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Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

Does Windows run natively on ARM + most of its software?

Do they have their own translation layers as fast as Rosetta 2?

Just curious as to how it works.

Yes, Windows 11 runs natively on ARM. There is ARM native versions of MS Edge, Office, Visual Studio. Most software from 3rd parties is still x86/x64 based but some things like Firefox are available for ARM.

They do have their own translation layers for both x86 and x64 based apps. It's "slower" than Rosetta 2 but it's just commodity ARM hardware with no accommodations for certain x64 instructions like Apple Silicon. I've been mostly impressed by it.

Oh, for a second I thought you meant the limited VS Code, not the real Visual Studio - but I checked and they do actually have a proper full VS running on ARM now, that's super cool. Would make me seriously consider buying an ARM windows laptop.

Rosetta 2 was/is "impressive" because Apple was smart enough to bake some x86 functionalities into their ARM designs to aid the transition. On the other hand Qualcomm and other OEMs don't have in their interests to offer such functionalities so Microsoft is forced to 100% emulate x86

Last time I dug into this, the conclusion seemed to be that Windows' translation layer, built in cooperation with Qualcom themselves, is actually quite competitive. Performance numbers weren't that far off from Rosetta for desktop applications, with an estimated performance 0-15% lower than Rosetta, which is quite low for a platform without x64 memory model optimisations.

The first release could only do one architecture (32 bit or 64 bit, I'm not sure) but its capabilities have been expanded. A lot of benchmarks are outdated and it seems like nobody has been paying much attention to it in a while now.

The biggest problem with Windows on ARM doesn't seem to he the binary translation, but the slow SoCs the translation is running on.

The most important tools (browsers, Office) work fine on ARM without translation. The translation layer is necessary, but I'm not sure if common use cases will see all that much use for most people.

On windows for ARM there are quite a few bugs during emulation that I don’t get on an x64 based system, even while using effectively the same settings for the program. Software using custom installers will be the biggest issue, and this is significantly more common on windows than on macOS

It’s definitely performant. I’ve been using it for mofe than a year under parallels on an M1pro macbook to run solidworks. It runs solidworks about as well as my 2019 13” intel MacBook running bootcamp. It runs non-GPU intensive stuff much better.

I don't know exactly what model you had, but the truth is 13" models from that time were a complete joke in terms of power for the price.

Beating this in a thicker chassis with a more efficient processor is not exactly an achievement. Non optioned 13" models still suck in terms of power for money, but at least in the Apple Silicon age they are less ridiculous.

But if you don't fanboy and don't need the battery life you should realize they are still are very bad deal in term of capabilities.

Yes, windows/arm64 runs all arm64 binaries out the box. Looking at my jenkins windows/arm64 CI machine, i'm running x64 java, but that's it.

If you want to build apps to run with support for x64, there is a special Arm64CE target type which changes how binaries are built to make compatibility with x64 better (as in faster, lower overhead).

It's described here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/arm64ec-abi

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