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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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this is for the transition. no point in porting your software if nobody has the hardware. This will get people to get the hardware, as they can just keep using the existing software, and wait until it's properly ported
Edit: you people really think windows is the only software that needs a translation? Do you only ever use your OS on your computer, and not a single software more?
Nobody will buy the hardware if they can't commit to supporting the software. In a previous role, I was responsible for advising purchasing decisions for my company's laptop fleet. The Surface X (Arm edition) looked cool, but we weren't willing to take the risk, because at the time Microsoft had far worse transitional support than they do now. It's gotten better, but no one in their right mind is going to make the kind of volume purchases that actually drive adoption until they demonstrate they are in it for the long haul. It's a chicken and egg problem, and Microsoft doesn't care what hardware you are using, so long as it is running Windows or using (expensive) Windows services.
What better way to sell devices than by halfassing them to oblivion?
Apple released a native x86 version of Tiger with their first Intel Macs.
Sure, but the vast majority of Mac software at the time, including loads of first applications from Apple, couldn't run on Tiger. You had to run it in the "Classic" environment - and they never ported that to Intel.
Tiger shipped just 4 years after the MacOS 9.2 and plenty of people hadn't switched to MacOS X yet.
The reality is Apple only brings things forward when they can do it easily.
Apple has done eight major CPU transitions in the last 40 years (mix of architecture and bit length changes) and a single team worked on every single transition. Also, Apple co-founded the ARM processor before they did the first transition. It's safe to assume the team that did all those transitions was also well aware of and involved in ARM for as long as the architecture has existed.
No, this won't get people to get hardware that looks horribly slow because everything needs to run through a translation layer. They do have the sources. They could just recompile them for the new hardware. If their sources are not total crap.
I'd expect there's quite a lot of assembly and endianness-dependent stuff here and there. It's Microsoft. Their culture is about pride of things being arcane-complex inside, cause if you can untangle that, you are a good programmer. They think that. I think they think that. Maybe they are just vile.
You may be spot on with that. Though the assembly part can be fixed by code translation at compile time. Endianess and shitty programming habits are another thing that the cross-executor must deal with, too, so maybe this has been covered already. Or it will blow up in their faces, anyway.
Both arches are little endian btw.
I'm sure they have found something to make the port problematic.
I mean, it's a Microsoft product.
Windows NT historically ran on lots of CPU architectures, PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium, etc, and that included the bundled software like 3D Pinball. I would have expected it to still be quite portable.
20 years have passed.
Microsoft really never do that port if they have a translation layer