Comment by shmerl
3 months ago
I see. But aren't they emulating x86_64 on ARM64 there anyway? Can't they emulate ARM64 on x86_64 the same way?
3 months ago
I see. But aren't they emulating x86_64 on ARM64 there anyway? Can't they emulate ARM64 on x86_64 the same way?
Yes, in theory.
But there's not a huge market (and therefore, FOSS dev time spent on it) for emulating AArch64 on x86 the way there is x86 on AArch64, so if your options are to build your own AArch64 emulation for x86 (or drop a fortune into an existing FOSS option), or building something based on AArch64 and using the existing x86 emulation implementations, one of these has much more predictable costs and outcomes today.
Sounds like a project for Valve to back then.
They could, but why?
If an ARM device both suits the goals and has lower risk, there's little upside other than forcing the project to exist.
And since there's very few pieces of AArch64-exclusive software that Valve is trying to support, that's not a goal that benefits the project.
(If I were guessing without doing much research, Switch emulators might be the largest investment of effort in open source on x86 systems running AArch64 things performantly, but that's certainly not a market segment Valve is targeting, so...)
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