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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • arm still needs a custom kernel and conpletely different drivers to even boot, because every manifacturer can implement it completely differently.

    Dunno why you’re getting downvoted, this is correct. ARM makes comparatively very expensive to maintain an OS over a variety of CPU models. The specialization required by each Cortex revision (and beyond that, each manufacturer adaptation) is too intense for a world trying to conserve resources.

    x86 hardware is standardized in a way where you don’t need to port an os to them, it just runs with generic drivers.

    That being said, I’m honestly shocked your friend doesn’t run into issues. Several ISA extensions have been released for x86 since the Core 2 Duo days, and I have to imagine software incompatibilities appear semi-frequently. Running Windows 10 on that can’t be a good experience.


  • If there was an option that was presented to users once the device got below 80% battery health to slow down the system to make daily batter life longer

    This isn’t why they did it. Degraded Li-ion batteries cannot sustain their rated voltage at high currents due to increased internal resistance. Sufficiently undervolted CPUs/memory cells produce errors (specifically bit flips), which can rather quickly lead to memory corruption and a crash.

    Reducing the CPU frequency (thereby reducing the peak current draw) is practically necessary in the face of a degraded battery. Various laptops were infamous for not doing this, because it resulted in a ~20-30 minute battery life, as the voltage drop became too great once the battery charge drops below 80-90%. Within the context of a smartphone, neglecting to use the remaining 80-90% would make it basically useless.

    What Apple (and the rest of the smartphone industry, at this point) really needs to do is make their batteries replaceable.





  • 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.


  • 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 really hope that on-device AI becomes competitive soon. It’s nice to see that on-device is the way large portions of the industry is going, but cloud AI just uses way too much energy. Not to mention the resources required to manufacture millions of large-die GPUs.

    It’s probably naive to think that the corporations that created this problem will solve it, but it honestly seems like the most feasible path forward in the near term. I certainly don’t expect the world’s governments to be effective at regulating AI any time soon.



  • I mean, nobody intrinsically cares how many competitors there are, so long as the all content can be retrieved from a single source. Of course that doesn’t mean people wouldn’t care if a single company were to abuse their monopoly e.g. by charging unreasonable rates or forcing ads (looking at you, cable).

    It’s worth remembering that monopolies aren’t inherently illegal in the U.S. or anywhere else really; it’s not against the law to have the best product by a mile, nor should it be. Antitrust is illegal, which in this case would be defined by signing exclusive rights for all content and then providing a shitty service.