NVIDIA, AMD planning on building ARM based pc chips

[Paul2]

Tegras did relatively well, though poor power efficiency because of VLIW inside was well known.

Ironically, the reason why nVidia to brought VLIW to Denver, to run translated X86 code, was never used by any of their clients, yet it did sail relatively well commercially.

 

[blueone]

Ignorant question here but what's the status of Microsoft's 'Windows x86 emulation on ARM'? What Apple did with Rosetta 2 for running Intel compiled apps was simply amazing and won't the same be absolutely necessary for Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm to be successful with ARM PC chips?

I agree about Rosetta 2 being pretty amazing. In fact it's so good there's been a lot of speculation and hype about Apple designing support in hardware for the x86 memory model into the M-series processor. Since Apple never published comments I've ever seen on this M-series CPU hardware support, I was very skeptical of its existence right from the start. I still am, and I think Rosetta 2 is simply a brilliant translating compiler.

As for Microsoft, I'm not seeing the financial incentives for getting x86 applications to run on Arm CPUs that Apple had. Apple's universe of applications were all written and optimized for Intel x86 CPUs, and Apple sold the entire solution and developed many of the apps inhouse. Microsoft has a narrower view on Arm and a broader problem, because x86 CPUs aren't going away, so Microsoft will have to expend double the build, optimization, QA, and release costs. Apple has also communicated a relatively short time limit on Rosetta 2 support. I think Windows app providers will have no choice but to double their release R&D too, and produce both Arm and x86 native versions, and that will take time. I'm not especially hopeful about the future of Arm PCs for these and other reasons.

Well, it does exist and is fairly complete these days. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x86-emulation

This link and it's associated embedded links all discuss Win32 application processing. I can't find any reference to native x64 to Arm emulation. Can you?

 

[Tanj]

They released 64-bit support on Win11 in Nov. 2021. In that article they do mention 64-bit support for WOW64 on ARM, and it is the main focus of the article. I'm puzzled how you are reading it.

The financial incentive remains the reach to consumers and business, and the wish to ensure relevance if ARM64 PCs and laptops should grow market share.