felix86 x86 and x86-64 emulator for RISC-V — Finally, some gaming!

This month we received the new SpacemiT K3 board. Since its inception, felix86 wasn’t able to run on any of the out-of-order execution hardware, such as the SiFive P550 or the SOPHON SG2042. The former has no vector support, the latter has XTheadVector support. While initially there was consideration for supporting hardware without RVV 1.0 or hardware with XTheadVector, ultimately the decision was that we should instead focus on the future of RISC-V consumer hardware which will have RVV 1.0 due to it being mandatory in the RVA23 profile.

If you watched the felix86 talk at the RISC-V NA summit you might’ve seen a video of gameplay on K1 hardware. You would notice the lack of modern 3D games running on the emulator, because a lot of them would run at less than 5 frames per second. Now that we have much faster hardware, there’s more to show!

TLDW: Huge performance improvements over the K1, and RISC-V performance will only go up from here.