Denuvo introduces anti-emulation DRM for Nintendo Switch

I did watch the LTT’s video here* and this entire thing boils down to:

[12:00] For those who are concerned about the damage that piracy does to game developers, you can rest easy known that we didn’t download any ROMs or firmware from the internet and we didn’t circumvent any protections. We got the games and keys to decrypt them fair and square from our own device using its own firmware recovery mode.
That matters legally even if it is a little less clear cut than the AACS decryption keys leak back in the day.

If you didn’t know, laws were passed to prohibit you from doing anything you want to a thing you own thought you owned (DMCA). Yes, the copyright traders pushed the legal boundaries once again to legally reduce your rights (DMCA anti-circumvention provision). So the mere presence of Denuvo on the scene will make it de jure illegal in some countries where their lobby efforts had good budgets.

* I have the video archived, ask if it goes away.

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Depending on who you ask, ARM is between -10 and +25% better in the power efficiency department.

To my knowledge, the big reason why ARM is more efficient is the relatively slow I/O it offers.

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Don’t forget that all of the legacy x86 backwards compatibility also takes some of the power budget; less so with the atom CPUs but it is mostly still there.

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Put another way: decoding variable length x86 instructions is difficult. Means scheduling them is difficult.

Arm (and other risc but as always the high end always gets eaten from the bottom over time) is much cleaner, easier to decode and more efficient.

Hyperhreading/SMT is a kludge to help alleviate this problem somewhat.

The transistor budget for bigger pipelines and instruction decode complexity in x86 can be better spent doing other things on arm. Or just not be there.

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