Amazon engineer gets Windows 10 on ARM running on Apple M1 SoC

Since the arrival of the Apple M1-based computers, one of the big questions remaining is whether they will get support for Windows 10. Neither Microsoft nor Apple seem to be putting big effort into this, instead users will have to hope firms like Parallels get it right via virtualization.

In the meantime, Amazon AWS principal engineer Alexander Grafmanaged to get the ARM version of Windows 10 running on Apple Silicon. He achieved this using the open-source QEMU virtualization software. In Geekbench, the virtualized Windows on Apple's M1 absolutely smokes a Surface Pro X running Windows 10 on ARM natively:

Windows on an M1 got a single-core score of 1,288 and multi-core score of 5,685 whereas the Surface Pro X's scores were roughly 800 and 3,000 in those respective benchmarks. Per MSpoweruser, the Surface Pro X benchmark was made using the SQ2 Arm-based chip that was co-developed by Qualcomm and Microsoft for Microsoft's latest Surface Pro X computers.

Who said Windows wouldn't run well on #AppleSilicon? It's pretty snappy here ????. #QEMU patches for reference: https://t.co/qLQpZgBIqI pic.twitter.com/G1Usx4TcvL

— Alexander Graf (@_AlexGraf) November 26, 2020