Will 2024 finally be the year of PCs under ARM? Microsoft seems to believe in it more strongly than ever and hopes to catch up, and even surpass, the lead that Apple has taken in the sector.
It’s been a few long years now since Apple shook up the laptop market with its MacBooks with Apple Silicon processors. The ARM chips used in the brand’s computers offer superior performance to Intel machines and much more interesting autonomy. Meanwhile, Microsoft is lagging behind and continues to rely on “classic” x86/x64 architectures. But that will soon change.
A more efficient emulator than Apple
If we are to believe the sounds of the corridors captured by The Verge, the Redmond firm is preparing to cause a sensation with its new Surface powered by ARM processors by promising superior performance to that of chips made in Apple. More precisely, it would be all Windows PCs equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor that would make new generation MacBooks bite the dust.
In an internal document consulted by The VergeMicrosoft claims that the emulation speed offered by these ARM machines would be “faster than Rosetta 2», the system used by Apple. The effectiveness of this compatibility layer is crucial, because it is what allows software designed for an Intel architecture to run on an ARM architecture. All software that does not natively offer ARM compatibility will therefore have to go through the mill of this emulator, and there are many of them.
Windows on ARM, a major challenge
Little by little, large software publishers are starting to provide Windows ARM applications, but the transition is slow, as evidenced by the very recent arrival of Chrome on the platform. The need to offer a quality emulator is therefore obvious if Microsoft wants to allow its customers to find their favorite software on this new version of Windows.
To sell this transition, Qualcomm has even published benchmarks proving that its ARM processor can beat Intel’s new Core Ultra hands down in certain aspects. The chipmaker bluntly states that most Windows games should “operate without problems» on future ARM machines. A statement which, if true, could boost the adoption of Windows PCs under ARM, gaming being one of the reasons why Windows is still preferred to macOS.
Source : The Verge
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