Microsoft‘s efforts to improve its products and platforms, despite the criticism received from time to time, do not stop. This is something that is especially evident in one of its main projects for a long time, we refer to Windows 10.
Specifically, as you know, we refer to the world’s most used desktop operating system, market penetration that continues to increase. Well, in these same lines we are going to focus on one of the architectures that has been talked about the most in recent times, specifically we refer to the ARM architecture .
We tell you all these because as it is being released now, ARM-based computers that work with the Windows 10 system, are coming. Specifically, they are coming to the market little by little after the technology giant announced the beginning of all this in 2017. As you can imagine, Windows 10 on ARM is a fairly large and important project. To give you an idea, all this is designed to work with hardware based on ARM processors in the latest generation devices of different brands.
ARM computers with Windows 10 improve software support
Say that the first ARM-based Windows 10 computers shipped with a long list of compatibility issues. These had a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor , but it seems that things improve in this regard. What’s more, the latest reviews made on this platform have been quite positive.
And it is that Microsoft has invested a lot in the emulation support for Windows 10 based on ARM. With the emulation that we are discussing, applications designed for other architectures such as 32-bit x86 can be run. But there is a drawback, and that is that x64 applications, that is, 64-bit applications , cannot be emulated or installed unless they are compiled again for the ARM architecture.
However, it seems that things are going forward in a new update that arrives in November. Now Microsoft says that you can finally run x64 applications with a new emulation layer, on Windows 10 ARM. Thus, the new emulation update should allow us to run most of the desktop applications, however at the moment there are still some performance problems in them.
An update supports x64 applications on Windows 10 ARM
Thus, as we mentioned earlier, at this time, native ARM64 and x86 applications can be run with emulation. So if any developers are interested, they can now recompile their software as an ARM64 application to improve its performance. But if not, users can now run x64 applications through emulation without any hassle. In this way any desktop application in Windows 10 will run through this emulator.
As you can imagine, this is great news, since teams based on this architecture do not stop growing in terms of market penetration. Take as an example that the latest Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm offer better performance. This way the resources should be more than enough to emulate x64 applications smoothly in Windows 10.
Thus, with support for 64-bit application emulation, Windows 10 on ARM could become a viable option. At the same time you can expect more affordable devices with this operating system and with this architecture that we mentioned. Mind you, performance-related issues still exist at the moment, and it’s not clear how this set will work on older hardware.
