PICAXE on ARM-based Win-11 supported?

[kranenborg]

Hello,

With a number of new Qualcomm ARM chips on its way, it seems that Windows(11) on ARM will get more mainstream (and I will likely be an interested user).
Therefore this question: will PICAXE Editor run on this type of hardware?

Thanks!
/Jurjen
https://www.kranenborg.org/maker

 

[PhilHornby]

I found this (Windows on Arm).

Amongst other things it says:

Windows 10 enables existing unmodified x86 apps to run on Arm devices. Windows 11 adds the ability to run unmodified x64 Windows apps on Arm devices! This ability to run x86 & x64 apps on Arm devices gives end-users confidence that the majority of their existing apps & tools will run well even on new Arm-powered devices.

This implies that it 'should just work'. There will be an obvious performance overhead, which, I suppose, could affect things like simulation.

(I assume that by 'x86', they really mean WIN32 applications (like Picaxe Editor)...)

 

[hippy]

I assume that by 'x86', they really mean WIN32 applications (like Picaxe Editor)...

That is my understanding but I haven't tried it. The emulation is said to be quite impressive, and doesn't simply take each instruction at a time and emulate what it should do, but uses Just In Time (JIT) compilation tricks to turn X86/X64 instructions and routines into ARM equivalents which run at native speed once that's been done.

The PICAXE uses a similar trick, albeit the' JIT' is done in advance by converting source code to tokens. Those tokens when sequenced invoke native firmware code to do what they need to do. This is what can make PICAXE emulation surprisingly comparable in execution speed to native code; the same library code is native in both cases, there's just a small overhead in working out what to call. So there's not always a lot to be gained in going native, though it does depend on what the code does.

 

[kranenborg]

Thanks Phil & Hippy!

 

[PhilHornby]

One slight issue is that drivers have to be native ARM binaries. Our old friend the AXE027, with its old FTDI innards may, or may not, be on the list to be ported

 

[kranenborg]

That might indeed be the dealbreaker for now. Anyone on this forum has tried this with an ARM--based Win machine maybe?

 

[kfjl]

Anyone on this forum has tried this with an ARM--based Win machine maybe?

It looks like no-one has, but if you have access to a raspberrypi 4 or 5 with 8G of RAM, you could try it yourself.
https://raspberrytips.com/windows-11-on-raspberry-pi/