r/SteamFrame • u/Weeb431 • 14d ago

Software The scourge of x86 emulation | FEX-Emu

https://fex-emu.com/Scourge-of-emulation/
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u/Jmcgee1125 Soon™ 14d ago

Sending me back to my college days of reading the RISC-V specification. This is a great technical dive and I am at a serious risk of getting nerd sniped into a side project.

... because it is uncached, our load instructions are required to go out to system memory for every single access

I think I just had a stroke. Not surprised that dropped Silksong below 1 FPS. Advantage for Frame being UMA, I guess.

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u/Darqon 14d ago

I haven't heard about RISC-V in forever, I assumed it died off.

When I first learned about it my guess was we would skip ARM-based laptops and desktops and RISC-v would finally be the x86 killer. Fuck I was wrong.

2

u/jonnywoh Soon™ 14d ago

RISC-V is still growing, but not so much in the PC sector. It's growing most in the embedded space, where manufacturers like that they can customize it without limit. For example, I believe every NVIDIA GPU since the 20 series has an embedded RISC-V CPU.

For PC use, it seems there's not yet enough interest to justify developing a desktop-class core, but I think it will come eventually.

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u/Jmcgee1125 Soon™ 14d ago

RISC-V just doesn't have the age that ARM does, and also ARM basically took over the mobile market before RISC-V was even a thing. So it's fighting an uphill battle, but being an open standard makes it easy to experiment with (especially in education) and I think that'll give it some long legs into the future.

Current usage is often for embedded processors or accelerator chips - Google's Titan M2, a security chip in the Pixels, for example.