The Open Source environment has shown a way to run Windows 10 ARM on Apple’s latest laptops. The results achieved in the benchmark are embarrassing Surface Pro X!
As reported in earlier In the post, Apple announced that Windows 10 running on their latest chip is possible. Not only that, Apple’s vice president of software engineering argued that the system can run natively on their devices. Nevertheless, the whole operation was not to be possible without the intervention of the creator of the system – Microsoft.
As notebookcheck.net shows, what seems impossible for the Cupertino giant has to be done for a developer!
Alexander Graf posted on his Twitter profile a photo showing a working instance of windows on the Apple M1 chip.
The developer was able to run Windows 10 ARM64 Insider Preview. The QEMU software was used for this purpose. It is essentially an emulator and a virtualizer at the same time. It can also be run as a hypervisor, which makes the code of the running virtual machine execute directly on the host processor. This is how the software was launched and it is thanks to this solution that the performance of the virtualized system is very similar to the native one. In addition to the very launch, Alexander Graf successively debugs the software so that as many things work correctly as possible.
After the publication of the tweet and the release of patches under the Open Source license, other users of Apple M1 hardware also decided to try their hand at running Windows on their Macs. What is the most interesting are the results of benchmarks launched on such prepared configurations.
Well, the results obtained in Geekbench 4 and 5 oscillated around 1,300 points in the single-core test and about 5,500 points in the multi-core test. And these are, of course, the results obtained on a virtualized system. A system that theoretically could not run on this particular hardware.
For comparison, Surface Pro X, running on the same system (natively), under the control of the Microsoft SQ 1 processor, which was also created in the ARM architecture, in the same test scores about 800 points in the single-core test and about 3000 points in the multi-core test. There is a gap between these two results, showing that in the newest SOC there is huge power from the giant from Cupertiono.
This state of affairs should not be surprising considering the fact that the Apple M1 chip is much newer. However, this whole situation allows us to look with hope at the possibility of using windows on the latest computers with the logo of a bitten apple. The scenario of running Windows 10 this way to fill a software hole (especially in the professional industry) is really tempting.
May it not be just a vague vision of a beautiful idea.
–
