Well, the ones based on Chromium arenât, anyway. Iâve heard some major criticisms of Safari in the last few years, for what thatâs worth.
Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 Iâm aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But youâre absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.
Luckily, I think most games either didnât do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.
The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoftâs whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.
The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoftâs core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isnât necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).
Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphinâs âĂbershadersâ - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox Oneâs CPU design, similarly to how Appleâs M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.
Microsoftâs APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.
This is a total affront to the ethos of the web and everyone involved in drafting this awful proposal should be publicly shamed. Stick sandwich boards on each of them saying âI tried to build the Torment Nexusâ, chain them together and march them through the streets while ringing a bell and chanting âshameâ.
Iâd be fine paying Google for YouTube Premium if I could use it without being logged in. Iâd take an access key for anonymous ad-free viewing for $20 a month. But Google is never going to offer that because the data-harvesting is the whole point of YouTube to them. Google is a data-slurping company with an advertising division that dabbles in video, search and phones as side hustles.
In any case, if they really do crack down on adblockers, there are always other methods of watching their videos ad-free, and if I really like a creator, Iâll subscribe to their Patreon or watch them on Nebula.
Possibly, now that we have much tighter integration between different chips using die-to-die interconnects like Appleâs âUltraFusionâ and AMDâs âInfinity Fabricâ to avoid the latency and microstutter issues that came with old-fashioned multi-GPU cards like the GTX 690 and Radeon HD 7990 XT.
As long as software can make proper use of the multiple processing units, I think multi-GPU cards have a chance to make a comeback⌠at least if anyone can actually afford the bloody things. Frankly, GPU pricing is a bit fucked at the moment even before we consider the idea of cards with multiple dies.
To be fair, a lot of these are accurate, or at least were at the time.
-
Multi-GPU just never caught on. Thereâs a reason you donât see even the most hardcore gaming machines running SLI today.
-
The Wiiâs novelty wore off fairly quickly (about the time Kinect happened), and it didnât have much of a lasting impact on the gaming industry once mobile gaming slurped up the casual market.
-
Spore is largely forgotten, despite the enormous hype it had before release. Itâs kind of the Avatar of video games.
-
It took years for 64-bit to become relevant to the average user (and hell, there are still devices being sold with only 4GB of memory even today!). Plenty of Core 2 Duo machines still shipped with 32-bit versions of Windows and people didnât notice or care because basically no apps average people cared about were 64-bit native back then and you were lucky to have more than 4GB in your entire machine, let alone need more than that for one program.
-
Battlestar Galactica (2003) fell off sharply after season 2 and its ending was some of the most insulting back-to-nature religious tripe that has ever had the gall to label itself as science-fiction.
-
Downloading movies over the internet ultimately fell between the cracks outside of piracy. Most people stream films and TV now, and people who want the extra quality tend to buy a Blu-Ray disc rather than download from iTunes (can you even still do that with modern shows?)
-
I definitely know people who didnât get an HDTV until 4K screens hit the market, and people still buy standard-def DVDs. Hell, theyâre still outselling Blu-Rays close to 20 years later. Calling HD a dud is questionable, but it was definitely not seen as a must-have by the general public, partly because that shit was expensive back in 2008.
-
The Eee PC and the other netbooks were only good when they were running a lightweight operating system like Linux or Windows XP. Once Windows 7 Starter became the operating system of choice for netbooks, the user experience fell of a cliff and people tired of them. Which is a shame, because I love little devices like UMPCs.
-
The original iPhone was really limited for 2007. No third-party applications, no 3G support, no voice memos, you could only get it on a single carrier⌠the iPhone family did make a huge impact in the long run, but it wasnât until the 3GS that it was a true competitor to something like a Symbian device.
The only entry on this list thatâs really off the mark is Facebook, which even at the time was quickly reshaping the world. And I say that as someone who hates Zuckâs guts and has proudly never had a Facebook account.
I have mixed feelings about the iPhone. On one hand, the device itself was very sleek for the time and its touch-driven, easy-to-use interface was a revelation for 2007. On the other hand, it was the harbinger of the locked-down, walled-garden hellscape that is the modern tech industry, and its success paved the way for horrors like Windows 8/10/11 and the modern Mac OS which gets very testy if you try running app that hasnât been notarised by Apple.
This is undoubtedly true. YouTube is a private entity and there is no legal obligation for them to treat speech equally. But it is subjectively troubling that YouTube, a virtual monopoly, has little qualms about directly shaping the political discourse on its platform, censoring and limiting the reach of content about LGBT people while Fox News is on the front page.
A flood of children at the same time as an exodus of the type of users who actually upload good content to Reddit could definitely set up the conditions for a steady bleed of users away from the site, though. Especially with moderatorsâ ability to actually do their job being impacted by the API changes.
Kbin. Kbity. Like kitty but kbin. Kbity!