would need some kernel level / hardware support for, to be honest. Not that that means we should accept these things, of course :). I'm honestly a little surprised we haven't seen more usage of TPMs and security extensions for DRM, and frankly I hope we never do because that gets dystopian very fast.
What would really be neat is if this hardware can go into a mobile form factor, and we can see how ARM translation works in PC gaming once it's outside the hobby space.
To be very frank I have very little hope that any major game company will be supporting ARM for Windows. They may have made it so that porting software has become “easy”, actually supporting that version and fixing all the bugs for it is still going to be a big financial commitment for a market that there really isn’t much reason to be confident will exist. Big game companies have issues dealing with three GPU vendors on the PC platform as it is, so even if emulation worked perfectly it doesn’t mean that the graphics will display correctly.
This situation has an extremely high number of variables that are completely impossible to know how they will pan out, so it seems to me that speculation on this front is entirely useless. But if I had to guess, we do have historical precedent from the players involved that demonstrated an extremely underwhelming public response; the attempt was not terribly successful.
Gaming laptops are a thing?
Yeah, people have been putting overpowered hardware and LED lights on laptops for a while.