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by Eridrus 3485 days ago
Even assuming they can hit performance targets with this, which sounds hard but not impossible, what's the major use case?

Continuum? Windows laptops with better battery life?

Most win32 software is going to suck on a touch screen, so I'm not really seeing this help them in mobile.
2 comments
ZenoArrow 3485 days ago
>"Windows laptops with better battery life?"

Not going to happen. There's a performance hit that almost certainly comes along with emulation. Battery life is likely to get worse with x86 Windows emulation on ARM.

Also, by the time Intel stopped pushing x86 in mobile devices they were producing chips that were competitive with ARM chips when it came to power draw.

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jabjoe 3485 days ago
> Also, by the time Intel stopped pushing x86 in mobile devices they were producing chips that were competitive with ARM chips when it came to power draw.

People forgot this. It was price that killed Intel in this space. They couldn't get the price down to ARM chips. They subsidized hard to get even close, but it ended up just costing them too much just to have even a presence.

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xorxornop 3484 days ago
Maybe, though their partnering with Qualcomm is suggestive: perhaps they're doing hardware-accelerated binary translation? That _might_ be fast and power efficient, who knows...

In any case, many users may just be wanting to run older enterprise apps, and so even then, with the translation penalty, they'll probably be quite snappy.

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ZenoArrow 3484 days ago
> "That _might_ be fast and power efficient"

My argument is that it's not going to be as power efficient as using x86 natively. There's no getting around that.

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Eridrus 3485 days ago
Does your comment still stand for the cheap end of things? If Intel struggles to compete on price, then low end ARM may have better perf characteristics.

From what I read, doing binary translation from x86 to ARM is actually not that hard since ARM has many more registers, so I'm sort of hopeful they get decent perf from it.

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ZenoArrow 3484 days ago
> "If Intel struggles to compete on price, then low end ARM may have better perf characteristics."

I'd suggest it has more to do with the size of the silicon wafer rather than the performance.

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Splines 3485 days ago
Maybe this makes sense for a better continuum experience?

Phone mode = UWP touch apps

Docked continuum = Full desktop x86 apps (and UWP)

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Eridrus 3485 days ago
This is one of the few things that makes sense, but as much as I liked my windows phone 7, the lack of apps was a disaster.
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