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An Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtualization engineer showed what Windows 10 could look like on Arm if Microsoft licensed its Arm-based operating system to the public rather than to the makers of Windows 10.
With Apple’s new M1 Arm-based System on a Chip, Mac users who need to use Windows 10 cannot run Microsoft’s Arm-based version of Windows using Apple’s Bootcamp.
The main obstacle is that Microsoft does not license Windows 10 on Arm to entities other than its own Surface group and Windows 10 on Arm to OEMs like HP, Asus and Lenovo.
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Technically, there’s nothing stopping owners of the M1 MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, or Mac mini from running Windows 10 on Arm, as Apple’s chief software engineer Craig Federighi recently pointed out.
“We have the core technologies to do that, to run their Arm version of Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications. But it’s a decision Microsoft has to make, to license this technology to users. on these Macs. But Macs are certainly very capable of it, ”said Federighi.
But Microsoft’s reluctance to license Windows 10 on Arm for end users hasn’t stopped creative engineers from putting together a working example of what things might look like if they did.
This is exactly what AWS Principal Engineer Alexander Graf did using open source virtualization software QEMU for Windows on Arm. QEMU emulates access to hardware such as CPU and GPU. Graf’s work was spotted by the 8-bit, via 9to5Mac.
“Who says Windows won’t work well? #AppleSilicon? It’s quite eye-catching here, ” Graf wrote in a tweet.
Graf previously worked on the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) for the SUSE Linux distribution for over a decade. He also worked within the SUSE Arm team to bring “openSUSE and SLES to all Arm platforms where it made sense,” according to Graf’s Linkedin profile. And he worked on Mac OS X virtualization using KVM.
He is now a KVM developer at AWS, which today announced new Mac instances for AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) based on Nitro System, an AWS hypervisor for EC2 instances.
AWS EC2 Mac instances with the Apple M1 chip “are already in preparation and scheduled for 2021”. But the current AWS offering includes instances of the 8th Gen six-core Intel Core i7 processors running at 3.2 GHz. Instances allow developers to run apps for Apple’s macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari.
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But a developer using the @imbushuo handle on Twitter published the scores of Geekbench versions 4 and 5 which compare Windows 10 on Arm on an M1 computer with Microsoft’s Surface Pro X.
Windows on an M1 got a single-core score of 1288 and a multi-core score of 5685, while Surface Pro X scores were around 800 and 3000 in these respective benchmarks. By MSpoweruser, the Surface Pro X benchmark was performed using the SQ2 Arm chip which was co-developed by Qualcomm and Microsoft for Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro X computers.
Benchmarks do not bode well for Microsoft Windows on Arm’s ambitions to create an OEM Windows ecosystem if Apple’s new internal M1 chips make Macs the best performing hardware to run Windows on Arm.
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