Things are getting exciting in the Windows on ARM space, with Qualcomm’s announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite supercharged by the custom Oryon CPU and rumours that AMD and Nvidia will make ARM CPUs for PC.

The hardware is coming together nicely, but the software side is still… pretty bad?

There are few native apps for WoA. That wouldn’t be a problem if there was a good x86 emulator, but there isn’t.

Why can’t Microsoft make an emulator like Apple’s Rosetta2 ?

I have heard various reasons such as Microsoft not fully commiting to it, that Apple Silicon contains hardware acceleration for Rosetta2, that a hardware accelerated x86 emulator would result in patent violations, that Microsoft uses a generic emulator whereas Apple uses a translator etc…

So why doesn’t Microsft create something like Rosetta2 ? Will they eventually make one? Will it be as good as Rosetta2 ? And will it finally make Windows on ARM viable?

  • Digital_warrior007@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure about the real ROI in buying an ARM laptop and using some sort of emulator to run your applications. Not to mention the effort it takes for you to test / debug various pluggins to see which ones actually work.

    The performance and battery life of ARM / X86 / Apple laptops have become increasingly similar in the last couple of years. With intel finally moving to EUV process, this trend is only going to continue.

    When Apple first launched M1 laptops, there was no single x86 laptop that could compete with it in battery life. You needed an M1 laptop if you need 10 hours of battery life. Now we have multiple thin and light laptops from Intel and AMD that give over 10 hours of battery life.

    Qualcomm can not succeed in PC market without having some strong differentiating features that x86 can not achieve at least for a couple of years.