Does make you wonder what Microsoft has been doing with their ARM based Surface Pro X range when you can emulate the entire thing on a Mac and it runs faster than it does natively…

of course it runs skyrim :}

'[GSV
Trig;4290064']Does make you wonder what Microsoft has been doing with their ARM based Surface Pro X range when you can emulate the entire thing on a Mac and it runs faster than it does natively…

I can't vouch for it but in another thread about the m1 performance 3dcandy said about the m1 having dedicated space on the chip to accelerate x86 etc… if the qualcomm offerings don't (they don't) then that will cause a considerable performance hit in comparison and might also be why MS have been rumoured to be ‘making their own’ arm cpu.

Essentially Apple designed their arm cpu from the ground up to perform well in x86/x64 emulation on a laptop/desktop, qualcomm just ‘upscaled’ a mobile cpu and put it in a laptop.

Must admit I'm a bit confused. From what I read Parallels Desktop is merely virtualising Windows 10 on ARM on an M1-based Mac, but what use is that? Windows 10 on ARM (as the name suggests) only runs ARM-based Windows applications natively, of which there are very few (there isn't even a native ARM-version of Office). Everything else is emulated, and, as I understand, not very well.

I could understand it, if Parallels Desktop would virtualise a native x86/x64 Windows better than Apple's latest Rosetta incarnation, but seemingly that's not the point. Instead bold claims are made on the basis of a practically useless OS.

What am I missing? What don't I get?

azrael-
What am I missing? What don't I get?

I presume the x86 emulation built into Windows will be able to diverty Windows calls into the ARM native windows calls and pick up some speed there, vs a simple emulation of x86 Windows where the entire stack will have to run in emulation. So perhaps the Windows x86 layer actually isn't that bad, it is just that this is the first time we have seen it on a decently fast platform.

As for Office, I thought they were something like a .net assembly and have been for years, so they aren't native on amd64 either.