Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last

Microsoft says it will start to bring 64-bit x86 emulation to Windows on Arm, allowing x64 applications to run on Arm-powered Windows 10 laptops, fondleslabs, and other computers. Er, doesn't it do that already? No, so far Windows on Arm only runs 32-bit x86 code on emulation as well as 64-bit and 32-bit Arm code natively. …

[martynhare]

Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Linux already has a complete set of ARM native applications, including a fully functional office suite, multiple browsers and creativity apps one needs for basic work. It’s hard to find common packages in the repositories for Debian (for example) which aren’t already available for the architecture out of the box. Tens of thousands of applications.

macOS is about to drop its first ARM-native release with a complete set of applications automatically ported from iOS and a number of key partnerships to ensure rapid delivery of Adobe Creative Cloud, iWork suite, Safari, iMovie, Logic Pro etc. It will have more mainstream modern applications available than Windows offers today in the Microsoft Store even counting x86.

What does Microsoft have ready for their ARM port? Bugger all. Given the quality of their store, will they ever be ready? I doubt it. A hypothetical Raspberry Pi 5 on Linux will still provide a better functioning device than any ARM box shipping with Windows. If manufacturers ship this crap, maybe that’s when we will see The Year of The Linux Desktop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

I agree windows apps are evermore becoming recognised as less and less worth the cost of slurp.

All these posts by MS on ARM seem a bit desperate and needy, almost as though they are pleading for anyone outside of the blinkered businesses to notice them.

Time to start selling any remaining MS stock me thinks

[six_tymes]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

"me thinks" you are so edgy... "Anonymous Coward"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

I suppose if you are getting paid to support MS then you have to post something against criticism but just pointing out the obvious i.e. AC and "me thinks" isn't really any more value for money than anything else from MS

MS clearly need to either look at improving their shill's efforts or recognise that both have given up the effort up as pointless ?

Say after me 10 times "irrelevant" it applies to your post and MS in general

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Ah my bad six_tymes, are really that new (6 posts) or is this a new shill account given your name's coincidence with your post count?

[werdsmith]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Yes, people should understand that this is a techie site and many users are socially stunted, so you should expect to find people using the words “me thinks” in a failed attempt to shoehorn some Hamlet whilst disastrously adding a space. Just imagine the nasality if you were speaking to them in real life and live with it.

Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet, the mild cigar....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

"Just imagine the nasality if you were speaking to them in real life and live with it."

If I had a sack full of upvotes, they would all be yours.

[TimMaher]

.... from Benson & Hedges.

I liked the ones about the tennis match and the sculptor.

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: .... from Benson & Hedges.

Here are the two you mention: https://youtu.be/NIckHmwZAeI?t=82

I liked the one with the Carlos Fandango super-wide wheels - though I've only just realised that it was for Panama cigars, not Hamlet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqqZ28m8uCo

[A Non e-mouse]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Can we move on from the playground "My CPU/OS/Application is better than yours". The joke's past it.

If you bother to look at MS' recent business decisions, products are moving to be online services. The only thing that MS then cares about is the browser. Guess which product MS are getting to run on multiple devices.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

And EVERY single one of them is complete and total shite

Linux is a joke - anyone who thinks Linux is even a decent OS (not good/not great - just decent) is a total moron

Seriously - its so fucking bad it makes Windows look good

[werdsmith]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

I don’t know if you are a troll or not, but on the desktop it has some nasty flaws, but I can’t see past Linux as server of choice for most situations.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Hey SatNad is that you?

If Linux is such a POS then why is MS embracing it like there is no tomorrow?

If Linux is such a POS then why is it running everywhere? How many devices do you have that run some version of Linux in the background?

Linux isn't perfect. not by a long shot but it has been a lot better and more stable than Windows has especially since that monstrosity called Windows 10 came out.

As a long time computer user/developer/geek, I said enough is enough with W10. I now no longer use any Windows systems. (hurrah!). These days, it is all Linux or BSD or MacOS and good riddance to the Microsoft Way.

(do it our way or not at all)

Eat that Redmond [see Icon]

[TheVogon]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

"If Linux is such a POS then why is MS embracing it like there is no tomorrow?"

They are just making it easier to run Linux stuff under Windows and to migrate your legacy midrange systems to Windows / Azure. If it continues this way you wont need Linux at all but can run everything under Windows. Microsoft are already adding GUI support to the Linux subsystem for Windows.

[Tilda Rice]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Oh look. Someone whose discovered Linux.

[Timmy B]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

On the desktop you are right. Ever single desktop type app and UI I've seen and used on Linux just seems a bit "off" it's like a UI was stuck on top of something that never really wanted it.

But then since I swapped to Mac every time I go back to windows it feels kind of the same - Windows is also just a bit "off".

The best desktop OS out there is Mac OS. I've used them all and I won't go back from Macs now - it simply needs no faffing, fiddling or tweaking - just works - and I'm getting too old to mess around with the minutiae of configuration any more. Not that I can't - I just can't be bothered.

[Maventi]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

I'm a routine Mac and Ubuntu user and every time I spin up a Windows 10 machine (last one was just yesterday) I'm still shocked at how inconsistent the UI remains.

[werdsmith]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

The problem with Linux desktop is the fragmentation. This distro,that distro, this UI layer, that UI layer.

If it was a consistent installation with a standard set of binaries for x86_64, it will go far.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Linux is a joke

Linux is what makes the Internet work.

Linux is what makes Azure work.

I'm pretty sure AWS is not using Windows to work.

For fuck's sake, even Microsoft is not using Windows to run Azure. Hello ?

Hint : a successful troll is posting something that is at least remotely plausible.

[Sandtitz]

Re: Linux is a joke

"Linux is what makes Azure work."

"For fuck's sake, even Microsoft is not using Windows to run Azure. Hello ?"

Azure runs atop a modified NT kernel, not Linux.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

It will have more mainstream modern applications available than Windows offers today in the Microsoft Store even counting x86.

By providing an emulator Microsoft is doing pretty much the same as Apple. CPUs are now good enough to handle the thunking in real time with users rarely noticing it (except for computational intensive resources).

And Apple isn't moving wholesale to ARM either. We've yet to see which devices will be released but it's reasonable to assume that x86 hardware will still be offered for another two years and supported for at least another 2 beyond that.

Microsoft could be on top of this but made several mistakes with ARM with Windows RT and the rest. But the fact is that > 99% of the Windows world is x86 and this isn't likely to change soon. More important was realising that Windows Mobile wasn't worth the effort (cf IBM and OS/2) and the decision to provide good versions of MS Office for IOS and Android, though Outlook for Android really is a piece of shit.

[DrXym]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

If Microsoft had any sense, they would have provided universal binaries and compiler support for Windows 7 / 8/ 10, i.e. you open devstudio and build an executable like usual but it's targetted to a low-level architecture neutral format. Just like what Apple already does in the iPhone with LLVM. Or what Google does with ART.

Then when that binary runs the OS compiles it natively and caches it somewhere and uses the cached copy thereafter. It means companies can ship a single binary that runs everywhere and that lessens the burdening of testing and supporting multiple versions.

But that would make too much sense. So instead Microsoft forces developers to choose what platforms to support and so one ARM device after another arrives stillborn because nobody can be bothered to support it.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

I tihnk they deliberately didn't do this because they liked selling the same thing multiple times: want Windows for x86 and x86_64? Then you'll need two to buy to different versions. This was easy enough to do with the captive market they had.

[Stuart Castle]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Much as Microsoft would hate to admit it, the Windows store doesn't really have appeared to have taken off. Comparing the availability of software on Linux with this store isn't fair on Microsoft, and , in terms of commercial software anyway, both are dwarfed by the amount of software available outside the Microsoft Store on Windows.

Sadly, as a mac fanboi, I have to admit that the amount of Windows Software also dwarfs the amount available in or outside the Mac AppStore.

To succeed, an OS doesn't need to be the best. It just needs to be better known by the general populace than the competition, and have better known apps. For instance, most Graphic Designers are aware of Photoshop, even if they hate it. How many are aware of Gimp, Paint.Net or Paint Shop Pro? All products that I would argue are superior to Photoshop, for general use at least. OK, the only commercial product is Paint Shop Pro, but I'd wager it gets a fraction of the users of Photoshop.

I think Windows, whether running on Arm or X86 will be around for years, but I think long term, we won't be using any kind of PC running any OS outside specialist markets. We'll be using tablets or mobiles, and will likely be using cloud-hosted apps, such as Microsoft Office 365 or the Google apps..

[Abominator]

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

Not Libre Office. The only thing worse than MS Office.

[redpawn]

It's just fear of missing out

Much of the world is moving to Arm, even Macintosh. Best not to look totally inept and behind the times.

[Michael Habel]

Re: It's just fear of missing out

Again are Intel just gonna lie down, and roll over, before floating titsup? Has nobody passed this memo off to them? Did the not care enough to lose Apple as just another OEM to sell their warez to?

[Tom 7]

Re: It's just fear of missing out

I'd dare guess that Intel have layouts ready to roll in their fabs at the click of a mouse button.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: It's just fear of missing out

MS Office already runs on the two most common ARM platforms: Android and IOS.

[DrXym]

Re: It's just fear of missing out

I suspect Apple are going to it simply because they can fab their own chips and aren't held to ransom by Intel.

But that's a business decision, nothing to do with benefiting users. And it's hard to see how it would benefit users when they're going to suffer crappier performance if they run x86 software through an emulation layer.

At least Apple are slightly better placed for the transition since they've done it twice before and make the hardware, the operating system and much of the ecosystem. So they can dictate the pace and can force the change.

[Michael Habel]

Why is everyone raging on M$ for? One would have to think that the inevitable victim here would be Intel, possibly AMD.

I mean it gets the knogin jogin that there isn't a proper ARM Linux disto in the vein of Ubuntu, or CentOS.*

*Yes I'm aware of generic ARM Builds for your Pi. I'm trying to think bigger than that though.

[Steve Davies 3]

re: that there isn't a proper ARM Linux disto

Wrong. Think again

http://isoredirect.centos.org/altarch/7/isos/armhfp/

CentOS for ARM does exist and the abov link shows you where you can download it.

10 seconds with a half decent search engine would have told you that.

[Tom 7]

Do you live in a weird country where ARM is illegal or something?

[Hubert Cumberdale]

'He added that the number of Windows 10 devices active each month continues to "grow by double digits year on year."'

O...kay. So... last year there were ten and this year there are 20...?

[Anonymous Coward]

> O...kay. So... last year there were ten and this year there are 20...?

He said "grow by double digits" ... so that means 11 last year and 22 this year . :-)

[katrinab]

No. There were 10 last year, and 11 this year. That's 10% growth, which is double digits.

And that refers to the installed userbase, not new shipments.

[TheVogon]

"He added that the number of Windows 10 devices active each month continues to "grow by double digits year on year."'"

By percentage.

[Jason Hindle]

How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

My money is on Apple getting it more or less right on first attempt.

[Timmy B]

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

"My money is on Apple getting it more or less right on first attempt."

This will actually be the third attempt.... 68K to PPC to Intel to Arm.

[druck]

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

4^th attempt!

[Timmy B]

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

4th? First macs had 68K processors - I kind of ignored Apple II/Lisa and all that kind of thing as not being in the mac series.

[davidp231]

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

Unless you include the rebadged Lisas (ie the Macintosh XL)

[Jason Hindle]

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

Apple got it right on each attempt. Unless you're arguing the move to a different processor architecture was somehow a wrong thing to do.

[TripodBrandy]

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

Not forgetting 6502... but that was pre-Macintosh

[Charlie Clark]

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

They haven't got the best of form in this respect.

[Anonymous Coward]

X86 ain't dead yet

But, between Apple moving to ARM and probably working on beefy numbercruncher ARM to fill the desktop roles; server manufacturers offering ARM solutions; and Microsoft supporting the development of ARM 64 bit there are; for better or worse, some signs that x86 days may be becoming numbered.

Do tell me if I am insane, but could a CPU exist with both ARM and X86 cores? Add a hypervisor to shunt workload of particular flavour to certain core and segregate off memory? Sharing of motherboard resources not impossible either, via hypervisor. If I were sat in AMD and thinking what went well about X86_64; something along those lines would be my plan to keep both business and gaming users happy.

Would the complexity be worth it over a native ARM or X86 design? Some performance penalty I guess but the compatibility I (and I suspect a lot of others) would value.

Interesting times.

[Tom 38]

Re: X86 ain't dead yet

I'm nowhere near knowledgeable enough to answer this. Historically x86 is a CISC instruction set, and ARM is a RISC instruction set, however all modern CPUs from Intel and AMD are RISC under the hood, with a CISC frontend. Theoretically it would be possible for an ARM cpu to present an x86_64 interface.

I guess my point would be why would you want to? Seems like its easier to recompile, and translate on the fly any apps that haven't been recompiled.

[TripodBrandy]

Re: X86 ain't dead yet

You could make cores that can run both x86 and ARM code, depending on the mode the OS switched it in to. That would come at the cost of some overhead of having 2 front-end decoders. You would probably only support one architecture for system level code, which it would automatically switch back to when running interrupt handlers.

[grumpy-old-person]

Re: X86 ain't dead yet

You could make cores that can run both x86 and ARM code, depending on the mode the OS switched it in to.

Like Burroughs did decades ago?

[Majikthise]

Re: X86 ain't dead yet

Technically there's no problem. Transmeta wanted to do this way back when with (x86 and Power, IIRC). Looks like Tachyum are having a go; I'd be interested to know how much fun they're having with the licensing lawyers at ARM and Intel.

https://www.eenewsembedded.com/news/x86-arm-and-risc-v-software-running-tachyum-prodigy

Or how about Loongson: https://venturebeat.com/2015/09/03/chinas-loongson-makes-a-64-bit-mips-processor-that-can-run-x86-and-arm-code/

From the article: "It’s not clear how Loongson can legally do the x86 emulation, as Intel owns the x86 architecture and licenses very few chip makers". Looking at the Loongson Wikipedia page, it seems what they're actually doing is hardware acceleration for QEMU, along the lines of RISC-V's J extension aimed at Java and Javascript. That seems much more plausible: generic hardware acceleration for the subset of commonly used instruction patterns which can really use it; translate or interpret the remainder in software.

[katrinab]

Re: X86 ain't dead yet

I thought Intel licensed x64 from AMD? Yes, x86 is Intel technology.

Zhaoxin (Chinese chip designer) has rights to an x86 licence via Cyrix, and makes Intel clones that are not particularly fast, or particularly cheap.

ARM will generally licence to anyone willing to pay

[katrinab]

Re: X86 ain't dead yet

Currently-shipping Macs kind of do that. The T2 chip is an ARM chip, based on the A10 from the iPhone 7. It mostly does security stuff, but also does audio and video processing.

[DrXym]

Perfect news

For people who want run all the software they know and love, only much more slowly and with a bunch of caveats.

[naive]

MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

Windows is over 30 years old, it started on cpu's like the 80286 with had less power than the micro controller in a new dishwasher.

To give users a good desktop experience they probably had to make lots of handwritten machine code into the kernel to optimize performance.

The fact that there never was a successful native windows implementation on non x86 cpu's supports this idea.

Instruction emulation is a good way to go.

IBM did the same with its z-Series processors, the original IBM 370-XA instruction set is emulated on Power processors for years now.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

Windows 10 has virtually nothing to do with the Windows on DOS you're talking about. Windows NT has a completely different kernel and most of the APIs have been replaced.

The work on DotNet core shows that MS can handle multiple architectures, but it does need to improve the way Windows works in this respect. Historically, Windows was very platform-specific though this was more to do with market segregation than any real technical constraints.

The emulation is largely a signal to the market that switching to Windows on ARM tablets will be an option for their field workers because all their "important" software will still work. They'll be exceptions but basically if something with run on Windows 10, it will probably run fine in the x86 emulators on Windows for ARM.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

There's NO WAY they can dig themselves out of the hole they got themselves into.

ARM will only flourish with an alternative OS, such as Redox or something entirely different.

Windows will forever be tied to x86, the installed base is simply too large as is the code that will need to be ported to any other architecture.

[Timmy B]

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

"ARM will only flourish with an alternative OS, such as Redox or something entirely different."

It's going to do well on Macs....

[Charlie Clark]

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

So, Android and IOS are not doing well?

[davidp231]

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

"Windows is over 30 years old, it started on cpu's like the 80286"

Drop the 2. It was around before the 286.

[Roland6]

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

The 286 was the min. cpu for Windows 3.1; Windows 3.0 supposedly could run on 8086/8088.

Personally, I never used it on anything less than a 386 with 4MB of RAM for Word, Excel, Powerpoint; now I use W10 and use some massively more performant CPU and 4+GB of RAM for Word, Excel, Powerpoint...

[katrinab]

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

The competition is mostly based on Unix of some description, which is about 50 years old. Age isn’t the problem.

[DrXym]

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

This has nothing to do with the kernel and a lot to do with the amount of software that is compiled natively for x86 and the dearth of software compiled for any other architecture.

Microsoft have tried repeatedly to support other architectures. Even Windows NT had versions for Alpha and they've tried for PowerPC, Itanium and ARM too. The problem each time is customers say their software runs on x86 and Microsoft have produced sucky emulation layers which are either too slow or come with a bunch of restrictions.

The only time Microsoft have managed to pull off an architecture switch is from x86-32 to x64 and that's mainly because the processors were backwards compatible. So the Intel seeded the market with 64-bit capable processors and Microsoft were able to finally pull the rug on 32-bit. And the 32-bit software was able to run reasonably because the WOW32 layer in Windows is basically thunking stuff rather than full blown emulation. But it took a LONG time.

[mark l 2]

"Microsoft had already ported its Chromium-based Edge browser to 64-bit Arm as a native application, though not Office, which runs as a 32-bit x86 suite on emulation"

I wonder why MS hasn't bothered to port Office to ARM yet and is relying on x86 emulation? They had an ARM native Office 2013 version available for Windows RT.

Maybe MS can't be bothered to put the development effort into porting their own flagship Office suite to ARM as they fear it is not going to gain enough market share and will end up as another dead platform, just like Windows RT.

[Timmy B]

"I wonder why MS hasn't bothered to port Office to ARM yet and is relying on x86 emulation?"

With Macs going to ARM you can bet they are working on it right now...

[StrangerHereMyself]

All in vain

The programmers working on this will find that their talent has been wasted since no one is waiting for an x84 emulation on ARM.

If people want to run Windows they'll buy an AMD or Intel x86 PC, not some ARM powered thingy which struggles to even run x86 software.

[skswales]

Re: All in vain

Pity the poor sods who get it foisted on them by beancounters then

[J.G.Harston]

Isn't this olds not news? I remember running Windows 3 via a PC Emulator on RISC OS on ARM over two decades ago.

[davidp231]

I also have done this, albeit at school. With an A4000.

[DS999]

Why did they ever support 32 bit ARM?

Windows 10 ARM should have been 64 bit ARM only. It isn't like they have legacy ARM Windows binaries to worry about, or that people will want to run it on a years old ARM CPU. That makes no sense for me, and increases their support cost because they have to produce 32 and 64 bit builds of the entire OS, and all patches - and include the 32 bit libraries on the 64 bit version. What a waste.