World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

Post by barrenko » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 11:09 AM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #56

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft implemented a backwards compatibility layer as Apple has in this case Windows-on-ARM already has 32-bit x86 emulation - and 64-bit x64 emulation is coming soon: * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on... * https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315733-64-bit-x86-emul... I haven't looked too deeply, but it seems to use the same WoW (Windows-on-Windows) mechanism that's been present in…

Running x86 code via Rosetta on the MacBook Air is significantly faster than it is running on the previous generation. With the Surface X, that isn't remotely the case. It's a pretty major gap. This is from the Verge's review of the Surface Pro X: > The worst part is that even if an app installs, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have a great experience. Photoshop installs and opens just fine on the Surface Pro X, but…

Post by tibbydudeza » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6

This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…

Post by breakfastduck » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 11:31 AM UTC

totalZero wrote: post #149

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #136

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No, this is not the reason. The reason is that Apple didn't half-ass anything, and they executed with competence. The Apple M1 is so good, it outperforms most everything else natively in single-thread, and every other previous x86-based MBP when using Rosetta, all the while offering superior battery life, and its not even that expensive because those are the entry-level models. Microsoft never had anything remotely l…

Almost every software offering under the sun runs natively on Windows, so it doesn't exactly make sense to give MacOS a pat on the back for that particular achievement with WoW. I am all for innovation and I welcome any chip that runs cooler while offering better performance with the apps I use. But so far, 90% of the praise I've seen of M1 either comes from benchmarking software that doesn't reflect my real world us…

Post by breakfastduck » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 11:34 AM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #47

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #13

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It’s probably more complicated than that: Microsoft’s customers have traditionally been very different from Apple’s, and they valued perpetual backwards compatibility over Apple’s approach.

Basically Apple is selling a cozy computing environment that some people really like, whereas the operating system division of Microsoft is selling a compatibility layer between a bazillion of long tail niche applications and every single piece of hardware in existence that isn't either significantly smaller or larger than a PC (phones, supercomputers) or made by Apple. If Microsoft had an LTS version of Windows 2000…

Post by breakfastduck » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 11:37 AM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #81

Arcuru wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rosetta seems to have a similar performance hit to Microsoft's solution (10-30% overhead compared to native, depending on the workload). The difference is that Microsoft is locked into using Qualcomm chips, which just aren't very close to Apple's performance.

The impression I got was that it was a lot slower than a 30% performance hit, but perhaps the Qualcomm CPU is that much slower? If so, it really begs the question—Why bother making a tablet-laptop thing which performs so poorly?