Chuck(G)
25k Member
The Power architecture is far from dead in the high-end field in both servers in supercomputers.
It just got overtaken by x86 eventually, since Intel had a much larger market, and therefore a much larger R&D budget than Apple/IBM/Motorola.
Power is nearing the time of being phased out. IBM paid Global Foundries $1.5 Billion to take over IBM's processor production lines. Global Foundries will continue to offer Power chips for 10 years. So with Power8 being fairly new, there will be one or two more generations of Power designs before the last Power chip is sold.
This isn't really true. IBM had, and has, a gargantuan R&D budget: they're famous for it. IBM just didn't really want to be in the consumer market and they even got out of the workstation market because they (correctly) perceived that the days of high-margin sales were gone.
Higan/bsnes and Dolphin emulators are two examples. In fact, Dolphin dropped support for 32-bit x86, while the author of higan says he will continue to support it. But my machine- a Sandy Bridge Core i7- can't run games at full speed using the 32-bit build of higan (it can using the 64-bit build).I have rarely seen any 64-bit software that is actually faster on x86 rather than slower, which can not be explained by hitting the memory limits in 32-bit mode. In other words, 64-bit code that actually performs better at the instruction level.
And other RISC CPUs don't ? Even MIPS by R3000 was unpleasant to think about its 8 stage pipeline. Well, MIPS code is unpleasant to write period (takes way too many instructions to get anything done), but I digress...And you still have all these crazy optimization rules that make your head explode.
And other RISC CPUs don't ?
Higan must not be very well put together, then; I can run games at full speed in other emulators for the same systems on a Core 2 Duo laptop running 32-bit XP. Heck, time was I could do it on an 800MHz Celeron.But my machine- a Sandy Bridge Core i7- can't run games at full speed using the 32-bit build of higan (it can using the 64-bit build).
Higan must not be very well put together, then;
Maybe it does a dedicated emulation of every single transistor?Indeed, there are plenty of cycle-exact emulators for eg C64 and Amiga, which should be at least as complex to emulate as a NES.
And they generally work fine on a modest Core2 Duo, or less.
So I wonder what kind of horrible code is hiding inside Higan then