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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2022-04-06, 15:40

Yeah, Parallels does not have any CPU emulation and never did. It runs ARM OSes on ARM and x86 OSes on x86. Same for VMware.

Incidentally, this Monday, I extensively played around with Windows 11 on an M1 MacBook Air. Gotta say, the experience wasn't perfect, but it was much better than I had anticipated. First, though this doesn't matter much for me personally, Parallels really tries to nail that first-run experience — they download Windows for you, run its installer, boot into Windows (at which point they ask you "bee tee dubs, your Parallels isn't licensed"; bit of a dick move there ).

But second, Windows was also quite smooth. The UI was set to 200% in order to match macOS's Retina @2x, and I couldn't spot a lot of places where this was messed up (I did run into one dialog which was almost impossible to read because it was half as tall and wide as it needed to be… ugh). x86 apps seemed to mostly just work™, and they did not feel slow.

The only real issue I ran into wasn't with performance, but rather with apps that presumably had some paths hardcoded: Windows on ARM is this doubly stupid thing where you now have C: \Program Files, C: \Program Files (ARM64) and C: \Program Files (x86) (not sure I got that right, but you get the point), and not everything handles that gracefully. For example, Visual Studio apparently installed the x64 version of the .NET 6 SDK, but tried to run the ARM64 version, and had confusing "path not found" errors as a result.

So, TL;DR: performance on M1 Macs is incredibly (who knew?), but also, you'll run into glitches in Windows where stuff does not just work™, because of this chicken-and-egg thing where almost no app has been tested on ARM Windows, because almost nobody runs ARM Windows.
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