Microsoft and Qualcomm Collaborate To Bring Windows 10, x86 Emulation To Snapdragon Processors (anandtech.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from AnandTech: Today at Microsoft's WinHEC event in Shenzhen, China, the company announced that it's working with Qualcomm to bring the full Windows 10 experience to future devices powered by Snapdragon processors. These new Snapdragon-powered devices should support all things Microsoft, including Microsoft Office, Windows Hello, Windows Pen, and the Edge browser, alongside third-party Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and, most interestingly, x86 (32-bit) Win32 apps. They should even be able to play Crysis 2. This announcement fits nicely with Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" doctrine and should come as no surprise. It's not even the first time we've seen Windows running on ARM processors. Microsoft's failed Windows RT operating system was a modified version of Windows 8 that targeted the ARMv7-A 32-bit architecture. It grew from Microsoft's MinWin effort to make Windows more modular by reorganizing the operating system and cleaning up API dependencies. The major change with today's announcement over Windows RT and UWP is that x86 apps will be able to run on Qualcomm's ARM-based SoCs, along with support for all of the peripherals that are already supported with Windows 10. This alone is a huge change from Windows RT, which would only work with a small subset of peripherals. Microsoft is also focusing on having these devices always connected through cellular, which is something that is not available for many PCs at the moment. Support will be available for eSIM to avoid having to find room in a cramped design to accommodate a physical SIM, and Microsoft is going so far as to call these "cellular PCs" meaning they are expecting broad support for this class of computer, rather than the handful available now with cellular connectivity. The ability to run x86 Win32 apps on ARM will come through emulation, and to demonstrate the performance Microsoft has released a video of an ARM PC running Photoshop.

Comments

Performance?

[crunchy_one]

According to TLA, x86 compatibility is achieved through emulation. Emulating the x86 instruction set is a non-trivial exercise that almost invariably results in extremely disappointing performance. Why? The x86 instruction set is an accretion of the instruction sets of older Intel processors, beginning with the 8008. This yields a difficult (i.e., computationally expensive) instruction set to decode and execute. Over the years, Intel has implemented micro-architectures that address this problem through special purpose hardware. If you're so inclined, have a read here http://www.intel.com/content/w... for details. The takeaway is that simply emulating the x86 instruction set results in about a 100x slowdown for an equivalent clock rate. So, although this is an interesting technology demonstration, I seriously doubt it will prove useful outside of a small set of applications. It will certainly not be a satisfactory gaming platform.

Not all emulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the Win32 x86 apps are emulated. The Win64 bit ones are not, and neither is the OS. That is why the performance is good (check the video). Hope that helps.