Windows on ARM systems: support for x64 software is coming

Redmond developers have made great strides in developing emulator technology. It took a little while before you can run the current 64-bit software on ARM systems.

Microsoft has been working for some time to be able to manage laptops and other mobile systems based on ARM chips with its own software platform. Appropriate devices promise a significantly longer battery life – but software support has so far been pretty weak. Of course, the success of sales is so modest, because it is unlikely that any of the users will want to intervene in the inability to use certain applications in case of doubt.

The ARM version of the Windows platform for Microsoft currently has the ability to run x86 software on the emulator for 32-bit systems. Currently, this means that most modern commercial applications are not taken into account. At least that will change soon, according to a report by MSPowerUser.

Microsoft close to emulating x64 code on ARM laptops

Microsoft’s Windows 10 ARM efforts are about to take another step, indicating that Microsoft is close to allowing 64-bit code to run on Windows 10 on ARM laptops.

ARM laptops currently use the WoW emulator to run Win32 code on x64 computers, to run Win32 code for ARM64 code, but unfortunately this means that 64-bit Windows applications are simply not supported on Windows 10 on ARM laptops .

The fix dates back to March 2020 and was made by Kenny Kerr, an engineer for the Windows team at Microsoft.

A year ago, it was unclear whether Microsoft would enable x64 application emulation in Windows 10 on ARM, and Microsoft encouraged developers to recompile their applications instead of ARM64. The good news is that Microsoft is indeed succeeding, making ARM laptops more competitive with Intel devices.

The architecture is there

Microsoft has released a new preview version for the Windows 10 feature update planned for the second half of 2020 . Due to a bug, the new build will be temporarily not available for ARM devices.

The new preview version is now available for users of the Fast Ring. The Windows 10 Preview now brings the version number 19587, but there are no new functions this time. But there is a long list of improvements and bug fixes. Microsoft was not able to fix one problem: There is currently a compatibility problem with ARM devices. This update is therefore blocked for ARM devices.

Microsoft now has an ARM64EC emulator architecture that can be used to execute x64 code on ARM64 processors. The corresponding commit was introduced by Kenny Kerr from the Windows team some time ago on Github. But this just became known. When you will be here at the stand to manage a commercial system is still unknown.

At least it’s now clear that Microsoft will provide x64 support for ARM in the foreseeable future. Some time ago it was completely unclear. It might just as well have happened that small sales figures for such systems allowed the entire project to fall asleep in silence. So anyone who has flirted with the purchase of an ARM-based laptop with Windows due to their longer battery life can still hope to get a complete system soon.