Re:Windows for Arm on M1 Mac Successfully Virtualized
by my123 on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:59PM
(#25232090)
XTAJIT, which is the x86(_64) application compatibility layer on Arm Windows is far from garbage, and got a ton of engineering work.
The problem is that having a 30% performance penalty on a Snapdragon 8cx (because Arm only started really caring about fast CPUs starting from the Cortex-A76, which is the first generation stemming from that effort, resulting in not-ideal perf characteristics for x86 emulation) results in not very good performance. This can only be fixed through better, smarter Arm hardware. (which is coming)
I hope recent software advances in ARM by Apple pushes Microsoft to focus more of their efforts in building a competent translation software layer for x86-64 apps (in contrast to their current garbage-ish emulation layer that makes their ARM devices running legacy x86-64 apps nearly unusable, in some cases) like Rosetta 2.
And also hoping those advances by MSFT in turn push Apple to make an even better version of Rosetta 2 (because mainstream x86-64 apps will probably be around at least for the next couple of decades, imo), leading to a 'golden age' of sorts for translation/emulation software.