zlacker

>>frankj+(OP)
Asahi Lina is truly an inspiration for open source reverse engineering. For those not aware, they also live stream their coding sessions quite often: https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina

I'm excited for the day that I can easily install SteamOS (the modern one that runs on the Steamdeck) on an M2 Mac mini for an insanely powered "Steam console" for my living room TV.

>>jamies+9g
I wonder how long it's going to take for games to start generally supporting ARM. Getting Linux running well on M1/M2/etc.. seems like only half the battle for making a good gaming machine out of these.

>>ozarke+oh
I wouldn't count on many developers going back to update old games with ARM support. It's more likely that the community will work to build some sort of Box86 + Proton stack to get games working, which should get a lot of the classics working[0]. From there, I think the struggle will be getting Box86 to run fast enough for modern games. Apple's ARM CPUs have great IPC, but that can still get annihilated when it's forced to simulate SIMD/AVX instructions. I assume Apple has some sort of vector acceleration framework in Apple Silicon, but it will take time and effort to reverse-engineer and implement.

Things are certainly looking better than they did a couple years ago, but getting ARM to run x86 code faster-than-native is an uphill battle. Maybe even an impossible one, but I've been surprised before (like with DXVK).

[0] Crysis on a Rockchip ARM SOC, for example: https://youtu.be/k6C5mZvanFU?t=1069

>>smolde+1o
> I assume Apple has some sort of vector acceleration framework in Apple Silicon, but it will take time and effort to reverse-engineer and implement.

I'm pretty sure it's just vanilla ARM NEON so I don't think it will take any reverse engineering. The Apple Silicon GPU is custom, but the CPU is just minor extensions to (and compatible with) AArch64. Rumour has it that this is because AArch64 was designed by Apple and donated to ARM (who Apple has close relationship with being that they were a founding member).

>>nicobu+Sp
Apple support NEON (and uses it for most SIMD code) but it also has other proprietary ISA extensions for e.g. matrix multiply.

>>saagar+aD
note that the proprietary extensions are extremely unlikely to gain linux support though, unless upstream arm adopts something similar

though amx won’t help out with emulation much