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"A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop."

Well, my Archimedes was 8Mhz, and my Pi is 1500Mhz, so we have some room there perhaps?



Don't forger the fact 187.5 times the frequency is not the only improvement. Today you also have 4x the cores, 8x the bits and hardware 4Kp60 HEVC en/de-coding. There probably are more things (like AES encryption, linear algebra and FPU) hardware-accelerated, I don't really know. This way your emulated Archimedes can probably do much much more than it was supposed to.


Gameboy advance emulators emulate 32bit arm, plenty of those around.


Which is fine, but the things we do with our home computers today are not the same things we did in the late 80s.


Maybe so, but I'd imagine most of the legacy 32-bit apps you'd be running in emulation here on your 64-bit RISC OS system are from the late 80s (or maybe the early-to-mid-90s), doing those late 80s things.


Plenty of them actually are.

A rusty Amiga 2000, with Internet connection could handle like 80% of the stuff I use my 2009 laptop for.


If the things we do with with our home computers are crunching in kernel space instead of in userland, someone's done something wrong.


The article's talking about running 32-bit applications in emulation, with a 64-bit native kernel.

> Then a rewrite of RISC OS for 64-bit ARM chips would require a 32-bit emulation layer for old apps to run -- and very slowly at that, when ARM chips no longer execute 32-bit code directly. A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop.


The cost of simulating 32-bit ARM on 64-bit ARM is nothing like 10x if you try hard enough

https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/56078084/...


So I have been informed, in some detail, over on Lobste.rs.

I am glad to hear it. I like this little OS and I want to see it survive!


I saw some YouTube videos of RISC OS running on Pi.


[Author here]

I have RISC OS running on a Pi, and it's not the first one I've had, either.

https://twitter.com/lproven/status/1310304554395860996

http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2015/12/day-8-zx-spectru...

I don't just make this stuff up, you know. :-)

I still have my A305, too, and an A5000 as well.




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