The M1 does not emulate x86 instructions (in hardware). Emulation is provided by Rosetta 2, a combined ahead-of-time and just-in-time emulation that can run x86

The M1 does not emulate x86 instructions (in hardware). Emulation is provided by Rosetta 2, a combined ahead-of-time and just-in-time emulation that can run x86-64 macOS binaries on Aarch64. However, there is still some hardware support for Rosetta 2 in the M1, e.g. to support strong memory ordering. More details on Rosetta 2 internals can be found at https://ffri.github.io/ProjectChampollion/ https://ffri.github.io/ProjectChampollion/