It runs like crap. It more of a Jurassic Park "too preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should".
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Parallels 16.5 Can Virtualize ARM Windows Natively on M1 Macs With Up to 30% Faster Performance
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You can run x86-64 version of Windows in QEmu on a M1 but it is quite slow. One estimate was that it had a 40x slowdown. Probably not too interesting.
Yes, and it is not only VMWare (or the VMWare/Dell/EMC conglomerate . . . the particulars seem to change a bit too frequently for me to keep up). Oracle/VirtualBox is not covering themselves in glory in this area, either. Parallels seems to be the only player that is really trying. Perhaps they will be rewarded with a bigger share of the (probably) shrinking pie.
The SoCs in the current iPad, iPad Air and iPad Pros don’t have support for virtualization. It is possible to do virtualization without hardware support but nobody does that any longer. The rumored upcoming iPad Pros might have a SoC that is either a M1 or uses the same CPU cores as an M1 so they might support hardware virtualization but it would still require Apple to allow it in iPadOS. That doesn’t seem likely.
I'm in the same minority. I've been using Boot Camp as a gaming rig for years, and I'd be sad to lose that whenever I upgrade to an M1 Mac.
As a possible alternative, I've been playing around with streaming game services, and I've been very happily surprised by how well they work. Unfortunately, all the options have drawbacks. GeForce Now is great and reasonably priced, but you can only play games that have been specifically licensed for it. An alternative is Shadow, which gives you access to a remote Windows 10 desktop that you can play any game you want on. But Shadow is apparently about to be bought out by somebody else, and it's not clear what their future business model will be.
My hope is that by the time I upgrade, there will be some combination of virtualization software and streaming service that lets me play every game I'm interested in.
In the meantime, FYI, you can try GeForce Now for free. Definitely worth playing around with.
This is big news. Two more likely developments will bring a big blow to Intel CPU business: Microsoft making ARM Windows commercially available, and Apple offering bundle/discount deals for Parallels/VM (if not buying them). Intel must be paying (or thinking of paying) big concessions.
It’s not impossible. Crossover is doing it. I use it for Steam to run classic games from early 2000s.
No. Apple would ruin both companies and their products.
Virtualization is running a virtual version of an OS on top of another OS that is doing all the support of hardware on a computer. These days that is supported in hardware on the host CPU for high efficiency. Virtualization could also include emulation of a different instruction set of a different CPU but in most cases today, emulation isn’t included.
Emulation is interpreting instructions from one CPU like an Intel x86-64 on a different CPU like Apple’s M1 in real time. It is generally very slow which is why Apple and Microsoft do translation from x86 to Arm-64 instead. This is mostly done statically at application startup and cached for later use making it much more efficient.
Journalism majors shouldn’t be allowed to author tech. Unfortunately, tech people, generally speaking, aren’t terribly good at written communications and/or don’t like to write. There are exceptions. Invert the number, Intel computers use 2.5 times the energy, an you get M1 emulation that uses 40% of the energy or 60% les energy.
Unlike Parallels they didn’t seem to be working on it early. I don’t know if Apple invited them like they did with Parallels or they declined but when the M1 was introduced they had a post on Twitter saying that they were considering doing an M1 version. So if they decided to do it, they are still far behind Parallels.
Thats not correct. You can install most legacy win32 x86/64 apps. I've been using the beta to run Fallout 3, Torchlight 1, and the M365 apps which are x86.
Shockingly good. I mean, temper expectations, the GPU on the M1 is basically a GTX 1050.. but I've been able to run GTA 4 at medium, Fallout 3.. I've seen videos of GTA 5 at low settings. End of the day, it's a fricken VM that's giving you faster than intel integrated graphics performance. There isn't a goddamn thing on the Windows side that can offer the same performance for 30watts of power.
Edit: It's not meant to be a gaming PC.. at least not the current Airs/Mini. But, I can totally see an iMac being a reasonable performer.. one would think the GPU in that is substantially better.
The software developers are really impressive ! I wonder how much documentation they get from Apple on the M1 and on the Mac architecture. Do they really get nothing ? Or they have some help ?
I made Virtual PC run Windows NT4 on a G3/266 in the 1990s. I have to be honest… it was slow
I think they meant it colloquially.
If it used to use 10 units of energy and now uses 25, then it's "2.5x more energy". If it used to use 10 units and now uses 4, then it's "2.5x less energy".
Oh well.
If you read the press release, that 30% faster performance value is derived from a Geeekbench 5 score. See this from the release:30% performance improvement claim with a new Parallels release. Never saw that coming
"Performance measurements conducted by Parallels by running the Geekbench 5 benchmark and comparing an average score out of five iterations on each computer. Tested with a pre-release version of Parallels Desktop 16.5 on MacBookPro17,1 with Apple M1 chip and 16GB RAM versus MacBookPro15,3 with Intel Core i9-8950HK, 32GB RAM and Radeon Pro Vega 20 GPU. The performance will vary based on usage, system configuration, and other factors."
So WOA on M1 is not 30% faster than x64 Windows 10, but the Geekbench score for the M1 is 30% faster than an Intel Core i9-8950HK on Windows 10. This does not translate to overall Operating System Performance, and makes that statement overall misleading.
This is good, but there is still no licensable release version of Windows 10 ARM to run on it. (Unless you want to solely run beta previews).
What happened is what you often see with big corporate software houses. They need all their smart people to make sense of their own licensing structure.
VMWare Fusion was a breath of fresh air in the corporate VMWare mess. But I guess the real value in a company is trying to figure out how to prevent charging a customer $398 if that customer had also been willing to pay $399.
AVID is another example of a company which seems to spend more engineering effort on license validator upgrader downloader installer apps than on Sibelius :-(
The activation back-end for Windows 10 Arm is the same as Windows 10 x86.. I was able to activate my copy using an old Win 7 Pro key. Is it legit? No.. but it does away with the nag screen.
Yes, I actually did the same. I’m not holding my breath here, but a ARM version of 21H1 would be great!