Valve has been quietly working on integrating the FEX x86 emulator into Proton for a while, and it's official now.
https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...
https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...
I believe low wattage SOCs can make traditional desktop hardware irrelevant (ish), but I think ARM is orthogonal to that.
The thing is, x86 dominance on servers,etc has been tied to what developers use as work machines, if everyone is on ARM machines they'll probably be more inclined to use that on servers as well.
It's like an avalanche effect.
The main reason x86 still has relevance and will continue to do so is because x86 manufacturers actually care about the platform and their chips. x86 is somewhat open and standardized. ARM is the wild, wild west - each manufacturer makes bespoke motherboards, and sockets, and firmware. Many manufacturers, like Qualcomm, abandon their products remarkably quickly.
Yes, Windows on desktop hardware will probably continue mainly with x86 for a while more, but how many people outside of games, workstation-scenarios and secure scenarios still use desktops compared to laptops (where SoC's are fine for most part)?
2. I am referring to the snapdragon x elite and associated devices, which were and are a failure.
3. You don't need ARM to create an SOC. Even Intel makes a more power efficient x86 SOC than the x elite.
4. Games and work are, like, HUGE use cases. If you can't use the ARM laptops for your job or your not-at-job, then what the fuck can you use it for?
2: Again, how are they failures? Yes, sales have been so-so but if you go onto Microsofts site you mostly get Surface devices with Snapdragon chips and most reports seems to be from about a year ago (would be interesting to see numbers from this year though).
3: Yes, I got a new x86 machine myself a month back that has quite nice battery life. Intel not being stuck as far behind on process seems to have helped a fair bit (the X elite's doesn't seem entirely power efficient compared to Apple however).
4: Yes, _I_ got an x86 machine since I knew that I'd probably be installing quirky enterprise dependencies from the early 00s (possibly even 90s) that a client requires.
However, I was actually considering something other than wintel, mainly an Apple laptop. If I'm considering options and being mostly held back by enterprise customers with old software I'd need to maintain the moat is quite weak.
My older kids previous school used ARM Chromebooks (currently x86 HP laptops at current upper highschool but they run things like AutoCAD), the younger one has used iPad's for most of their junior high.
Games could be one moat, but is that more due to the CPU or the GPU's being more behind Nvidia and AMD. Someone was running Cyberpunk 2077 on DGX Spark at 175 fps (x86-64 binary being emulated.. )!
But beside games and enterprise...
So many people that are using their computers for web interfaces, spreadsheets, writing, graphics(photoshop has ARM support) and so on won't notice much different about ARM machines (why my kids mostly used non-x86 so far), it's true that such people are using PC's less overall (phones and/or tables being enough for most of their computing), but tell a salesman Excel jockey that he can get 10-20% more battery life and he might just take it.
Now, if Qualcomm exits the market by failing to introduce another yearly/bi-yearly update then I'll be inclined to agree that Win-Arm has failed again.. but so far it's not really in sight.
Potential lottery ticket win, they are available for consulting internally anywhere that can add value, and they're not working for anyone else.
A company sufficiently scaled can largely only be fixed by the CEO, and often not even then.
This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment:
> Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus.
> Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future.
It's mentioned in this issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8136 which was closed Oct 2024 with this comment by kisak-valve:
> Hello @Theleafir1, similar to #1493, this is not a realistic objective for Proton any time in the near future.
Out of all the IPs Valve owns, somehow it's TF2 that got a story conclusion and it couldn't have been more perfect.
You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API.
On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.
I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.
The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.
You don't need Proton's Wine fork when you can just use Wine.
There's also DXMT which is open-source, but doesn't support DX12.
Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
In comparison the proton experience is seamless.
Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation.
Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.
It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
Also, how could Apple kill the old software that is better than the new, if it doesn't control the emulation? This way they don't have to even have 10% of the features to force you to buy again.
cough /final cut/ cough
Compare Steam Machine (2014) to Steam Machine (2026). The difference this time around is Proton support, and you can pretty easily see the hype on the internet for the new version, even after the original version was mocked relentlessly in some circles for having "no games."
For funsies, try searching App Store apps and find a way to filter out results for apps with IAP. Nope!
(Source: me, who spent time at a mobile gaming company as we figured out how to continuously optimize our funnels so that some rich dudes in Qatar could continue to spend $40K a month on useless cosmetics.)
"evaluate your unmodified Windows executable on Apple silicon using the evaluation environment for Windows games"
A bunch of games just ship the Windows executable and some version of that translation layer in their MacOS App bundle
They'll spend billions on a handful of (late) AAA ports for macOS every 4-5 years, and then go radio silent again.
The efforts are usually short-lived and mostly fruitless, but I wouldn't say they're "grossed out" by gaming nerds.
They released Apple Vision Pro with no ability to play popular PC games on it.
A VR headset. That doesn't play games.
The available low-level API is Metal, and the existing software stack is written for Vulkan, so it makes more sense to implement Vulkan than to write a new Metal backend.
Apple's native gaming story has been similar failure as their AI and Siri ventures. Time to fix it.
Apple seeks to builds its own walled garden.
Their interests do not align. Apple doesn’t want portable software on their platform, they want exclusive software.
Every day I sit down at a Mac for work and proceed to launch VS Code, Zed, Outlook, DBeaver, Excel, Teams, LogSeq, Syncthing, Chrome, Firefox, LM Studio and Docker. I prefer MacOS but basically all of my application workflow exists for Windows verbatim and if using browser versions of the MS apps, on Linux too.
The last straw with MacOS was when my US bank cards expired, I could no longer update apps I already paid for, I could no longer install apps I already paid for. Everything was held hostage, could not install FREE apps via the appstore on macos or on ipad.
That day my eyes opened to what Apple has become.
You simply cannot trust Apple with your computing future. They're a fashion company now.
Honestly right now there is so much overlapping between all the wine "flavors" and forks available (Stock wine, Crossover, Proton/Proton-GE/Wine-GE, Game Porting Toolkit, winevdm, probably a few more I'm forgetting right now) I'm not entirely sure how many features have been independently implemented already multiple times.
The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM.
Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine.
But honestly at this point I’m destined to buy a Steam Machine despite having a hefty Mac that could do gaming if only it were possible. Valve have been amazing about open computing and Apple are basically the enemy at this point.
It makes me wonder about what using steam machine for all computing might look like, as the new home of open computing and gaming.
I don't think it's ever likely to return any time soon, but it'd be cool if it did. Valve seemingly have very little interest in macOS at the moment.
CodeWeavers work closely with Valve and the Wine project to improve compatibility with games, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers work on Wine too. So all the pieces are there in theory.