Russian Startup Develops x86 Emulator for ARM, Could Be Great for Windows RT Dev

[Guest]

Emulators are a fantastic tool to get antique Atari ST, Amiga and C64 games to run on your PC. In the future, there may be an emulator that is solving ARM headaches.

Russian Startup Develops x86 Emulator for ARM, Could Be Great for Windows RT Devices : Read more

 

[LuckyDucky7]

It would be great news, but who is going to approve it?

Not I, said the Apple, I'm interested in keeping my platform 100% closed.
Not I, said the Microsoft, I'm working on forcing all my customers to a closed platform.

Android will most certainly get this, though- that much is certain, but Android is not where this is needed.

 

[PhilFrisbie]

Yes, it is doubtful Microsoft would approve this for their app store.

BTW, now that Microsoft seems to want to become the next Apple, I was thinking of conjunctive names for them; how about Microple or Micrapple?

 

[xaephod]

Why work so hard to use an ARM when you can use a low powered intel atom? I know intel has chips that run at 15w. Arms are pretty slow anyways.

 

[Zingam_Duo]

[citation][nom]PhilFrisbie[/nom]Yes, it is doubtful Microsoft would approve this for their app store.BTW, now that Microsoft seems to want to become the next Apple, I was thinking of conjunctive names for them; how about Microple or Micrapple?[/citation]
They have it already: it is Micro and it is Soft, just like Bill Gates' thingy!

 

[mikenygmail]

[citation][nom]PhilFrisbie[/nom]Yes, it is doubtful Microsoft would approve this for their app store.BTW, now that Microsoft seems to want to become the next Apple, I was thinking of conjunctive names for them; how about Microple or Micrapple?[/citation]

Microdrone? Micrap? Microverpriced?

 

[adbat]

Well I think in 2014 40% would be enought to run legacy software and games - the question is what about graphic preformance and emulation.
I would be cool to have a win 98 and xp emulation on a phone all the clasic at your hand.

 

[lathe26]

We've been down this road before with Intel's Uranium processor and DEC's Alpha processor (and others).

I'll wait ans see if we go anywhere new this time.

 

[winterspan]

"Why work so hard to use an ARM when you can use a low powered intel atom? I know intel has chips that run at 15w. Arms are pretty slow anyways."

I can see Apple buying this company (just like the PPC emulator Rosetta) and using it for a next-generation 1lb macbook air. A new SoC using the ARM Cortex A15 cores (like the Samsung Exynos 5x00) will easily be competitive with Intel's Atom for performance and use less power.

"We've been down this road before with Intel's Uranium processor and DEC's Alpha processor (and others)."

Apple's transition from PPC to X86 Rosetta seemed to be successful...

 

[sean1357]

They should thinking about to run on FPGA chips.... All ARM and Intel chips are always slow...slow...

 

[adbat]

[citation][nom]xaephod[/nom]Why work so hard to use an ARM when you can use a low powered intel atom? I know intel has chips that run at 15w. Arms are pretty slow anyways.[/citation]
It's no whare near as energy efficient as arm, but intel will get there.
The real reason for this is keep choice - with AMD not competing with INTEL in the desktop segment it would be good for the giant to have an equal opponent. If they will be left alone (all thing seems to be heading that way) they we will pay for it - and progress will be halted (slowed down).

 

[Guest]

adbat, where have you been? Intel's updated SOC's are very energy efficient. The "no whare near" comment isn't even remotely accurate.

 

[house70]

This is good, but you know what would be great? A jailbreak for RT devices! That would enable RT users to sideload this and other apps not sanctioned by MS.

 

[Pinhedd]

[citation][nom]sean1357[/nom]They should thinking about to run on FPGA chips.... All ARM and Intel chips are always slow...slow...[/citation]

FPGAs are great for running arbitrary logic in a shallow and wide fashion. They're awesome for re-programmable function generators, oscilloscopes, bitcoin mining, etc... but they're absolutely horrible for modern general purpose processors which are deep and narrow by design.

I have several Altera dev boards sitting on my desk and even the most powerful of them can at best run ARM Cortex A9 with most of them running M1 or even less.

Soft instantiating instruction set processors on FPGAs (using the FPGAs logic elements) is so inefficient that most manufacturers are now including hard-instantiated ARM processors (a fully fabricated ARM processor) which is directly connected to the FPGAs routing fabric.

 

[g00fysmiley]

heck yea, even if it can only load older programs (i refuse to call an x86 program an app damn it!) at 40% efficiency i be tyou could still run some good programs like older games, imagine running steam, then playing fun indie games like bastion, super meat boy, or a virus named tom on a phone or tablet that didn't cost an arm and a leg. best of luck to this company when the app does up for sale count me in as a customer

 

[blppt]

[citation][nom]winterspan[/nom]"Apple's transition from PPC to X86 Rosetta seemed to be successful...[/citation]

That was a little different---the x86 chips available at the time were a good deal faster natively than the then top of the line Mac PPC chips, thus the performance hit from Rosetta was not as bad as it would it have been if the x86 chips were slower natively than the PPC chips, which is the situation ARM chips are currently. In another words, 40% of ARM native is not 40% of x86 speed...its much slower than that.

 

[Guest]

Emulation should be used to ease the transition form x86 to ARM, Just until the software is ported to the native ARM code! When the FAB process for ARM chips reaches or approaches that of Intel's chips, ARM's lower transistor count will always consume less power. Currently the one thing that is helping Atom chips
is Intel's advanced power gating, but this only helps lower the power usage when the chip is idle! At full load, less transistors = less power used! With too much Intel inside, there will be too much money out of everyone's pockets!

 

[Pinhedd]

[citation][nom]ARMforLowCost[/nom]Emulation should be used to ease the transition form x86 to ARM, Just until the software is ported to the native ARM code! When the FAB process for ARM chips reaches or approaches that of Intel's chips, ARM's lower transistor count will always consume less power. Currently the one thing that is helping Atom chipsis Intel's advanced power gating, but this only helps lower the power usage when the chip is idle! At full load, less transistors = less power used! With too much Intel inside, there will be too much money out of everyone's pockets![/citation]

Unless there are serious architectural deficiencies, more transistors = more work done at full load. The fabrication process doesn't have as much of an impact as one might think. Intel employs a lot of unique and interesting techniques to maximize instruction throughput, at the cost of power but not power efficiency or die area. Lower die area does not necessarily imply lower power consumption because logic networks that aren't being switched consume very little power.

Some architectures are inherently biased towards floating point instructions while others are inherently biased towards general purpose integer instructions. Intel owns the general purpose integer field, IBM owns floating point, while AMD owns the floating point / mm2.

 

[fb39ca4]

Well, some guy ran Windows 95 on his iPad, so it's a start.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9NeRQjGwfs

 

[enewmen]

Can someone explain how apps can only be found on the Mirosoft App store for RT (on ARM)?
I understand x86 can't work on RT (maybe it can now). But .NET should run fine.

So, if someone makes some little Notepad++ in .NET for $5, it's illegal to sell it outside the App store? - even if it should run fine on RT or x86 with .NET installed?

 

[agnickolov]

Why does everybody think this applies to WinRT? Event though it's labeled Windows, even if it runs on x86 architecture (something I doubt Microsoft will actually do), WinRT still can't run Windows applications -- the requisite Win32 API is simply missing! We'd need something like Wine for WinRT in order to run Windows applications on top of this emulator...

 

[captainblacko]

with apple looking to drop x86 and switching to ARM for future macs, an ARM emulator can only be a good thing. Hopefully they can bump it from 40% to 100% pretty soon.

 

[Firion87]

For me: WRONG direcion. I don't want ARM. I was waiting for ages for x86 phones to make an appearance. As someone sad above: it would be great to run win xp on my phone! but with some nice hardware; I could run old pc games on my phone, I could run older software (which I bought at a high price ages ago). They say by each generation they improve the architecture of the cpu's and the efficiency; nice then! cut all the stuff off the die by 80%, 80% less energy consumption and I got a cpu working like a P4 in my cellhpone. Would be the nice!!!

 

[blppt]

[citation][nom]fb39ca4[/nom]Well, some guy ran Windows 95 on his iPad, so it's a start.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9NeRQjGwfs[/citation]

Not really a big deal, people on other CPU architectures/OSs have been able to run win 3.1 in DOSBox for ages. Runs flawlessly on my G5 Quad (PowerPC) with Leopard 10.5.8.

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]LuckyDucky7[/nom]It would be great news, but who is going to approve it?Not I, said the Apple, I'm interested in keeping my platform 100% closed.Not I, said the Microsoft, I'm working on forcing all my customers to a closed platform.[/citation]MS is pretty pro-developer. If the software works well I don't see any reason they'd reject it. Or maybe you have a list of rejected apps and you're just keeping the info secret. :/