this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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The main advantage of ARM right now is that there are low power cores available. The actual instruction set is unrelated to this advantage. If Intel or AMD put more serious effort into power efficiency most of the advantages go out the window.
As for instruction set changes impacting what software you can run I think that is still a big issue. Yes porting to ARM is straitforward in more modern programming environments but most software actively developed at the moment has a lot of old cruft that won't easily port if the engineers can even be convinced to touch it. Most businesses are dependent on old software not all of which is still maintained. Most gamers are even more tied to old software that is not going to get ported and often has annoying anti-virtualization checks (see games breaking on systems with enabled intel e-cores).
I am not sure how large the modern non gaming personal pc market is (tablets, phones, works computers, and chromebooks probably took a chunk out of it) but that could be in play.
Gaming is already a solved issue. Any console manufacturer managed to get games developed regardless of processor instruction set. All it takes is investment and a market.
Xbox and PlayStation are currently x86, but they've used different processors in the past. But Nintendo manages uses arm and gets great price/performance. For the PC market Valve could use it's marketplace to make arm and Linux work for gaming. They've made good progress but they could be more aggressive. If they lowered their rates for Linux and/or arm support the gaming industry would move. They could also use the stick as well as the carrot. If they refused to list new games that don't support Linux and arm the industry would move even faster.
I don't think gamers will move the market much either way. Apple is the biggest computer manufacturer in the world and their users don't buy their products for PC gaming. I imagine the rest of the market is similar. People are buying PCs for productive web browsing and office apps. If arm Windows and Linux machines can get half the battery performance macbooks get, they slowly displace x86 in the market for new machines. But half the problem is software optimisation for battery life. Intel macbooks got better battery life, as long as you were using safari rather than a chromium browser.
In new games sure. I was referring to old titles
Steam. Almost all games would be impacted. On Linux we already use translation layer (Windows -> Linux), but I am not sure if it's a good idea to emulate X86_64 on top of translation layer.
Getting anti-cheat that technically already works enabled on Linux has been a lot of work and Epic still won't enable it. Piracy protection systems will also be an issue. Most EA games inspect your CPU to see if they like it on startup (I think this is using vmprotect and some non-OS x86 calls but don't quote me on that). These kinds on anti virtualization checks are really common (not just in games ProctorU and lock down browser do them too). I don't think valve running an open virtualization layer will be well received by companies and they will probably ban it from running games. MMOs (due to botting) and anything with anticheat will look particularly askance at this. I also suspect Valve won't want to try hiding the VM signatures as it borders on violating DMCA.
Newer games will probably get ported if a large part of the market buys into ARM. Unity stuff might get re-released as it is .net if the publishers can be bothered. Minecraft java edition will also always love you (the launcher might not though).
I don’t see how hiding sigs could be seen as violating the DMCA…
Anti virtualization is sometimes used in copy protection. Altering virtualization to avoid those checks might be circumvention under DMCA.
Just because something is in place as DRM does not mean it is inherently covered by DMCA. Otherwise “run in compatibility mode” would be considered a DMCA violation.