They showed games (WoT I think) running using this emulation, so maybe not.

"World of Tanks Blitz" - a Phone game

We don't know yet. Overhead could be something like 5% or 25%. We'll see when the reviews come. For what it's worth, it seems to run x86 apps just fine in Microsoft's own demo (keep in mind it's still a mobile ARM processor, so performance will be similar to Atom/Celeron/Pentium, rather than Core i5, etc).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U

I don't trust product demos, movie trailers nor press releases, so I'll reserve my enthusiasm until someone on the "real world" has had the chance to get their hands on this.

What I know is this: ARM emulation via QEMU on my core i7 was pretty slow last I tried it. Not unusably slow, but still slow. And I have tons of ram and a fat CPU.

These laptops, especially if they are made on the cheap side, won't have tons of RAM and a fat CPU. Unless Microsoft pulled some magic tricks, I don't see this emulation being usable.

But I could be wrong.

"faster than QEMU" isn't a particularly high bar to clear, though. In particular if you're only emulating a single process rather than a full guest OS then you can reduce the overhead quite a bit. Plus if you design something from the start for the single-process emulation case, and only need to worry about one guest and one host architecture, and focus on emulation performance as a key goal, you can likely do better than QEMU without too much trouble.

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=37172... ARM64 emulation in Qemu is very slow anyway...

Emulation is slower but most people will be using browser/office/vscode etc so its just for those extra few apps that might stop you buying the product if emulation didn't exist.

that might not matter