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Emulation (Games) Microsoft Operating Systems Windows Build

Microsoft's Latest Windows 10 Test Builds Includes Promised x64 Arm Emulation (zdnet.com) 30

Microsoft has made available two different Windows 10 test builds today, one of which includes the promised x64 app emulation for Arm, among other features. ZDNet reports: The RS_Prerelease build 21277 -- which ultimately is expected to be designated as the "Cobalt" branch -- includes the features Microsoft had previously been testing but removed at the end of October. This includes the updated emoji picker, redesigned touch keyboard, voice typing, theme-aware splash screens and more. It also provides the aforementioned Arm emulation support. Currently, Windows on Arm natively supports Arm apps, including ARM64 versions. But so far, only 32-bit Intel (x86) apps are supported in emulation. This lack of x64 emulation has limited the number of apps that can run on Windows on Arm devices, since apps that are 64-bit only have only been available on Windows on Arm (WoA) devices if and when developers created native versions of them. As of now, these x64 Arm apps also can run in emulation. More details on the x64 Arm emulation preview functionality are in this Microsoft post.
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Microsoft's Latest Windows 10 Test Builds Includes Promised x64 Arm Emulation

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11, 2020 @03:07AM (#60818586)

    There. Fixed it for you.

  • by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Friday December 11, 2020 @06:06AM (#60818744)

    While exagear's proprietary x86 emulation on ARM (which powers exagear desktop windows emulator), is able to get ~"core 2 performance" on an older samsung galaxy S5, that is for 32bits only.. and a pretty high penalty for the emulation.

    I am curious how bad the penalty for 64bit emulation will be.

  • ... hadn't sold most of MIcrosofts shares in Apple (which would apparently be worth $120 * 10^9) today ,they could probably have persuaded Cook to use the M1 chip in their own tablets.

    • Bill Gates doesn't give a shit, though. He's actually worth more personally now than he was since he started "giving" "his" money "away", and that's not counting the funds stored tax-free in his Foundation, which he is in ultimate control over (which is why he was able to rebuild his fortune so rapidly — directed investment.)

  • because MS Windows is so wedded to the Intel architecture that the concept of recompiling for a different architecture is alien to Microsoft developers. This is not an issue in the Unix/Linux world where different repositories for different architectures is the norm and developers do not bat an eyelid. Oh, well - maybe MS will catch up with *nix one day.

    • by mccalli ( 323026 )
      That's unfortunately not the case. In ye olden days of PowerPC, you'd regularly find things that couldn't port across due to various #fdefs or daft macros or what have you.

      That was a while ago, but you can also see from people recompiling stuff for the new macOS ARM machines (which are, after all, Unix) and finding the same issues.
      • by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Friday December 11, 2020 @07:28AM (#60818830) Homepage

        Yes: you do get people who write stuff without thought of portability, but that is very much the exception rather than the rule. Don't get me wrong: writing code that is portable between CPU architectures takes discipline: look at compiler warnings; take care on int sizes; worry about byte ordering; ... but you get used to it and it becomes easier - I have been doing it for ~ 35 years. There are similar problems making code portable between different *nix and other operating systems - but people do it often.

        • But I'm working with huge load of technical debt where the orginal authors had no concept of portability, not just porting to new machines but portability of data across a network. And the bizarre thing is they already migrated some of the code from a different architecture. A lot of this is a mixture of self-taught programmers, never having to grow up in a Unix world where portability is a concern even at the application layer, and the startup model of getting code to work now instead of worrying about t

      • by trparky ( 846769 )
        And we're not even talking about hand-coded assembly code that's written to accelerate certain portions of modern-day programs. There are some things that do better if you write it in pure assembly as versus hoping that your compiler is good enough. This code, of course, would have to be rewritten in ARM assembly and that's not always easy to do.
  • x86-64 (Score:5, Informative)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Friday December 11, 2020 @11:38AM (#60819386) Homepage

    The designation is x86-64. x64 is a MS-ism.

    AMD64 was the original designation of AMD's 64-bit chip designed to be x86 compatible. EM64T is Intel's brand designed to be AMD64 compatible. x86-64 is the generic name for AMD64 compatible chips.

    x64 is only used by Microsoft and should be avoided by technically literate writers when talking about AMD64 compatible chips.

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