I remember when Apple supported PPC emulation of applications when they made the switch to Intel x86 for a major OS release cycle. I was impressed that the speed there was, in fact, near native enough that the transition was essentially completely seamless.
Although this is somewhat of the reverse in architectures, going from CISCy to RISCy.
The only thing that concerns em about recent Microsoft developments is that they seem very keen to move their OSes into more of a walled garden like iOS and the Mac App Store, and extract 30% from every third party application transaction. They could use one of these sorts of transitions as an opportunity to advance that business strategy further.
They're definitely going in the direction of the walled garden strategy, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. For the vast majority of users, computers are safer with walled gardens. For the more advanced users, developers can always offer their apps through a different distribution channel.
In the case of Windows in particular, it's a chance to leave the installation wizards, the registry and the DLL hell behind and use the packaged model that macOS adopted from the get go.
World-changing technologies like p2p filesharing, bitcoin, app stores, and even the web itself wouldn't have taken off if most personal computers were walled gardens. What future innovations will never even be given a chance at life? Will we have to depend on the big corporate players to move computing forward?
Centennial (read, non-UWP) apps can be published to the Windows Store and don't get any sandboxing beyond registry virtualization by default. Microsoft lives and dies by backwards compatibility, they're not going to kill off Win32 - they may very well push for the Windows Store to be the primary source for applications with traditional installers being blocked by default though.
Unless those non-UWP apps are browsers that use non-Microsoft rendering or javascript engines.
I don't think that's a dealbreaker, especially when they'll let people trade from 10S to 10Pro for free. But it's a pretty big caveat that got added very quietly.
> Although this is somewhat of the reverse in architectures, going from CISCy to RISCy.
Apple did the same when they moved from 68K to PPC. The PPC would run the 68K code in emulation or, if it was a "fat binary" with both 68K and PPC code, it would just load the functionally equivalent PPC binary and run it.
There were utilities to compress executables that deleted the versions not for the current CPU - very handy in low-power 68Ks
In that case, the PPC had probably a 5-10x perf advantage over the 68k's people were upgrading from. So, it wasn't noticeable, so if in the end the emulated code was only running at the speed of the 68k it was replacing it was a net win every time it entered the kernel and ran native code.
ARM doesn't have this advantage over X86, at best its probably somewhere around 1/2 the absolute performance. Of course intel has been selling a _LOT_ of really slow CPU's down the product line, so for someone upgrading from a atom class machine the ARM will probably appear to be pretty reasonable. Not so much, if your running a fairly high end laptop.
I don't think any ARM emulating x86 code will be able to get to Xeon E7 performance anytime soon. May get close to low-end x86's with JIT and jumping to native mode on every OS call (with some clever adjustment to data structures, if they differ/misalign).
And yes. At that time, PPCs ran rings around x86's and 68K's.
> extract 30% from every third party application transaction
This seems tragically the inevitable, but slow direction. We can only hope that it accelerates the transition of app stores to state-regulated markets rather than private arbitary fiefdoms.
> I was impressed that the speed there was, in fact, near native enough that the transition was essentially completely seamless.
Not to diminish Apple's accomplishment, which was indeed impressive, but a lot of this was because by that point, PowerPC was so, so far behind Intel's chips that, even after the emulation performance penalty, the Core 2 chips were fast enough to make it no big deal.
There's not a similar Intel/ARM gap this time around so Microsoft will have to rely on their chops alone.
Apple started with the Core Solo and Core Duo chips (Yonah), which were fairly fast but weren't remarkably faster than the PowerPC G5. A single core G5 iMac held up quite well versus the two-core Core Duo and thrashed the Core Solo. Aside from memory reads the G5 did quite well.
The strength of the Core Duo and Solo were in performance per watt and that's what Jobs was looking for.
It is easy to have rise tinted glasses. I remember my MacBook with 80? GB hard disk and cursing power PC everytime I had to install a universal DMG that included both Rosetta? and Intel apps.
Although this is somewhat of the reverse in architectures, going from CISCy to RISCy.
The only thing that concerns em about recent Microsoft developments is that they seem very keen to move their OSes into more of a walled garden like iOS and the Mac App Store, and extract 30% from every third party application transaction. They could use one of these sorts of transitions as an opportunity to advance that business strategy further.