Comment by cultofmetatron
14 hours ago
I'n incredibly impressed by valve's commitment to playing the long game. It makes sense to have the frame by arm since the system is lighter and its clear this is just the trojan horse to get arm linux into every gamer's house. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with an arm steamdeck 1-2 version from now when the tech is ready.
Too bad Arm doesn't allow architectural licenses, because this is exactly the kind of thing Valve and the FEX developers would want to extend the ISA to support. I bet we see a RISC-V backend to FEX in the next 6 months, it probably already exists in a private repo.
FEX is the shootstring, extra special discount budget (not maligning) version of Rosetta. Apple should sell Rosetta to Valve.
My understanding is that Rosetta sidesteps a bunch of tricky memory model issues by using non-standard hardware extensions only present in Apple Silicon, so even if Apple did share Rosetta, which they certainly won't, it wouldn't work properly on Valves hardware anyway.
yeah that is correct. The m series chips can turn on total store ordering memory model solely for Rosetta. There's also some hardware extensions to arm to support x86 condition codes in the hardware because it's way more instruction efficient that way.
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It's not only present in Apple Silicon, it's just not required by the ARM standard. Fujitsu also has an ARM64 CPU with TSO.
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Box64 already runs on RISC-V. Just, the available processors are so slow it's hard to even play 5-10 year old games.
This means that, when the much faster chips implementing RVA23 arrive next year, they'll be immediately able to run Box64.
> Too bad Arm doesn't allow architectural licenses
QEMU exists. I doubt they want the bad press of suing an Open Source project everyone is using.
ARM were perfectly fine getting the bad press for suing Qualcomm for releasing the Snapdragon that was finally performing enough despite these companies paying them a lot of money.
They seemed quite happy to destroy their eco system if they won.
https://www.rcrwireless.com/20251001/business/qualcomm-arm-2
And GBA emulators. And before that, BBC Accorn ones with Risc OS.
better yet, Apple should make it open-source on github.
> Apple should sell Rosetta to Valve.
Isn't Rosetta kinda bad though? And won't get much better because it's not open source?
Rosetta performance is best in class to my knowledge, although they had the benefit of being able to add custom instructions and modes to the cpu to make some parts easier. Meaning Rosetta would not have helped valve unless they built the frame on apple silicon.
As for not improving, it is likely that Apple no longer feels the need to invest in Rosetta improvements now that Apple silicon is so dominant and software support is already very strong, but nothing is stopping them from investing in it if they need it for example for gaming
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Last I heard, they don't even have bosses there, a flat hierarchy. They vote on things and pick each other to work on teams and appraise performance. Perhaps that radical culture has merit to it?
How much did Gabe own Valve, 50%?
Gabe Ownership/co-founder:
- Valve - Yacht Companies - Starfish Neuroscience (Neuralink) - Submarine Companies
I've heard that to ship hl2 (or anything really) they had to stip some of that flatness somewhat.
Anything works when you have infinite money and the company is privately owned by a chill dude.
It’s amazing what you can do when you have a business that prints money hand over first and you have no obligations to shareholders.