Things are getting exciting in the Windows on ARM space, with Qualcomm's announcement of the Snapdragon X Elite supercharged by the custom Oryon CPU and rumours that AMD and Nvidia will make ARM CPUs for PC.
The hardware is coming together nicely, but the software side is still... pretty bad?
There are few native apps for WoA. That wouldn't be a problem if there was a good x86 emulator, but there isn't.
Why can't Microsoft make an emulator like Apple's Rosetta2 ?
I have heard various reasons such as Microsoft not fully commiting to it, that Apple Silicon contains hardware acceleration for Rosetta2, that a hardware accelerated x86 emulator would result in patent violations, that Microsoft uses a generic emulator whereas Apple uses a translator etc...
So why doesn't Microsft create something like Rosetta2 ? Will they eventually make one? Will it be as good as Rosetta2 ? And will it finally make Windows on ARM viable?
Hardware.
M-series chips bake in hardware support for x86 memory model, expensive flag calculations, and probably a few other things. Doing these without hardware is a lot harder and won't ever be as performant.
Could you elaborate on what those memory models and flags are, and how they function?
Slide 7 https://ee.usc.edu/~redekopp/cs356/slides/CS356Unit5_x86_Control
See also https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-fast/ on the entire general subject.
However, acc. to the very author of that article the contribution of these extensions to the overall performance is rather quite minor, see discussion starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537213 that gives very compact descriptions of both the extensions in question and the assessment of their realistic contribution.