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?

  • DevAnalyzeOperate@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    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.