cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17489781
I mean, it’s a 4 core MIPS CPU, tops out at 2.5GHz and apparently compares to an i3 10100F, which is pretty much “reheated Skylake”. This with native code.
It can translate x86 and ARM code in theory, but I can imagine the performance degradation. You can buy this if you want, I know I won’t
If it runs Linux no need to translate anything. It’s been a while since I ran Unix on a MIPS CPU but it should just work.
Not every app on Linux is compiled for MIPS, or am I wrong? I mean, technically Windows 8 RT could run natively on ARM without problems, except you couldn’t run any apps, which made the whole thing 100% useless.
Unless every app can run natively, you’ll always have to run some sort of translation layer, either in software, hardware or both. That layer will have native performance.
In a Linux distribution for a particular architecture all code is compiled to the underlying CPU architecture. Packages can also be built from source.
Proprietary software is different since it doesn’t give you the freedom to build things from scratch. There are emulators, of course, but they all fundamentally suck.