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?
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.
x86 and ARM laptops are still nowhere in the same league in battery life
Microsoft, ironically being mostly a software only company, is by historical tradition a mediocre, uncreative developer lacking innovation, initiative, taste and quality. They are trend followers, not trend setters by default.
Part of the issue is that windows has a lot more backwards compatibility than MACOS these days. I can run 32 bit software from back in the day on a windows pc
Microsoft can’t even get text to render correctly on OLED panels. How could they do something actually difficult like a high performance emulator?
Apple has horrible (i.e. nonexistent) support for non integer scaling, and the way they “solved” antialiasing for OLED panels is by not supporting subpixel rendering at all, macOS still uses grayscale antialiasing, which means it doesn’t take into account the subpixel positions of the panels and instead just antialiases based on brightness levels.
You can force Windows to use greyscale rendering on all text by using MacType.
Hardware.
M-series chips bake in hardware support for x86 memory model, expensive flag calculations, and probably a few other things. Doing these without hardware is a lot harder and won’t ever be as performant.
Could you elaborate on what those memory models and flags are, and how they function?
flags
Slide 7 https://ee.usc.edu/~redekopp/cs356/slides/CS356Unit5_x86_Control
See also https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-fast/ on the entire general subject.
However, acc. to the very author of that article the contribution of these extensions to the overall performance is rather quite minor, see discussion starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537213 that gives very compact descriptions of both the extensions in question and the assessment of their realistic contribution.
Yep, the unique advantage of apple is to build custom hardware for their software
An MS engineer claimed that reading QR codes off of images is basically impossible in emails. Yes it’s such a beast that only apple and the linux community managed to figure out, but the biggest software company struggled with it.
I have Windows 11 ARM on my M1 Macbook Air (trough VMware) and i dont have any problems using X86 software on it, i can even play some games on it.
Microsoft just doesn’t seem to care enough about WoA to invest the time and money needed for a solid x86 emulator. Typical half-hearted effort from them.
They can technically make the emulator and have. It is hard to think of a company more qualified to do so than Microsoft, they’re frankly more equipped than Apple is.
The problem Microsoft has more broadly is Apple is a company which has set the expectation that they don’t do legacy support. Apple is a company which has set the expectation that they will change things and their customers will pay the cost. So they can just straight up say “in 2 years, we won’t sell computers which use x86 anymore, transition now” and everybody does it and they only see higher sales.
Microsoft is a company which people use because they have outstanding legacy support and save their customers money through supporting 10 year old line of business applications at their expense. If they move off x86 in the same way Apple did, they will bleed customers to Linux/ChromeOS/MacOS/Android/iPadOS etc. etc. So they’re essentially forced to support ARM and x86 concurrently. That results in every developer going “Well, more people are using x86, and a lot less people are using ARM, so I’ll just develop for x86 only and ARM users can emulate”. This results in the ARM experience being shit but there’s nothing Microsoft can do about it even though not transitioning more forcibly will kill Windows market share in the long term. It’s just not worth it to force things especially since Windows is doomed to die in slow motion regardless.