OK, maybe you wouldn’t pay three grand for a Project DIGITS PC. But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo?
Besides, why not use native Linux as the primary operating system on this new chip family? Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn’t. It’s that simple.
Nowadays, Linux runs well with Nvidia chips. Recent benchmarks show that open-source Linux graphic drivers work with Nvidia GPUs as well as its proprietary drivers.
Even Linus Torvalds thinks Nvidia has gotten its open-source and Linux act together. In August 2023, Torvalds said, “Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work.”
If it coukd be baked before rather than at run time it feels like there might be some nuance there
It’s a very difficult problem to solve.
Different architectures are more than just translating op codes. They have different ways to address memory, different types, sizes and number of registers. Compiled binaries use offsets within the code to jump, loop, etc. which all changes when you start changing instructions. It’s much easier to emulate the platform at runtime.
No doubt. Software emulation of different arches is still magic to me. Being able to run qemu to run just one program on the CLI as an arm bin was so neat