Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1

[gamerk2]

Intel did what companies with effective monopolies do, i.e. nothing meaningful for several years. Maybe if AMD had been capable of competing in the period where they weren't, we'd have had x86 processors maintain the gap with ARM, or maybe CISC would have hit a wall by now and we'd live in a RISC-V-powered utopia, or maybe things would be largely the same as they are now, but with somewhat faster desktops available.

The real problem is desktops are locked to x86/x64 until someone comes up with a translation layer good enough where we can ditch Intel entirely.  Backwards compatibility matters.

[MayImilae]

x86 on ARM through emulation? Pfft, no one would be crazy enough to do that...

[gamerk2]

x86 on ARM through emulation? Pfft, no one would be crazy enough to do that...

Oh, someone will try, if for no other reason then to try and grab the Desktop market.  The key is doing it without losing too much performance.  Itanium could do it at a 10% or so hit, and we saw how that ended up.

[NaturalViolence]

Oh, someone will try, if for no other reason then to try and grab the Desktop market.  The key is doing it without losing too much performance.  Itanium could do it at a 10% or so hit, and we saw how that ended up.

You may want to read MayImilae's quote one more time.....and think real hard about the topic of the article that spawned this thread.

[darwiniandude]

Oh, someone will try, if for no other reason then to try and grab the Desktop market.  The key is doing it without losing too much performance.  Itanium could do it at a 10% or so hit, and we saw how that ended up.

The grey bar in the performance charts on this blog post, Quad-core Coffee Lake i7 8559U @ 4.5Ghz. The Red bar is the fan-less low power M1 emulating X86. (Well, translating - but anyhow)

Yeah that's an old Intel chip, but remember M1 is boring - it's the slowest, lowest end, Apple Silicon SOC ever shipped in a Mac. It's the worst one. And it's pretty good...