Microsoft is reportedly gearing up to emulate x64 code on ARM laptops. The news comes to the light when a Twitter handle with the name Longhorn exposed the fact behind the x64 code. The tweet mentions Windows architecture alongside the Arm64 machine type.
Windows architectures:
_M_ARM64EC:
x86_64 on Arm64 machine type.
— Longhorn (@never_released) May 17, 2020
Generally, ARM laptops make use of the WoW emulator, which is designed to run Win32 code on x64 computers and then on ARM64 code. Going forward, the 64bit Windows applications are not supported on Windows 10 on ARM laptops. The latest tweet explicitly mentions support for x64 code emulation on ARM64.
The architecture will reportedly be called ARM64EC for x64_64 on ARM64 machine types. According to the reports, the commit dates back to March 2020 and was developed by Kenny Kerr, Windows team Engineer at Microsoft. Microsoft is encouraging developers to recompile the applications to ARM64 instead of enabling x64 app emulation on Windows 10 on ARM.
That being said, Microsoft is paving way for the ARM laptops to become more competitive with Intel devices. We can expect changes to the system architecture due to the changing trend. With people making use of Windows 10 on a daily basis due to the COVID-19 lockdown, it’s imperative for the companies to adopt a strategy to tap all chipsets.
