@Racketboy
Why do you want a removable drive? You can always clone 1:1 your hard drive for a backup, you can also boot from external drive. With Thunderbolt speeds+SSD that should be near native I think.
Also the Mac Mini is $700, no GPU, and 256GB storage. 8GB RAM.
Xbox Series S: $300, dedicated GPU, 512GB storage, 10GB RAM, you also get a free controller worth $60.
You tell me the better choice.
Side question: Those ROMS, they are built to work with specific console CPUs. Does the emulator do the heavy lifting between translating between the original CPU and the currently used CPU on the modern device? As in, the ROM is agnostic to the current CPU used?
marurun wrote:Not only is Apple now running their own CPU (they have to pay for an ARM license, but they are much more independent in what they can do with it compared to buying someone else's chip wholesale) but they've also finally proven that ARM can indeed fully compete with x86 in the desktop segment. Intel and AMD are now both on notice in all but the the power-hungry top segment of the market. And who knows what Apple has on tap for the next 2 years.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11 ... ompetitor/tl:dr Apple's new M1 appears to be the single-threaded performance IPC king. Nothing on the market can touch it for single-threaded performance. Multi-threaded it tops every mobile CPU and many (most?) desktop CPUs and is hamstrung only by the fact that 4 of its 8 cores are lower-power "little" cores. I suspect workstation class machines will have more "big" cores and fewer "little" cores to take advantage of the massive power of the "big" cores' IPC advantage. I honestly did not expect an ARM CPU to take the IPC crown. That's truly frightening.
I was told RISC/ARM was always the better performer but since all the other software was already running on CISC\x86 they just didn't bother to make the switch. Actually Apple turned to PowerPC(ARM) in 1993 or so but I am not sure what they were using before that. Then they abandoned because PowerPC maker IBM was not putting enough investment into it so they went to Intel and now back to their own ARM. There is excitement about running Linux native on M1 Apple computers, there is a guy on Twitter is surveying people if they are willing to donate/fund such project. They say he was able to run Linux or FreeBSD on PS4 so he knows whats he is talking about.
One thing people are not paying attention to, is that the new M1 chips not only perform superbly but they do so at less wattage and less heat generated. They new Apple laptops has some crazy battery life like 18hrs or something like that.
I am not sure if I understand this correctly, but...what if we get an ARM GPUs? what happens then? Or does the GPU not deal with RISC or CISC instruction sets?
isiolia wrote:On the other hand, every other major OS already has an ARM version as well. Granted, losing legacy applications is a much bigger thing on Windows...since it actually has them, unlike macOS. However, for modern Office/etc, the ARM versions are already there (lower end Surface products have been on that for years). MS or others could end up putting together similarly great CPUs. The uptake just may not be as universal, as given a choice (that Mac users won't have), Windows folks seem to opt for keeping decades worth of software working. Given a good emulation layer though, could get interesting.
Reviewers say that they can't distinguish between x86 apps being emulated vs native ARM ones. They are speculating that Apple is not emulating on the software side but something in the chip itself is dedicated for emulating x86 giving near native performance. Microsoft can try something similar.
I am not a Microsoft guy but I have heard this corporates want the legacy software and refuse to update to more modern methods. I think by now its time to drop the weights of legacy libraries or whatever and make Windows lighter and more advanced. They should release 2 versions of Windows, Windows Legacy who want the old software and Windows Future(
) to move with new tech. and times. But what will happen to the sweet sweet PC games of the 90s and early 2000s?