There's a couple different things at play this time. Windows RT only allowed Store apps and Microsoft's own ARM desktop apps. Windows 10 on ARM will run UWP Store apps and x86 apps (desktop & hybrid "Centennial" apps). At at Build, they announced Edge support for Progressive Web Apps and they'll be adding PWAs to the Store automatically if they meet all the right criteria for features & quality.
So not only will this platform support almost all the existing Windows software out there, it'll treat PWAs as first-class citizens.
Have there been any public previews of this? I'm still trying to figure out how they can emulate x86 without significant performance problems due to the different memory concurrency models
We don't know yet. Overhead could be something like 5% or 25%. We'll see when the reviews come. For what it's worth, it seems to run x86 apps just fine in Microsoft's own demo (keep in mind it's still a mobile ARM processor, so performance will be similar to Atom/Celeron/Pentium, rather than Core i5, etc).
I don't trust product demos, movie trailers nor press releases, so I'll reserve my enthusiasm until someone on the "real world" has had the chance to get their hands on this.
What I know is this: ARM emulation via QEMU on my core i7 was pretty slow last I tried it. Not unusably slow, but still slow. And I have tons of ram and a fat CPU.
These laptops, especially if they are made on the cheap side, won't have tons of RAM and a fat CPU. Unless Microsoft pulled some magic tricks, I don't see this emulation being usable.
"faster than QEMU" isn't a particularly high bar to clear, though. In particular if you're only emulating a single process rather than a full guest OS then you can reduce the overhead quite a bit. Plus if you design something from the start for the single-process emulation case, and only need to worry about one guest and one host architecture, and focus on emulation performance as a key goal, you can likely do better than QEMU without too much trouble.
Emulation is slower but most people will be using browser/office/vscode etc so its just for those extra few apps that might stop you buying the product if emulation didn't exist.
The x86 desktop application support is for the desktop use case. For a phone you'd plug it into a dock and use it as a desktop or into a laptop shell and use it like a laptop. Like this for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNzatcI9Fqw
Probably, but more likely because of AMD's HEDT (high end dedktop) platform called Threadripper which will have up to 16 cores (32 Threads).
Before AMD announced Threadripper Intel had only a 12 core chip on the roadmap for the x299 platform, and charged around 1700$ for their 10 core chip. Now they will be charging 2000$ for 18 cores.
Competition is such a nice thing. Glad that AMD is back in the CPU game. Can only be good for us customers.
I'm personally looking forward to the times that this competition drastically lowers the price of mid-range CPUs for the benefit of the normal people who don't buy CPUs for 2000$.
(Yes, I know that "normal people" don't even buy laptops anymore, let alone desktops. Please excuse my fantasy-world in which people buy desktop computers and even upgrade the amplifiers of their at least 7-piece stereo sound system)
The AMD Ryzen R7 1700 is a $320 8 core/16 thread processor. Intel's cheapest 8 core/16 thread processor is their i7-6900K which sells for $1049. Even their 6/12 i7-6850K is over $600.
IMO the Ryzen R7's have been a huge "mid-end" win for anyone doing any sort of multicore/CPU intensive work. Without competition, Intel's been gouging the market for the past few years.
Well, I think the current mid-range Ryzen's offer significant value and I imagine OEMs will start including them into their popular models sooner than later.
More than likely we won't see any kind of price war. Instead we'll see minor price fighting on a per category basis. Intel's mid vs AMD's mid, etc. There's no drive down to the bottom with a duopoly.
EDIT: I was getting excited by the i7-7820X until I saw it has only 28 pcie lanes. Talk about being pushed towards the way more expensive 7900x! My relatively cheaper 6850k has 40 lanes, wonder what the thinking behind this is?
It limits what peripherials can be attached. For instance, single graphic card uses 16 PCIe lanes, so having only 28 lines supported by processor makes it impossible to have two GPUs in SLI mode (ok, not impossible, because motherboard chipset can add some lanes, but performance will suffer)
NVMe SSD drives also use some lanes (typicaly 4), and you might want two of them in RAID.
Apparently, Intel has years of runway vs AMD. The chips are literally designed and sitting there, only to be released if AMD comes up with something. Intel isn't scrambling in any sense, just announcing stuff that is already designed and built. All AMD was force Intel to release it earlier than their monopoly position was allowing.
The down vote behavior is interesting. I simply mention that Intel has an early release of a previously constructed part. Monopolies behave in predictable ways.
> wasn't it a external partner that planted the rootkit?
Nope. The first time it was 3rd party software, Superfish, but Lenovo installed it and installed a self-signing root certificate authority to MITM the traffic[0]. The second time it was Lenovo's own software, Lenovo Service Engine, which they also installed themselves[1].
I think open sourcing a language you built is rather different from acquiring companies and locking out competition.
Apple has more incentive to open source Swift than they do to let anyone use content from a company they acquire (remember FoundationDB's fate?). I think Authentec went the same route but I am uncertain.
