I tested with the Windows performance slider set to maximum, but the results did not change.
Also, the SQ1 chip is not the latest SQ2 chip, but a first-generation chip up to 3GHz (although the SQ2 chip is just a minor upgrade to the 3.1GHz boost clock). To be fair, the Microsoft emulator is in the preview stage, and Microsoft has promised that the emulator performance will improve in the future. This laptop is an average product that sells for $700 and has a Core i5-1035G1 which is nothing special. A third Windows notebook, the HP Pavilion x360 Convertible 14, was added as a reference. It is largely similar to the old test suite. The test suite was used in Macworld’s MacBook Air review, including GeekBench 5, Cinebench R23, HandBrake, and the flagship game, Rise of the Tomb Raider.
But looking at this benchmark, you can see how slow the Surface Pro X and SQ1 chips are on the new 64-bit x86 instruction emulator. The slowness of Microsoft’s Surface Pro X was already clear in reviews, so nothing was new. (Microsoft warned that some apps might not run on its own emulator, too.) The comparison target is Apple’s MacBook Air (A1).
I installed Windows Insider build 21277, and downloaded and installed other necessary code, such as the Adreno GPU driver to run 64-bit x86 apps. The test target is Microsoft’s Surface Pro X, based on the first-generation SQ1 chip, a higher-performance version of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx (we can’t get a SQ2-based Surface Pro X for testing).
Now that Microsoft has released its own 64-bit emulator, a more direct comparison of how much performance ARM-based Windows can perform compared to ARM-based Mac OS is possible.Īpple and the M1-based MacBook Air have built a new ARM hardware and software ecosystem that Microsoft has never been able to do. Apple also released the final 64-bit emulator with a Mac running on its own 64-bit ARM chip, the M1.Īs in the reviews raved by our sister site Macworld, the superior performance of the new MacBook Air (M1) and other M1-based hardware is confirmed. Of course, the app runs through emulation rather than native, so it’s slower than native code. Currently, most apps are developed optimized for 64-bit processors and the large amount of memory these processors can utilize. This emulator lets you run 64-bit x86 apps through emulation on an ARM-based Windows PC. After delaying the schedule, Microsoft finally released a 64-bit x86 emulator last week.
Until last week, WOA devices could only run apps that were coded natively for the Snapdragon ARM architecture, or 32-bit apps that were coded natively for x86 processors. Both the SQ1 and SQ2 processors are featured on the Microsoft Surface Pro X tablet. First of all, the chips currently installed in ARM-based Windows machines are Qualcomm’s own processors such as Snapdragon 8cx and Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2, and derivative chips SQ1 and SQ2, which Microsoft designed together with Qualcomm. There are several challenges in the process of running Windows apps on an ARM processor. How does ARM-based Windows compare to ARM-based macOS? The answer is’behind the scenes’. There is only one question that comes to mind here. Apple released the impressive M1 ARM chip on the new Mac, and Microsoft later unveiled the long-awaited 64-bit x86 emulator.