Probably one of the most necessary videos for ARM enthusiasts.

I imagine a lot of the skepticism of Windows' x86-64 emulation is a result of the slow processors that came on the first Windows-on-Arm laptops, which would make a task running twice as slow feel MUCH slower.

As I remember, Rosetta 2 does some type of translation on the first run of an application. This takes a certain amount of time but is cached so the second run of any application will be faster than the first. This would be worth testing to see if affects your findings.

I’m almost an only Mac User since 1989 and I’m very grateful for this impartial review. Videos like this are the only way we have to assure that Apple keeps on improving their hardware. The more companies compete, the better products we’ll all have. It’s a win-win for Windows, Apple, Linux and other systems users. I’ve been following you for years and will remain doing so.

I would like to see the Linux version of this video. Linux on ARM has also risen over the last few years and emulation of X86 has been a part of that too. I wonder how well that works.

I can't wait for ARM to take off on Windows. I'll definitely get an ARM Laptop, great battery life and decent performance is all I've always wanted on Windows. I hope Microsoft encourages enough developers to port their apps over soon 😁😄

The end-user experience is what matters. I’ve rooted for the Surface Pro X since its arrival. But the performance has been slower and software has been limited. While the back-end experience might be similar, the results in everyday use have been not. Snapdragon’s new chip has raised hopes once again (particularly when you see who created the new tech). But let’s see if the hardware will give us similar performance that we see on a M1 MBA.

I think the real advantage, that was confused as "better emulation", is just that Apple CPUs have been so much faster than the ARM CPUs Qualcomm has been using on their SoCs. It doesn't matter if your emulation layer is just as fast if your CPU is half as fast. I hope Oryon competes 1:1 against Apple and makes Windows on ARM a solid product.

One of the claims Apple made about their emulation approach was that it would improve over time. The first time it translated X86_64 code it would be slow, but the second time it would be much faster. Can you think of a way to test this? The understanding I have of how this worked, is that the translated code would be stored, and re-used the next time it was needed.

Thanks for clearing up the misconceptions.

Fantastic video Gary! Very clearly explains your methodology and clearly shows the results. Awesome!

Eye opening, keep up the good work, Gary! 👌🏻

FINALLY! A REAL comparison. Thank you!

That is great insight and really good journalism Gary. Really waiting to use new fanless ARM laptops in 2024.

I also did a few tests with box64 - the most popular Linux solution for x86-64 emulation for arm64. In all my test box64 was quite a bit slower than both Windows and MacOS provided emulation.

End of the day it depends on user preference. But love to see linux running on proper ARM platforms... that will just be amazing!

i love watching your videos , keep going U R the best

Amazing tests Gary

This was really useful. Thanks for taking the time to share the stats. It’s impressive it works at all. It’s nice to have options, though it’s slow enough if wasn’t viable for our use case. Half the speed meant wasting a heap of developer time waiting for tests to run. We wanted to keep it simple when our business transitioned to ARM a few years ago. We aligned our hardware refresh cycles and deployment planning to do it in one step. We adopted ARM workstations and moved our production load to AWS Graviton processes on the same day. In the end it was as simple as changing a flag in a docker build command and changing a setting on AWS. Roughly speaking, it’s working out about 40% cheaper than x86 was. The monthly AWS savings paid off the new workstation costs in under a year. The only x86 processor in my life is the one in my gaming PC.

very interesting subject indeed and in the right time too, very clever and informative approach, big fan 💚💚.. thank you

Thanks for getting the hard numbers on this. I think because I ARM translation got off on a rocky start on Windows, it got a bad reputation. For example, a client of mine had all kinds of issues running x64 code on their Surface Pro years ago. Mostly it was just lack of compatibility, but those were early days. I think because Apple comes out the door 100% working, and has a very good hypenmarketing system, there's just a complete different perception in the two companies. Now, I'm watching this 6 months later, and Microsoft just announced a whole bunch of new ARM "Copilot" computers, two he translation and compatibility is probably even better now, or at least fully matured.

Thanks you. This answers my phobia of Arm transition

Now do linux vs win vs Mac arm emulation comparison for us 3% linux users.

It would be a lot better if u have used latest insider build on windows 11 as some emulation improvements have been made there.

Great video! Thank you. Thanks for doing an actual test of the myth. Your results were very interesting.

Lovely videos as always! I really enjoy learning something new from @garyexplains Feature Request for future videos: please include more details and metrics about energy consumption and thermals/tdp. I feel this is missing from some of the metrics you typically cover in architecture vids and benchmarks. Moreover, would you be willing to add api benchmarks in future videos? Thank you! Long time fan 🙏🏽

I'm really impressed, thanks for the video

Thank you Professor 🙏🏽

Great video! Much needed proof to dismiss hype.

Most people comments about microsoft x86 emulation might from before volterra, it was a mess at the beginning compared to apple, but it not only improve but also show us what can be done. Wanna see what X elite can do, hopefully the game emulation scene can get as mature as apple's one is now.

Thank you for the interesting video. Speed of the translated code is important, but even more important, I think, is accuracy of the translation. That is harder to check because it means running translated code of many complex programs to ensure that they are behaving properly and there are no errors. Adobe Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Excel, games, etc. I suppose older pre-Apple Silicon versions can be found that are not fat universal binaries which could be used on Mac to try and get a true comparison of Apple Rosetta 2 translation to Windows translation.

I really like to see the application you wrote for the test. Window is heavily using dll’s even for standard c library functions. So how sure are you that it didn’t use arm based code on windows?

Awesome video thanks

I recall Adobe announcing arm. Development of their suite back before apples switched to m1. I was mainly excited because of the possibility of the native version being rewritten and ported to the iPad but given this. Knowledge I’m excited to see when a surface book ships with a snapdragon elite

Thanks for this video. There are many speculations on the street.

Very excited for x elite laptops.... Gona be awesome. I was going to get a new laptop but I'll wait till the ARM one comes out

Good job!

Fascinating! It was definitely true when the M1 released. I'm really happy to see it's good now

The “not actually emulating x86” revelation is major, and the new Snapdragon chip is a critically important recent update to consider surrounding this topic.

A very sincere thank you 👍🏿

Lovely, hope you do a an energy efficiency comparison between apple's m3 vs snapdragon x elite.

So excited about this new chip!!

Impressive testing

Great video

It may be that the Windows emulation has improved over time. IIRC when the Surface X came out, benchmarks showed that emulated software performed much worse vs native. Then when the M1 Macbooks first came out, reviews were showing much better emulation performance vs. Windows. It also could have been the issue you mentioned where MacOS still runs apps with the Arm library, although it was so early in the Apple silicon lifespan that I'm not sure if the apps had a fat version at the time. I don't remember all of the reviews I watched covering both, but I remember LTT being one of them.

Great video, Gary and your methodology is spot on. What important is that it is not your opinions or based on hearsays (what he said, she said). Anyway, it is good to know (and expected at least to me) that the emulators performance are almost similar on Windows and MacOS. Ultimately, these emulators won't be needed some years later down the line because nothing beats native code. It is interesting to speculate that perhpas in the future there will be split between ARM64 for mobile computing and x86_64 for desktop with regards to Windows. I don't think that x86_64, Intel, AMD will disappear into the ethos very soon.

Thanks for the comparison, it's really interesting to see how far emulation has come now that Microsoft is releasing consumer hardware with the Snapdragon Elite chips.

Can you please test fedora or ubuntu on it? I wonder if we can finally have some good arm hardware to run linux on

Very timely. Just upgrading from i9 to M3 and I’m having quite a bit of architecture anxiety.

Looks good.... looking forward to when I can buy a proper ARM-based PC! Hopefully sometime next year..

Thanks Gary, that's exactly what I expect to see on youtube. When someone states something, it should be backed up by some tests. But there are still some kinds of things I don't understand well. There are different instructions, some may be better emulated on one platform, some on the other. It would be nice to see that in detail. It would help to understand the difference in results between your code and HandBrake. Another interesting topic is gaming. Windows games rely heavily on DirectX and windows PCs GPUs have hardware optimized for it. What about Qualcomm vs Apple in that regard? Can we expect AAA arm games anytime soon? If you know anything about it, please, let us know.

Windows just did not have competitive ARM hardware to run on compared to Apple silicone so people just assumed it ran poorly when the reality is it was running on much weaker hardware. Should be interesting to see how Windows & x86 emulation on Snapdragon Elite will perform in real life now that it's on a comparable platform to the M series.

This one of the best non bias video. Thanks for always making these brilliant video. Still love my M2 Mac 😊

Rosetta also has access to intel memory extensions that apple built into m series SoC. This improved the performance a lot.

Another thing to test is compatibility. You can refer to the lists of most used PC software and test them on both platforms to see how well they run.

Thank you

This is what I've been holding out for. I'm going to wait another generation and probably pull the trigger on a system with one of these Snapdragon chips. I'm also very interested to see what x64 emulation on Linux is like.

Nice vid, thanks, emulation learns, running subsequent identical emulations should improve benchmarking, can you run your x86 emulation a few times and then compare to the first time you ran it?

Interesting topic. My guess as to why people have not responded with the facts that macOS on ARM performing better than Windows on ARM is because its not about the quantity and benchmarks, but the behaviour and experiences of how well the apps run on those platforms. So it's things like the number of apps that are supported, how well they run, signs of slow downs, glitches, etc that are harder to quantify (unless we conduct surveys with users). So making use of ARM libraries when available is a good optimisation technique, thus providing better experiences. But there are limitations, such as the lack of nested virtualisation if you're running VMs.

One has to write x86 code to specifically use instruction set like SSE2 , Larger virtual address space, various types of modes. This should be job of linker and complier, which if not configured, would default to most optimised binary.

Gary just a simple question. Are you optimistic about where ARM is going on Windows? Do you think we can have a small and light alternative to the M type Macs. I want an powerful and efficient Windows laptop. I don't want to buy into the Apple eco- system as I prefer to use Windows and Android in PC and mobile.

What about docker running x86_64 images under Windows on arm64? I'd be interested to see if OSx is just using some binfmt tools to run alternative architectures, or if they'd done something to be able to use rosetta with them (being that all docker images normal people use are Linux based)

Thanks for the video. I’d be interested to know, how does Parallels run Windows 11 on Mac M2 or M3 processors with 16GB minimum, and how fast are Windows apps run that way. Both ARM and x86 Windows apps compared to native Windows ARM machine.

I love to know more about the absolute amounts of time taken to convert the same video source on both platforms in native and emulated modes

For someone who had an iBook 12" in 2004, a MBP 13" Retina thingy in 2007, a MBP 13" Retina thingy in 2013, and now a MBA 13" M2 thingy in 2023, all while switching from a PC laptop in 2004 due to Unix/Linux university requirements, and using Windows 7/10/11 via BootCamp or virtualization the whole time ... I'm just glad they get faster and more reliable while remaining dirt cheap by 90's standards. $0.02

What I'd love to know, is how good Linux support will be on the new Snapdragon X Elite Laptops. I know native software support is actually pretty great, thanks to both RaspberryPi & Neoverse servers. But I heard from current Windows Snapdragon device owners, that boot & driver support for installing Linux has been fairly bad for the most part. Hope that changes, if it hasn't already. I'd love to have a Snapdragon X Elite Linux Developer Laptop.

Great comparison, How does QEMU compare to Rosetta and the windows emulator?

Well Said and Done Sir...the average user has no clue what the difference is or makes a program run, if there were no markings indicating its an apple or Microsoft, with the same looking DT or LT and program running and had to choose which was A or M,besides the lucky guess,they wouldnt know...Great topic thank you for sharing all that you have and future episodes...take care Sir...

Now I just imagined implications of Apple selling arm64 CPU in the wild to Windows hardware vendors... crazy idea, maybe I've been drinking too much coffee today... Gary, great review and explanations again, thanks!

A very good video Gary. Well done for all the testing and coding. Like you said, the general opinion on the internet for years has been that MacOS emulation is far better than windows and clearly this is not the case. 👍👍

Gary, when do you think i will be able to install microsoft visual studio in my galaxy phone? I really looking forward to that moment

The Windows problems were not related to the underlying platform, but wit the stubborn wish to make us use that modern UI/windowsRT/whatever. If they compile everything, it will be Ok. It was in the past, there was NT for many platforms, Windows CE was compiled for many CPUs, I for once remember compiling for at least 5 different processors and I can't remember how many platforms with them (had about 30 targets), but there was no CPU transaltion in CE. Other thing to remember is that initially Windows NT was in then called "p"-code and everything was translated! And this was when having 32 megs of RAM required you to be quite a rich person. So, the history is long and Windows is in that game from the beginning, but today considering that many people call the front end UI an Operating System, the difference from decades ago is that everybody can talk and not only those who know what is actually inside the devices.

Interesting to see more arm64 content. Thanks! Have you had a look at ADLINK's Ampere Altra Developer Platform. Up to 128 arm64 CPUs in a convenient workstation format.

Would love some benchmarks on arm64ec on windows compared to full native and emulated. It disallows some vector and other registers, so I'm curious about the impact on performance

The new Windows emulator with X SoCs actually has a name. It's talk Prism.

That was an eye opener for me. But there again it shouldn't had been. Yep, I was brought into all those previous Apple bench marking. And yes I'm looking forward to xelite arm laptops

Note that Microsoft has officially cancelled support for Windows 10 on ARM. So there is only Windows 11 on ARM. It lives happily within a Parallels Desktop VM on my Mac mini and receives all patches and function upgrades including the recently released 23H2. I bet the claims of Rosetta 2 being the better "emulation" stems from Windows 10 on ARM which had x86 emulation only and it was a real emulation, whereas Rosetta 2 uses JIT compilation of x64 code to ARM. Windows introduced JIT along with the x64-Support in Windows 11 on ARM. On Windows 11 on ARM, JIT compilation is only available for x64-Code (as it is in Rosetta 2 as there is no longer support for x86-Code in macOS for years now).

You have to test also battery duration, it is an important point, if a bought an ARM laptop that would be to get more portability.

I confirm that but I want to add that x86 app on 64bit are emulated very well than 32bit ones on Windows ARM

Any thoughts on ChromeOS on ARM? They are already power efficient with x86 as they use low powered Intel chips, with ARM google can try to interoperate with android? Like linux-android? Would this be even more efficient? If at all this could be achieved? Coz with the current mobile phone processors like SD8GEN3 and dex mode it with having linux on top of it, i guess it would bridge gap between mobile and laptops? Like the apple does having iOS, iPadOS,macOS all on the same architecture?

Surprising. I remember when Windows on Snapdragon first became a thing the reviews showed AWFUL emulation. So is it that SoCs are way faster or did Microsoft make additional optimizations?

Hi Gary you should try to build and run the SPEC benchmark suite - it's the gold standard for measuring performance across a wide variety of workloads and I think it's not too hard to build and run

Does Rosetta 2 also use ARM code for other things than benchmarks when it is supposed to translate (without being fat version)? Which might also make it feel better than what it is. I have probably been trainted how poor the Windows ARM translation has been early on and it probably doesnt help the ARM processors for Windows hasn’t been as powerful as the M series. It is interesting whenever someone uses Windows on ARM Mac that x86 programs runs great which people have attributed to Rosetta 2 which might just be Windows own translation but because it got more powerful CPU it feels better than on a Windows ARM PC.

This makes a lot of sense if one think about the incentives. Apple wants the devs to quickly port apps over to Arm, so they only care that x86 just works and don't care too much about speed. Microsoft knows that a lot of devs will never port to Arm, hence they need to optimize better.

What the testing code does? That may affect the results. Do they use SIMD operations (SSE/NEON)?

Does Windows not also choose native shared library code when available, even if the app calling into the library is running in emulation? (If not, why not?)

Another thing, it’s the same name (Rosetta) but it’s not the same technology in either, it’s just emulation tailored to the OSs and type of binaries.

I'm curious what the die size is of the snapdragon elite x compared to the mac m2 or m3

This was super interesting! Wonder how Box64 on Linux would compare.

This makes sense. Windows performance even as VM on Apple Sillicon is commendable. I don’t know why so much people lash out to Windows, when it’s clear that there hasn’t been ARM hardware up to the task for Windows… until now with the Snapdragon X. But the 8cx series has been a disaster, expensive and underperforming. Was meant to compete with Intel Y series, just as the M-series took off.

Can’t wait to see how the snapdragon surface handles emulation. Might switch from my iPad lol

Hey gary , will 99% of my software run on windows on arm if i switch to snapdragon x elite laptop at launch? and what is the disadvantage of not having ArmV9 in the X elite

Very cool and great to know👍 So why Apple silicon always wins against Windows ARM PC? Better chip & code optimization? Or is it because till now, with the X-Elite chip released Windows never had similar high performance ARM chip like that comparable to the Apple’s Mx family?

What I'm missing here is more technical detail on the character of your own test code. What kind of CPU load was it? Was it more arithmetic kind of computation? Did it access a lot of memory? Did it have complicated branching structure? Was it single-threaded or multi-threaded? Did it use x-86 extension instructions? How did the first run differ from the subsequent ones? Etc. It would be super interesting to see how different kinds of load behave in the emulation environment. In the HandBrake case, for example, you can see that the code is most probably heavily low-level optimized for the native architecture. Anyway, the point of your video - negligible difference between Mac and Win low-level emulation performance - seems to hold pretty well and that's great news. Let's see how Microsoft solves the end-user Win-on-Arm experience.

I guess we need different workloads to compare more situations. (Int32, fp64, with hardware acceleration, office workloads…)

Perhaps I'm just dumb, I'm not a developer, but isn't this test mostly semantics? Maybe Rosetta 2 isn't strictly emulation, but with the weird ARM stuff Apple uses with it, the end result for the user is a pretty seamless transition from the debut of Apple Silicon. I know personally, the reason I thought Windows on ARM was so bad was that the Surface Pro X got absulutely roasted on release for being nigh unusable with most x64 applications. It seems like, instead of being like "Well when you make the experience completely like for like, they're both as slow" the better option would be "Make sure Windows 12 or whatever release brings ARM mainstream pulls the same under the hood sleight of hand Rosetta 2 did, because the transition will be much slower and more complicated with the more fragmented Windows ecosystem, so any advantage they can get will be even more important."

I'm new to the subject. Could someone please tell me what the enthusiasm for ARM is about? I can only think of limitations, but that is probably because I'm new to the topic.

I just noticed recently that windows arm update brings significant x86/x64 emulation performance improvement!

Makes me think we could get an ARM based Steam Deck one day! One day the scales may tip to ARM and that's where the all the focus will be.

As someone who prefers Apple (wont call myself a fan boy, but know people will call me a fan boy), the reality is that up until now (with the release of the snapdragon X elite) Windows didnt have a ARM based chip that was comparable to the Apple chips (meaning that the previous ARM chip that the Surface used wasnt as good as Apple Sillicon), therefore in real world use you will always have the experience the Apple emulation of x86 to be better than Windows. I think it is only now that it can be possible to really compare the two. I do think that because Apple has moved away from x86 machines as a whole forcing developers to create native versions, that Apple will will be beter than Windows on ARM (as great as the SD X Elite is I dont think that it is enough to get developers to create native ARM versions and therefore will always have to emulate programs and as mentioned in the video native is always better than emulation