On Binary Translation and its Consequences

The PC market is one of the toughest areas for a CPU designer to compete in. Consumers in the PC segment expect high performance across a wide range of applications, and famously expect their devices to reach beyond a constrained, curated set of use cases. Microsoft’s own Surface RT prominently failed more than a decade ago because it could not run the programs that PC users expect to just work on Windows. Recent 64-bit Arm cores from Qualcomm and others are fast enough to satisfy the performanc...