Apple M1 Mac running Windows 10 ARM is embarrassing for Surface Pro X



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It looks like Apple’s M1 Silicon hasn’t made some amazing people yet, even those outside of Apple circles. CPU benchmarks have already been covered to death, but probably nothing is more impressive than the performance of the M1 outside of common and officially supported use cases. Running Windows games through CrossOver, for example, is already an achievement, but running Windows itself on macOS Big Sur, just like what a developer has accomplished, is even more astounding. Especially when it performs better than the “benchmark” Windows 10 ARM Microsoft device.

Apple removed Boot Camp from macOS Big Sur on M1 Macs, but not because Windows doesn’t run on ARM hardware. Apple puts the ball in Microsoft’s court, explaining that it is up to the creator of Windows to make this happen by changing the license of Windows 10 ARM and making installers available. That said, it’s technically possible to still run Windows on M1 Macs as developer Alexander Graf has proven.

To be clear, it didn’t use the x86 version of Windows 10, as that would have added a layer of complexity to emulate on an ARM-based Mac. Instead, he took an Insider preview of Windows 10 ARM and ran it through a modified version of QEMU, popular open source machine emulation and virtualization software, and using the own Hypervisor.framework. Apple designed exactly for virtualization purposes.

According to Graf, the performance of this layer cake was quite fast, although other testers who tried to replicate the setup reported some issues. More interestingly, however, The 8-bit reports that the Geekbench scores for this Window ARM on ARM Mac outperformed Windows ARM running on Microsoft’s own Surface Pro X.

That said, the current setup is hardly ideal, and Mac M1 owners who need to run Windows software might want to expect something like CodeWeavers’ CrossOver instead. It may also be some time before a full version of Windows can officially run on these new Macs, via dual boot or virtualization, but this latest experiment still shows the prowess of the first Apple Silicon.

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