What Apple did for Macs when switching architectures, though, was to port their own software to the new architecture. Microsoft doesn’t even port fucking Minesweeper to ARM.

Isn’t that the point? This new layer is supposed to make it easier to port everything, and they’re saying that’s what Rosetta did for Apple/Mac.

Translation layers aren’t porting

Fair enough, but to the end user it doesn’t matter if it works.

to the end user it doesn’t matter if it works.

Emulation is always slower and eats more battery. Microsoft’s laziness is proof they don’t care about that hardware, so may just as well buy an iPad Pro instead.

This is a pretty interesting counter example: eteknix.com/running-yuzu-on-switch-gives-you-bett…

But, as others have said, exceptions confirm the rule.

Yuzu can exhibit superior performance because the Switch is rocking the Tegra X1 from 2015. Yuzu absolutely cannot beat the Switch with contemporary hardware and/or comparable power consumption.

But yuzu was running on the switch in that example. So it was beating the switch on contemporary hardware.

Oh yeah, clearly I did not read the article well. Still, it doesn’t mean what you think it does. First, Yuzu is more of an alternative API implementation than an emulator in this setup. The stock Switch OS and API implementation have been entirely replaced with Linux and the Yuzu implementation of the API. Given recent performance uplifts in the Linux kernel, I’m not surprised that Linux+Yuzu beats the first-party implementation.

Second, the use of the word “emulation” in the above thread is really a misnomer: Rosetta 2, Prism and the like all perform what is called dynamic ISA translation.