Microsoft will run the x64 program through the WoW emulator on Windows 10 ARM
Earlier, Microsoft and Qualcomm jointly launched a notebook computer based on the ARM64 platform, which was equipped with the Windows 10 ARM operating system specially developed by Microsoft.
Although the operating system itself is 64-bit, it does not support running x86 and x64 software, mainly because the platform architecture is different, so the related code cannot be universal.
At this stage, the Windows 10 ARM device can run x86 software through the emulator, which is the desktop software developed based on the 32-bit architecture.
However, Microsoft has previously promised to bring support for the x64 architecture, and the code submitted by Microsoft engineers on GitHub looks like Microsoft is working to do this.
The system architecture natively supported by the Windows 10 ARM platform is the ARM64 version. At present, some well-known software has been developed to adapt to the ARM64 and develop a special version.
However, there is still too few supported software for users, so Microsoft is also trying to improve compatibility. The solution is to support more architectures through the emulator.
At present, the system mainly runs Win32 software and related code on the ARM64 computer through the WoW (Windows on Windows64) simulator.
Although it is also 64-bit, the WoW emulator for ARM64 does not support the Win64 code, so Microsoft can only continue to modify the emulator for compatibility purposes.
The code submitted by Microsoft engineers in the WoW simulator calls the new solution ARM64EC, which is directly compatible with the x86_x64 architecture.
Windows architectures:
_M_ARM64EC:
x86_64 on Arm64 machine type.
— Longhorn (@never_released) May 17, 2020
Judging from the current progress, Microsoft’s work seems to be still in its infancy. For users who purchase Windows 10 ARM notebooks, the new emulator helps run more software without having to wait for the software developer to be actively compatible.
The bad news is that the performance of running x86 and x64 software through the emulator is relatively poor. Of course, the ARM platform is ready to use, always connected, and low power consumption is an advantage that other desktop platforms do not have.
