Comment on Valve is working on a version of proton for ARM devices
leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 weeks ago
Well, Steam already runs on top of FEX on ARM Linux, but it’s nice to see an official effort.
Also, does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86? That adds a not insubstantial amount of CPU overhead, which does hurt battery life.
Also, does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86? That adds a not insubstantial amount of CPU overhead, which does hurt battery life.
No idea, and that’s a pretty good question. The again some games run better on proton through Linux than they do on windows, so the performance overhead isn’t that bad.
True, but I feel like having to reroute x86 calls to ARM will produce more overhead than just Proton.
Depends on how it’s implemented. If they have a version of Proton that translates all x86 windows syscalls to ARM Linux, some operations could be extremely efficient.
There’s definitely got to be more overhead overall, though. Especially for devices with memory page sizes other than 4K, like the M-series Apple chips do (they use 16K as their page size), likely a VM will need to be sandwiched in there to ensure memory alignment. It’ll more fully be emulation and not just translation.
does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86
afaik macos/rosetta is more efficient than native windows/x86, but that could be down to OS integration, or any number of confounding factors… i’d suggest though that x86 windows applications sometimes run better and more efficiently on alternative platforms, even with the translation layers
IIRC, the M chips also have a couple of specific hardware accelerators for some parts of x86 code that ARM devices would usually struggle with. That’s something that other ARM chips (presumably) don’t have.
X Elite has those same tricks
It’s more like a built-in hardware emulation mode than anything else. Modern ARM chips use out of order execution as the default, whereas x86 uses ordered execution as the default. M-series and Snapdragon X chips have a little flag that can be passed to tell the hardware to run in in-order mode instead of out-of-order mode.
drspod@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yes, but they’re made by Apple.
MyNameIsAtticus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I got a M1 Pro MacBook a couple weeks ago. I’m astonished at how fucking powerful those thing are. An Intel laptop I had with similar specs would start screaming for mercy for any heavy Programming work I’d do. The MacBook just shrugs it off. Fans don’t even come on
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
keep in mind, for the longest time Intels processors were still on Intels fab. a huge chunk of the efficiency/performance gains was less x86 > arn and more Intel Fab > TSMC. even to a lesser extent, compare the snapdragon 8 gen 1 to the snapdragon 8+ gen 1. Samsung wasn’t as far behind tsmc (compared to intel) at the time and both designs basically are the same chip but implemented at two different fabs.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
AMD is on a much better process node than Intel, but their battery life still isn’t as good as Apple’s. Particularly under low to medium loads. My M1 MBP easily gets 12 hours of battery life under a real load. My AMD powered ThinkPad is closer to 7 hours, and my Intel machines get like 4, on a good day.
jose1324@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
M1 these days is pretty mid though.
Telodzrum@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Compared to an M2 or M3? Yes.
datelmd5sum@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Snapdragon X Elite?
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Definitely doesn’t have even close to the graphical horsepower