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Microsoft says “Prism” translation layer does for Arm PCs what Rosetta did for Macs
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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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.
To add to what the other person said, there are some Windows-only games even today that run better on Linux than on Windows (I don't have examples off the top of my head.)
Wine is not CPU emulation.
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.
Just like wine is not a windows emulator, this will not be an x86 emulator
Its not laziness, they have lost developers support over time and lets be honest here, Windows 8 arm was roundly laughed out the door. Expectations are now marketing hallucinated by copilot.
This is typical Microsoft “agile”: minimum effort and delivery.
Not porting simple stuff like Minesweeper is definitely laziness on Microsoft's part.
FTFY. There have been some cases where emulation actually outperforms native execution, though these might be, "the exceptions that prove the rule." For example, in the early days of World of Warcraft, it actually ran better on WINE on Linux than natively on Windows.
WINE literally stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator".
To be fair this is also a translation layer and not an emulator.
Prism is an x86 emulator for ARM. If you think that Prism is "a translation layer and not an emulator", I refer you to the very first word of the second to last paragraph of the submitted article.
That's assuming the writer knows what they're talking about. Last line from the second paragraph:
And first line from the third paragraph.
Certainly more than you because Prism emulates an x86 CPU and WINE doesn't, therefore the WINE comparison is still wrong.
Edit: Please prove the writer wrong.
This article seems to conflate "emulation" and "translation layer". I don't think there is anything that confirms "Prism emulates an x86 CPU", only that it allows for running x86 code on ARM. This does not inherently require emulation as demonstrated by Rosetta 2, which is a translation layer.
WINE doesn't "translate" one CPU architecture to another CPU architecture either, so the WINE comparison is still wrong, no mater if CPU translation is called emulation by you or not. WINE is a wrapper for API calls within the same CPU architecture. That's it.
Wrong again.
"Windows apps are mostly compiled for x86 and they won't run on ARM with bare Wine"
What you linked is an effort to combine WINE with the QEMU x86 emulator which is an emulator because it emulates CPU calls. Hint that it's an emulator is in the name "QEMU" and an actual quote from the wiki page you linked and clearly didn't care to read: "Running Windows/x86 Applications: See Emulation"
EDIT: Let me also quote from the readme file of the Hangover project: