FEX-Emu 2308 Continues Striving To Be "The Greatest x86/x86-64 Emulator On Linux"

[ayumu]

Nothing will ever be near as fast as Rosetta 2 on non-Apple SOCs

The Apple fanboi energy is strong on this one.

as Apple specifically made design decisions in their SOC that make x86 emulation way more efficient

Because, of course, nobody else could ever make similar or better design decisions with that target in mind.

This is supposedly a level of genius afforded to Apple, and Apple alone.

[ayumu]

Oh sure. x86 is so devoid of deficiencies that Intel won't ever have to make any fundamental revisions to the core ISA:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-APX

/s

With AMD leading, Intel's proposal needs AMD agreement, or it will never take off.

Chances are, RISC-V will replace x86 before any significant deployment of APX.

[QwertyChouskie]

The Apple fanboi energy is strong on this one.

Quite the opposite. As interesting as Apple's SOCs are, Apple's extremely consumer-hostile anti-right-to-repair behavior means I am extremely unlikely to spend money on their products unless A) their behavior changes or B) I have to buy something for work-related reasons (e.g. working on an app that has both Android and iOS versions, you would need a Mac to compile the app for iOS. You could probably just use a hackintosh VM though...)

Because, of course, nobody else could ever make similar or better design decisions with that target in mind.

This is supposedly a level of genius afforded to Apple, and Apple alone.

Maybe I could have worded things clearer. My point was that without the special hardware changes, emulating x86 on Arm will always have a bigger performance hit. As others have pointed out in this thread, it seems Arm has standardized at least one of these changes, though only after Apple implemented it. Hopefully we see the whole ecosystem move forwards in this regard, to the point where x86 on Arm performance is competitive on any modern Arm SOC.

[coder]

Not sure what Intels extension segmentation has to do with that? You can allways buy AMD.

Sounds like you didn't read the article.

[Anux]

Sounds like you didn't read the article.

I did. Can you specify what you are refering to? I saw no mention of Intel specific features/extensions.

[coder]

I did. Can you specify what you are refering to? I saw no mention of Intel specific features/extensions.

APX is a clear admission of x86-64's inadequacies. They basically ripped off everything they could from ARM's AArch64:

• 32 GPRs
• 3-operand instructions
• more conditional instructions

Anything more (e.g. weak memory model, fixed-length instructions), and they'd break backward compatibility with standard x86-64.

[EvilHowl]

First of all, it's not an overnight process, nobody said so.
Second, for personal computers, Apple just proved it's totally feasible.
On day 1, their M1 based pcs were running x86 app very well, and now, a few years later, no more x86 cpu is left in their lineup.

If Apple can, Linux world can too.

You need more than just an ISA to replace the whole x86 and AMD64 industry. An ISA is just a piece of paper. You need, at least, one competent implementation of that ISA. Then, you need to create a whole ecosystem with standards, regulations, compliance, etc. Don't you really see the problem with multiple companies creating multiple platforms with no standards to follow? We already had that problem in the eighties and it was awful.

Apple does not need standards, regulation or compliance, because their products are isolated from the rest of the world.