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Does anyone know if Microsoft has (or is working on) something similar to Apple's Rosetta emulation system? It seems to me this is the critical component that a

by m12k 6y ago

Does anyone know if Microsoft has (or is working on) something similar to Apple's Rosetta emulation system? It seems to me this is the critical component that allows a transition to ARM to actually go forward without having to wait for every last developer to port their applications over.

LeoPanthera 6y ago
This already exists in an early stage, ARM Windows can run 32-bit Intel binaries. Extending that to 64-bit binaries is the obvious next step.
- my123 6y ago
  It's coming: https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/pull/556/commits/6b957fffd07feb1019f6257b0d36f537611ab176 https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/pull/556/commits/6b957...
  - monocasa 6y ago
    I'm not sure what I'm looking at there; can you add a bit of context?
    - my123 6y ago
      It's adding the linker flags for the ARM64EC architecture in Windows... which represents the x86_64 on arm64 execution mode to the WinRT C++ stub generator.
lunixbochs 6y ago
The ARM Surface Pro X took a sort of opposite approach to Apple in several ways. Rosetta: usually recompiles once ahead of time, only supports 64-bit Microsoft: seems to recompile on the fly, only supports 32-bit Also notable is the fact that the leaked benchmarks show the A12Z is generally faster when emulating an Intel CPU with Rosetta 2, than the Surface Pro X is when running natively, and the A12Z isn’t even Apple’s real desktop cpu, it’s just what they had on hand from the iPad (!)
- my123 6y ago
  And A12Z is a two year old A12X rebranded (they literally just enabled a GPU core turned off before for yields), using the exact same die.