Technology

58303 readers

11 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

189

Samsung does an Apple with its first Snapdragon X Elite laptop, suggesting the new Arm-based Windows machines aren't going to be a cheap alternative to x86 (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

79 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Interesting. Samsung making a bold move here, but one that could make sense.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

macOS converts x86 code to ARM ahead of launching an app, and then caches the translation. It adds a tiny delay to the first time you launch an x86 app on ARM. It also does on-the-fly translation if needed, for applications that do code generation at runtime (such as scripting languages with JIT compilers).

The biggest difference is that Apple has added support for an x86-like strong memory model to their ARM chips. ARM has a weak memory model. Translating code written for a strong memory model to run on a CPU with a weak memory model absolutely kills performance (see my other comment above for details).