Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?
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@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
Should i applaud ?
Only if you feel an urge to.
You understand that raspberrys have been 64-bits for 5 years and that official 64-bits support has been a regular request since then ?
I understand that Pi's have been 64-bit for 4 and a bit years. I also understand that for general purpose computing you're probably better off not using up your 1GB of memory (minus the bit reserved or the GPU) on 64 bit pointers. Obviously if you have a particularly compute intensive task or are trying to access very large databases through the single USB2 port, you might find a 64-bit OS useful - but there were 64-bit OSs available for that. For the Raspberry Pi Foundation's intended use case, i.e. beginners to computing, 64-bit didn't provide enough of a benefit to offset the downsides.
Even with a Pi4 and 4GB (only 1 year old), it still may not be worth it for the Foundation's intended use case. After the GPU, the OS and other services/apps that are running have taken their chunks, there's not going to be that much left above the 32-bit/3GB per process (not application) limit for you to gain from once you take the effects of 64-bit pointers into account.
For 8GB moving to 64-bit definitely makes sense though.
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@grant2258 said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
just wait ill you see all the older emulators 64 bit errors showing up needing fixed this includes retroarch ones. There are reasons beyond your need for a little speed updates for staying 32 bits.
That would have been a fair point until ~3 years ago, but nowaday i don't know of any emulator having issues with aarch64, if anything support for aarch64 is globally better than for arm.
@davej said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
64-bit didn't provide enough of a benefit to offset the downsides.
It did though, even for emulation, one example : yabasanshiro's aarch64 drc is ~20% faster than its arm drc. They should have provided support for users requesting it, instead of arguing & making fun of them.
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@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
That would have been a fair point until ~3 years ago, but nowaday i don't know of any emulator having issues with aarch64, if anything support for aarch64 is globally better than for arm.
what happened 3 years ago? Code that was written pre 64 bit will still need fixes and tested that statement doesnt really make sense unless im missing your point?
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@grant2258 said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
what happened 3 years ago?
It was around that time that android OS went 64-bit, so most emulators using arm drc moved towards aarch64 drc. Emulators not using drc are irrelevant : aarch64/x86_64 makes very little difference for non-drc, and x86_64 has been pretty standard for a very long time now (got my first 64-bit computer with 64-bit OS ~17 years ago iirc) so every emulator is supposed to have moved on with any potential issue caused by 64-bit.
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@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
Emulators not using drc are irrelevant
seriously thats your argument anything on android is fine to use else it irrelevant. I suppose that would limit your range a lot of emulators here including lr ones. Anyway if you think 64 bits would cause no issues ill leave you too it. This is off topic anyway
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@grant2258 said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
seriously thats your argument anything on android is fine to use else it irrelevant
You didn't understand my point, my point is :
- emulators that used arm drc have been updated to aarch64 drc (some of them even partially dropped 32-bit support, cf. reicast/flycast that only support wince games on 64-bits)
- emulators that used interpreters were supposed to support 64-bits long before that (last 64-bit bug i've seen in FBAlpha/FBNeo was around 5 years ago, on the sms driver)
I don't give a **** about android, i don't use that crap, still it's a huge lever for emulation on arm socs.
You seem to say that emulators are still heavily broken with 64-bits in 2020, well, do you have any example ? I've been using 64-bits only for ~17 years as i said, and encountered very few issues. -
@barbudreadmon @grant2258 you're both off-topic here, please stop.
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@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
@davej said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:
64-bit didn't provide enough of a benefit to offset the downsides.
It did though, even for emulation, one example : yabasanshiro's aarch64 drc is ~20% faster than its arm drc. They should have provided support for users requesting it, instead of arguing & making fun of them.
That's not part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's use case for the Pi though.
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@barbudreadmon please watch your language.
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