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?
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.